A new side of Shimokitazawa

Hello dear readers! How are you? The weather is warming up nicely in Tokyo, I hope it's pleasant where you are too!

Today I'll tell you about a recent visit I made to Shimokitazawa. I first heard about the area because there is a second-hand Lolita shop there, Grand Bazaar. They usually have a nice selection of Jane Marple pieces so I like to go there, however I haven't found so many other nice spots when I visit. 

Here's what I wore:

Knit: Vintage

JSK: Metamorphose temps de fille

Tights, shoes: Offbrand

I wanted to try something new this visit so I searched the internet for a nice place to have tea in Shimokitazawa, and came up with a place called La Palette. It turned out really lovely, and there's a nice pasta place next to it! I had a big bowl of seafood pasta for lunch, and then crossed over to La Palette for tea and cake. Luckily for me I don't put on weight easily, but I don't recommend this kind of lifestyle for everyone!

Apart from discovering delights for the appetite, I also discovered some other nice things. La Palette is on the north side of the station, the opposite site from Grand Bazaar Lolita. Well, all this time I had been going to the south side, but the north side is ever so much better!

It's a bit like Brighton Lanes and a bit like Camden Market, a bit like Ura-Harajuku and a bit like Daikanyama. So all in all very nice! A relaxed atmosphere, not overly crowded, cute vintage and used clothing shops, and sweet little boutiques and things. 

After exploring the north side I went across to the south and to Grand Bazaar. I tried on a few things but couldn't decide on anything particularly so I left empty handed. By this time I was getting hungry again. These 50s/60s film posters caught my eye.

It turned out that on the second floor there was an old-fashioned izakaya. There was a long wait before I could go in but I really wanted to so I was patient.

The inside was decorated with all sorts of old advertisments and magazine cuttings. The fare was not particularly good, but very cheap and besides the setting more than made up for it.

I had to resist the temptation to pull out those little tacks holding up the posters!

I really enjoyed this day in Shimokita though it was very full and tiring. I hope you enjoyed my account of it! Thanks for reading.

See you next time,

Sapphira

Daikanyama

Hello dear readers! How are you?

The other day I went to Daikanyama for the first time. There's no BABY store there anymore sadly, but there are vintage and second hand shops, and it's a nice area.

Here's my outfit, taken near CouCou, a really cute 300yen shop!

JSK: Metamorphose

Ribbon: Jane Marple

Fawn collar: H&M Kids (modified)

I was aiming to achieve a sort of fairytale maiden look with this outfit. I got the fur collar ages ago but it's only recently that I started to wear it regularly. Some items are hard to get the knack of, aren't they? I think it helped to replace the pink satin ribbon with a cotton lace one, it goes fits in much better with my wardrobe now.

The first thing I did was to stop at a cafe for lunch. I couldn't resist having a cake afterwards too! We were provided with coasters that featured a bespectacled gentleman exclaiming "WOOOW! TASTY!!", which was rather strange and amusing. It was all very tasty though, so he was quite right.

Daikanyama's streets are wide and quiet and the shops are widely spaced out. This gives it a very relaxing and peaceful atmosphere. I do sort of wish there were more shops, but it is such a pleasant place to walk around, so light and airy. Tokyo Metro recently had some improvements, so now Daikanyama is very easily accessible. If you fancy a quiet but stylish day of shopping and cafes, I do recommend going. And the 300yen shop is definitely worth a visit for cute cheap things.

I hope you enjoyed the pictures, see you next time!

Sapphira

xxxx

Black and brown coordinate

Hello dear readers! How are you?

I went to Shinjuku the other day, and decided to try out a black and brown outfit. For a long time, I didn't like this combination, but recently I started to think it looks very pleasing and elegant if done nicely. It also gives me a chance to wear my black items which I seldom use, like this chiffon blouse with tiny imitation mother-of-pearl buttons.

Headbow, JSK: Innocent World

Necklace: Chocochip Cookie

Bag: Metamorphose

Others: Offbrand

It's pretty simple, but I think I got the colour balance right. 

I went to a restaurant in Lumine Est, I'm afraid I forgot the name but it specialises in udon, soba and pasta. You can choose your main dish, plus two side dishes and a drink. I chose two desserts as my side dishes!

Warabi mochi (the one on the right) is my favourite! My friend went for rice and pumpkin. They were good too!

The main dish was cold noodles with yuzu soya sauce and mentaiko. It was really refreshing! This was actually the day of the dust cloud so it was good to eat something clean and healthy tasting after all that yuckiness.

I also got some fake glasses at 3coins, I've been thinking about getting some for a while since they look so good on Japanese girls here. The popular huge ones don't do much for me though, they are basically the same size as my face and look a bit mad. These middling seized ones are quite big enough I think.

I poked the lenses out when I got home. After all, if they are fake, you may as well make no pretence at all! I don't know if I will wear them often but it was fun to try them out for 315yen.

Hope you enjoyed the pictures! See you again soon,

Sapphira

xxxx

Sakura start to bloom in Koenji

 Hello dear readers! How are you?

The season I've been waiting for has finally arrived- cherry blossom season! I'm very excited. Although I have been to Japan many times, it is my first time to experience this. 

Wednesday was a public holiday, and it was the first day that the sakura began to appear! By the afternoon, the ones near my apartment were blooming quite a bit.

In my excitement, I put on a spring outfit. It was a bit chilly though, to be honest, but I stuck it out.

Onepiece: Metamorphose

Overdress: W<3C

Parasol: Innocent World

Bag: Jean Paul Gaultier

This outfit features two of my latest purchases, the long lace overdress which I got in a second-hand shop in Daikanyama and my beloved embossed JPG bag.

My first lolita friend had a green version from this line, and Rizzell has a bigger pink one. If I could, I'd collect every version! Artherapie made a similar line last year, but the Jean Paul Gaultier ones have so much nostalgia, and I think they are more beautiful. I was looking wistfully at this one in Closet Child for a long time, and pounced on it the other day when I saw they had lowered the price.

As for the lace overdress, I hope I can make some interesting coordinates with it. It's a bit different from my usual style, but it seem to be very versatile.

I did some shopping, and stopped for tea at an interesting cafe near a temple. The inside is like a woodcutter's cottage, an English tea room, an art gallery and a forest all in one!

I think it was called Nerken, which I thought might mean something romantic in German, but doesn't seem to. The closest I can find is "nelken" which means cloves according to google.

Anyway it was a very nice place, and the biscuits were nice too!

Tomorrow I'm planning to go to Inokashira Park to enjoy the sakura even more and visit the animals at the petting zoo. I'm very excited!

I hope you enjoyed this entry, see you again soon!

Sapphira

xxxx

PS Apologies to the sleeping beauty who can be glimpsed in the right of the above picture.... Hope you don't mind being on my blog!

Very Beary Coordinate

Hello dear readers!

How are you? Here in Tokyo the snow is melting more each day. Yesterday I thought I had caught yet another cold, so I took cold medicine and a power drink (the kind with chinese herbs and whatnot) and went to bed. This morning I feel much better.  It's just as well, I can't tell you how angry I was at the thought of going through all that again! I seem to catch cold very easily. I hope this is a sign of intelligence but I fear not.

Anyway, here is today's coordinate!

Hair Accessory: Handmade

Blouse:Vintage

JSK: Innocent World

Tights:Swimmer

Bag: Metamorphose

Others: Offbrand

Oh dear, my petticoat looks a bit flat here! In this outfit I combined beige and dark brown, with some red accents. There are teddies on my tights and on my dress!

My blouse collar had beige embroidery on it originally. I went over the embroidery with coloured threads, I think it looks much cuter now!

Adding embroidery to a collar is really easy. You can draw the design on with a tailors chalk or pen and then just stitch over. If you have a blouse you're a bit bored of, I reccomend doing this!

That's all for now, see you next time!

Sapphira

KERA snap again!

Hello dear readers! How are you?

When I got up yesterday and looked out of the window, I was amazed by....

SNOW!

Quite a bit of it has melted now, but it was quite magical for a while. On the same day, it snowed in my home down too. And my parent's central heating broke down.... not so magical.

I have something nice to share with you, mine and Aviva's twin outfits got into February's KERA!

Yay! In fact, Aviva's in this issue twice; she was snapped along with two of my other friends at another event. Quite an achievement! I'm very proud of all of them :)

That's all for now, but there'll be a longer post coming next time!

Thanks for reading,

Sapphira

Hat, waffles, twins and snap!

Hello dear readers!

It's been a while since my last post. I had a wonderful time with my mother during her visit, we managed to travel about quite a bit and have all sorts of Japanese experiences, like onsen, autumn colours viewing, visiting a temple and so on. I think she enjoyed herself a lot, and even discovered that she likes sashimi!

Today's post is a collection of a few odd photos I have gathered together, and after this I'll start to show you the pictures I took on my travels with my mother.

First is an outfit for shopping wearing my new red hat:

Hat: Bought at MYLORD

Onepiece: Handmade

Socks, Bag: Metamorphose

MYLORD is a shopping building in Shinjuku, owned by Odakyu. It contains a lot of cute girly fashions, like L'est Rose, franche lippée, and my favourite f.i.n.t.

Recently there was a lot on mention on the news about La France, a special kind of pear, coming into season in Japan. To see what all the fuss was about, I ordered La France waffles in a cafe in Isetan!

It was nice, very juicy and sweet, but quite a lot to get through. And they served the tiniest cup of tea :(

Next up is my first time as a Lolita twin! Aviva and I have the same Gobelins print in different colours, so we did colour-swap twinning. We wore this outfit to the KERA snap.

She has a dark brown hat and shoes, and I have light brown, and her blouse and tights are bordeaux and mine are blue. It was a bit tricky to take the mirror shot, and I can't figure out why I kept looking off to the left like that O.o It is very simple to look at one's own reflection, after all!

I loved being twins, and we're planning a wintery version of these outfits for the future, yay!

Finally, here's my photo in a Japanese magazine!

My friend and I were street-snapped in Harajuku last month (you might recognise the outfit).

We both got into the magazine, happy happy! She looks very lovely in her snap.

Thanks for reading, and hope you enjoyed the pictures.

See you next time,

Sapphira

xxxx

Kaho visited Japan!

Hello dear readers!

Do you know the lolita blogger Kaho?

http://kahotearoom.blogspot.jp/

She's a lolita from Japan, now living in Singapore. I met her in Singapore last year, and recently I had the chance to meet her and her friends in Tokyo when she visited Japan.

Me, Kaho and Kaho's friend Grace on Takeshita Dori. This is just after Kaho transformed Grace into a lolita! She arrived wearing casual clothes, but Kaho found an outfit in Closet Child and Grace dressed up in it. I think it was her second or third time to wear lolita? It's great that she's so happy to try dressing up for the occasion, and she definitely looks cute! I don't know if any of my non-lolita friends would be so willing.

We went to Harajuku, Shibuya, Shinjuku and back to Harajuku that day! This is where we had tea in Shibuya. It's in a building to the left of 109, it was really nice so I'll go back there soon and tell you more about it.

I was so glad to meet Kaho again, and I had a lot of fun with her friends. Everyone was so relaxed and cheerful! Also, I admire Kaho for dressing the way she wants to, even though she is working and also a wife and mother. Some people feel pressure to leave lolita as they grow up, and it's shame. Of course there are some situations when you need to wear certain clothes, but if it's your free time, why not wear what makes you happy? I can't imagine my life without lolita fashion, and I don't want to give up.

The best thing is, she stays true to her sweet style, and it really looks good her! And she's lucky to have a cute daughter who loves lolita. Lucky for her daughter too! 

In the evening some of the other Tokyo lolis came and we had dinner together. We took outfit shots, so I'll post mine.

Can you guess my favourite colour??

Finally, we took purikura. Grace had never heard of it before (it was her first trip to Japan) so I hope she liked the results!

Yay! It was a lovely day <3

See you next time,

Sapphira

xxxx

Robot Kitty in Omotesando Hills

Hello everyone! How are you enjoying the weekend? I'm going to see D tomorrow! Can't wait!

Today I'm going to show you some photos I took at the Robot Kitty exhibition at Omotesando Hills in Harajuku.

I didn't know this exhibition was on, but I'm glad I chanced upon it!

In this exhibition, Hello Kitty has been re-designed as a robot, and many celebrities were asked to dream up outfits for her. For example.....

Kishidan Robot Kitty!

Colourful Robot Kitty by Sebastian Masuda (founder of 6%DOKIDOKI)

Baby's contribution was a bit.... unexpected?

I knew this flamboyant robo-cat must be the work of someone special!

Sure enough, the designer is IZAM.

Yuko Yamaguchi, the designer of Hello Kitty since 1980, was present at the exhibition. She was wearing Emily Temple Cute!

She spent a long time signing things for this lady, who was obviously a big Kitty fan! She was wearing a Kitty yukata, with a Kitty obi, Kitty handbag, and had an endless array of Kitty good to be signed.

What do you think of Hello Kitty? I used to like her a lot when I was 12 or so, but these days my favourite characters are Jiji (Ghibli), Duffy (Disney) and Kutusita nyanko (are they more mature perhaps?). Rilakkuma has taken over from Kitty as Japan's most popular character, or so it seems to me. Still, I don't think she'll ever be forgotten!

Here's my casual coordinate for that day:

Cutsew by an another angelus (f.i.n.t) and JSK by Metamorphose

No fringe!

I just pinned it to once side, it's not gone forever. I really love my new cutsew from f.i.n.t! There was a choice of dusky pink or lilac, pink would probably be easier to coordinate but the lilac was too pretty to resist! I like how it picks up the purple roses in the print of this JSK, and in fact it makes it look like a onepiece. 

~I'm making a new tag for f.i.n.t because I know I won't be able to stay away from there XD~

Sapphira

xxxx

Kiyosumi Teien

Hello dear readers! It's a rainy day here in Tokyo. I hope that means it's going to be cooler for a few days!

I recently visited a Japanese garden recommended to me by my friend liemzie.

It was really beautiful!

There's a big pond in the middle of the garden, and stepping stones in the shallow parts. The building you can see is a tea house! It was so nice to be surrounded by nature for once. I'm still getting used to living in a big city and I really miss trees and plants and little birds. There are a lot of singing cicadas and giant ravens near my house but it's not quite the same!

Here's my outfit for that day:

Onepiece, bag: Metamorphose

Parasol: Innocent World

Others: Offbrand

There's a little shop selling food for the carp that live in the pond, so I bought some. It seemed that the pigeons and turtles were also very fond of this food and lots of them gathered to try to grab a bite! 

This one even crawled out of the water and chased us for food!

I had a lovely time at the gardens! Hope you enjoyed the pictures.

See you next time,

Sapphira

xxxx

An impulse buy!

Hello readers! Hope you're all well today. I'm a bit sad, because I had plans to go to Disneyland as my birthday treat (my birthday's on Tuesday) but I had to cancel them because I have a really awful cough :(

Anyway, I'll cheer myself up by posting about nice things! Last week I met up with Emma, another English lolita currently living in Japan. We spent the day in Shinjuku, going to Marui One and Takashimaya. Of course we spent most of the time on the lolita floor of Marui. It's summer sales now!

In Takashimaya, we checked out all the wonderful things in the craft section. There were fabrics, felting kits, resin jewellery kits, all sorts of things! It makes you want to be more creative. I feel like making some jewellery actually, but I wonder if I'll get around to it.  

We stopped to have a drink in Takashimaya. You might have noticed I cut my fringe extremely short; it wasn't entirely on purpose! I think it can look a little harsh, so today I placed my half lashes very low to create a drooping effect. I think it makes one's expression more gentle. Oh, and I wore my straw bonnet. Japan feels so safe, I think I could wear a bonnet everyday if I wanted!

Emma is so cute! She looks very fresh and pretty in these light colours. I hope we'll go shopping again soon. It might be a dangerous move though- on this day I tried on IW's Germaine onepiece in navy in the KERA shop. I thought it looked so fancy and elegant on the hanger, but I wasn't sure if it would look nice on me or not. Emma said "I think you should try it." So I did, and it seemed to fit very well. Then she said "I think you should get it!" so I did! Whoops! 

I don't regret it though, it's a lovely dress and I don't have a party dress apart from my Juliette bisque doll.  The back neckline is particularly lovely, so mature and gorgeous! Besides that the longer length is very good for me. I'm planning to wear it for the D tour final next month, so please look out for it then!

Here is today's coordinate, country and classical combined:

~Outfit Rundown~

Bonnet: Handmade

Cutsew: axes femme

Wrust cuffs: Baby, the Stars Shine Bright

Jumperskirt, bag: Metamorphose

Socks: Mikazuki Momoko

See you next time,

Sapphira

xxxx

Out on the wiley, windy moors

Hello dear readers! How are you?

I had a very nice Jubilee weekend, despite having to work on Tuesday.

Sunday was my leaving party, I did karaoke with my friends! I had such a fantastic time, I'm so happy to have made some good memories before I leave. Lucky we have a karaoke box here in Sussex too!

Here's what I wore:

~Rundown~

Onepiece: Innocent World

Socks: Mikazuki Momoko

Bag: Metamorphose

I tried to give a playful look to this onepiece by coordinating with short socks and a high ponytail. Carrying a big bag makes one look slim and dainty in comparison! The only problem is I get tempted to fill it up with useless things and it gets heavy....  

My sweet friends gave me really pretty bon voyage cards, a cute British souvenir to remind me of home and even some yen to put towards something for my new apartment.

As you might have guessed from the title of this post I performed Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights, which was one of favourites of the evening along with Prince's Raspberry Beret. On top of those we also did Karma Chameleon, Time After Time, Summer Nights, I Got You Babe, Total Eclipse of the Heart, All Around My Hat and many, many more. Two hours in the karaoke box passed quickly!

I say 'performed' rather than 'sang' partly because I really put my all into karaoke (dance moves and all), and partly because my voice is so bad I don't know if it counts as singing....

And here's the souvenir:

It's perfect for two reasons, firstly I used to go to Shepherd's Bush a lot while I was at uni to get fabric, and secondly I love shepherd's pie! I know British food is not highly rated, but I love it.

So readers, do you like doing karaoke? What do you like to sing?

Sapphira

xxxx