Iris Garden X Haenuli Beloved Delivered

Today I received the skirt and blouse from the kickstarter I backed back in March! As well as the headbow I also pledged for, and a tote bag with a few goodies.

When I backed these kickstarter items, I was still quite new to lolita fashion, and I didn't realise that my wardrobe, once it got larger, wouldn't have that much in the way of prints. I do remember being unsure whether to add the skirt or not, but deciding to just go for it. I was a little worried when I got the shipping notification a few weeks ago - what if these pieces don't work with my current wardrobe? I didn't really want to start buying fresh clothes in order to work with this into a coordinate, and I didn't want to struggle to fit it in. I was really quite nervous about stepping back towards owning a printed piece after so long using no prints.

But after the pieces arrived, I managed to put together 3 coords with them. It was a little difficult actually - I struggled somewhat with balancing the white in the leg area, as this skirt did badly highlight my lack of legwear that is both black and white. I used white shoes to balance this instead, and when wearing a coord which was mostly black I added lace tights for texture instead of using the solid tights I'd used on the coords where I had leaned more into white. The Neant Glass coffin rosaries were really cute with this, since they matched really well thematically. I grabbed a made-to-order coffin choker from the Neant release yesterday, to go with more of my off-the-shoulder coords, and now I'm quite pleased that I did since I think this will go really nicely with this skirt too. I am really wanting to lean into a bit of a vampire aesthetic by adding more coffin jewellery.

The Marble vest in the middle coordinate felt a little bold - the white lace in my eyes doesn't quite go perfectly with the skirt, but I think the shape of the vest works well to give it a bit of an academic feel, and the lace does go with the hat nicely. I had somebody comment that they thought it would work well with a black and white bow at the neck - but if you look closely I am already wearing one! This bow is just not the most dramatic of black and white bows.

So despite having a much larger amount of lolita clothing, this skirt is still quite a fresh piece, and does not overlap with any other items in my wardrobe, which is great. It did go thematically with a lot of my neant glass jewellery, and I think there are a few more clothing items that work with this. I was also really pleased with my decision to size up the blouse as much as I did - I was a little suspicious looking at the measurements, alongside the advice to size up if between sizes, so I decided not to risk it and took the one above where I thought I might fit. I wonder a little bit whether the same size would have been better size for the skirt, as I chose the one where I was within the measurements for the skirt since it has shirring and it feels a little tight but perhaps this was just because the elastic needs time to loosen up. Overall I felt the measurements for this release were on the smaller side.

I did see a few people complain about the quality of the blouse, the fabric weakening in certain areas of the darting, but I was really grateful that my blouse arrived okay and without weak points. I was a little frustrated at how long it took me to fasten all of those buttons though. They were very fiddly and I kept dropping them when trying to put them through the space to fasten them. The collar was cute, I liked the arm shapes, the fabric was not a very sweaty kind of polyester - but also not the softest, so potentially could get itchy on a long day. Although I really hope not.

Thinking forwards about black and white legwear, I do have a Wirehead order in the post which contains black socks with white lace, but I don't think these would really fit well with this skirt since they are more old-school in feel. So I think I will add a pair of black socks or tights with a white pattern on them into my next Atelier Pierrot order. My lack of patterned legwear is a little limiting sometimes, so I'd like to expand on what I have available anyway. I've been far too heavily reliant on lace tights for somebody who is prone to blisters.

Website updates

Today I finally designed a button for the Journal section of my website. This has taken me so long because I was looking for the perfect style of book picture to fit with what I had in mind for this section. I finally managed to find one that I liked today, so I am pleased to announce that there is now a button. The next thing I need to do is create a landing page for the journal section of the website, this will need a button to go to the latest post, as well as a menu with a bit of a post archive.

I am not sure what sort of format to use for the journal archive, and I've also been considering whether to add a "previous entry"/"next entry" button on each Journal entry. I think this would potentially be useful, but right now it sounds like it would probably be a pain to do. But then I guess it's better to start it sooner than to start it later? I've decided to add one to this entry now anyway. I can worry about formatting later I guess.

My website hasn't been updating as much as usual, this is because I had been updating on my work laptop earlier on in the development of my website, and sadly there has been an issue with my work laptop, so I am trying not to use it too much for personal things since I need to bring it into work next week to swap it for a different one. The issue with my work laptop is pretty bad and they're going to be taking a look at it to understand what happened - so I'm a little embarassed that they might start looking through to see what I've been up to. Unfortunately the last thing that happened before this issue was known to start was me visiting a website that I was linked to from somebody's neocities, which has set alarm bells off in the security systems at work, so I'm going to be a lot more cautious about what sort of links I click going forwards. I'm really sad about this because I was under the impression that people making websites on here were a friendly community, but this makes me feel as though there is truly nowhere safe from people wanting to do harm.

However, an acquaintance of mine (who introduced me to neocities) has mentioned interest in the creation of a lolita webring. I'm really hopeful that this will go forward because I really would love to continue looking at websites created by people who just want to create beautiful and cute free spaces on the internet.