Catching up on Snowflake backlog

[dolorosa_12]

There is no Friday open thread this week, because the snowflake_challenge backlog was stressing me out so much that I needed devote a whole post to catching up with it. That said, if you want to use any of the challenges as a prompt, and respond in some way to it in the comments (either by linking to your own snowflake_challenge post, or by answering it fresh), do feel free to treat it as a Friday open thread.




Challenge #10: Big Mood (Board)

CHOOSE SOMETHING YOU LOVE AND CREATE A MINI MOOD COLLECTION OF THREE (or more) ITEMS THAT EVOKE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT. You don’t have to limit yourself to visual media, or collect the items into a special format like a square (though you can if you’d like).

You know what, I love looking at other people's visual fannishness, but I do not enjoy creating graphics or anything visual myself, so I am going to link to some aural moodboards instead. If you think I've just decided to go with fanmixes again, you would be 100 per cent correct! When I feel fannish feelings, they are basically musical, always.

I still stand by this Babylonne Kidrouk fanmix 100 per cent. She's an angsty, romantic, melodramatic teenager with delusions of heroism.

I also stand by this Galax Arena Presh/Allyman playlist: two self-interested, nihilistic survivors finding home in each other in spite of themselves.

This one is for the Dune film adaptations


Challenge #11

In your own space, grant someone's wish from Challenge #5

I did this already for two different people's wishes, but I will copy my response (with identifying information removed) to see if it is of wider interest. The person had asked for (I paraphrase) advice on buying/styling clothing as a person over 40, with a preference for natural fibres, clothes that didn't look dated, and clothes that didn't look like something a teenager would wear. As a woman over 40 who likes wearing natural fibres and wearing clothes that are comfortable and don't immediately start looking out of date, I felt I potentially had useful advice here!

I'm of a similar age, and have developed some good go-to brands for clothes, mainly buying wool, linen, bamboo or cotton clothing (although occasionally cotton/acrylic blends). I buy all of this online, but (for reasons that I'll explain) essentially don't have any problems with things fitting properly because of the styles of clothes I tend to wear. The only impracticality here is that most of these brands are UK-based, and I don't know how cheap/easy they will be to obtain in other parts of the world.

I essentially have two modes of dress: casual clothing (which I wear around the house, or out and about doing errands in town), and dressier stuff (which I wear for my office-based job, out at most social events, etc — some is fancier than others).

For the casual clothing, I exclusively wear leggings or tracksuit bottoms from Bamboo Clothing Company, and long- or short-sleeved T shirts from either Bamboo Clothing Company or Uniqlo. The clue is in the name for the former — it's mostly athleisure wear made from bamboo — whereas the latter is a decent quality fast fashion brand which I basically only use for T shirts, made of cotton or cotton/acrylic blends. I know my sizes for both brands, so buying online is no problem.

I buy most of my formalish clothing from Toast. My style is mainly loose flowing dresses made of natural fibres in summer, heavier tunic dresses worn over long-sleeved T shirts in winter, with wool jumpers and vests, and if you look at the Toast website, you'll see it mainly consists of this kind of stuff. It is not cheap: natural fibres, and clothing that's not made in exploitative conditions costs that much to produce, and it's something I just accept in order to get good quality clothes that I know I will like, will be comfortable, and will last a long time. They do have regular sales (I bought a jumper and a summer dress during their winter sale and both had £100 knocked off the price), although things in more standard sizes get snapped up very quickly. I also use Vinted but I don't know if it exists outside the UK — there are often secondhand Toast clothes at heavily discounted prices.

There are physical Toast shops, but not in my town, so I only buy from them online, but the combination of their online 'size finder' (you tell the website your measurements and it recommends the size you should buy for any specific item of clothing; it swings between Small and Medium for me depending on the specific clothing) and the fact that I wear a lot of loose, tent-like dresses means that I'm not hugely worried about not being able to try things on.

I haven't worn trousers (other than leggings and pyjamas) since about 2008, and cannot advise when it comes to them!

None of what I'm describing could remotely be described as 'current fashion,' but I find that quite liberating as it doesn't need to be replaced when it starts to look dated, and most of the people I know who wear it are of a similar age to me (late thirties and older).

Finally, we have Challenge #12:

Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life. Appreciate them in bullet points, prose, poetry, a moodboard, a song... whatever moves you!

Well, in keeping with the theme of this post, you all get a song. And because it's me, you obviously get the extended dance remix as opposed to the original ballad.

There are many ways
Don't go too straight
Just walk around
Walk around that hill indeed.

We've all found our myriad ways around that hill, to this little corner of the internet that we call home, and I'm so immensely grateful we're all here.

Comments

[yarnofariadne]

Thanks for sharing the clothing recs!

[dolorosa_12]

You're welcome!

[goodbyebird]

❤️

I'm hoping to do a fanmix as well, if I find the time. Despite doing icons, I've never felt drawn towards other graphics like moodboards.

Speaking of, here's the icons silly me uploaded to imgur for fabdomtrees

[dolorosa_12]

Oooh, thank you (and no need to apologise for the Imgur thing — I don't think many people know that it's blocked in the UK now).

Those icons are pretty! I'm assuming they're for the Winternight trilogy, and I love being able to have icons that are specific for my small book fandoms. Thank you so much!

[goodbyebird]

Yup, it's Winternight. There were a lot of different covers, but I thought these were the prettiest.