A lovely Sunday outing

New Product Launch

Rose and Cucumber Face Mist

I have been working for the last few months on a couple of new products, the first of which I am proud to say is released today!  

Rose and Cucumber Face Mist is an excellent toner and can also be used on the face just to refresh the skin.  Made from gentle rose water and soothing cucumber water, this face mist is blended with hydrolised oats.  One of my favourite ingredients, hydrolised oats instantly sooth the skin, making it look and feel soft.  

You will note, of course, that this product is completely natural, vegan and is not tested on animals.  The labels have been beautifully designed by Karena at Magic Jelly.

Rose and Cucumber Face Mist is the perfect accompaniment to Pink Moon conditioning face soap and will shortly be joined by another new product, a face serum.  More on that later.  

If you are interested in trying Shanghai Lil & The Scarlet Fez's Rose and Cucumber Face Mist, come and say hello this Saturday at That Dapper Market at Bowden. 

Join the Club

Keeping up to date with Shanghai Lil & The Scarlet Fez news

If you have been following Shanghai Lil & The Scarlet Fez's blog (of course you have!), you will have noticed a change in the way it looks.  Take a look to the right:

Karena from Magic Jelly has created these fantastic buttons in the sidebar, all designed to lure you into the world of soap!  I must say, I love them, and I keep clicking on them for fun, they look so good.  Perhaps I should keep that to myself. 

You will have noticed that one of the buttons is for you to subscribe to a new newsletter that I will be releasing in the next week or so.  The newsletter will have news on upcoming markets and other events of interest, new product arrivals, special offers for subscribers and most importantly, fun!

You can also subscribe to this blog - there is a mini form just under the buttons for that.  If you subscribe to the blog, you will receive an email alerting you to new posts.  

Also, Shanghai Lil & The Scarlet Fez is now on Instagram!  You can find me at #shanghaililandthescarletfez.  The photos I will post here will be different to the content of this blog and Shanghai Lil & The Scarlet Fez's facebook page, but will focus on soap, what inspires me, more soap and anything else that captures my fancy.  Join up and welcome aboard!

New Product Photos!

Merging Interests

I have long collected vintage photographs and I was keen to incorporate them into the Shanghai Lil & The Scarlet Fez fold.  My friend Karena from Magic Jelly has kindly shared with me some of her vast knowledge of digital graphic programs to enable me to use some of my collection of photographs to promote my soaps.  With the keen eye of my partner, I have put together some images, which you will now find on my product listings at the store.  I am very pleased with the results and thank Karena and Stevie for their help!

Creative Types

Home Sewing

I was recently commissioned to make a batch of sample soaps for an Adelaide based fabric and sewing supply store called The Drapery.  The soap I made was The Emperor's Chai, and I packaged these in small brown envelopes and added labels designed by my friend Karena at Magic Jelly - more on Karena later.  The soaps will be given away to The Drapery customers so if you are after a natural, sustainable fabric or some indie designer patterns or books, then I recommend giving The Drapery a look.  

Talking to the lovely ladies from The Drapery about the amount of people out there taking up, re-visiting or continuing home sewing is inspiring.  I was reminded of the recent trip my partner and I made to Melbourne where we caught up with our friends and where we got to talking about blogs.  It transpires that our friend has a blog called Needle & Spindle in which she talks eloquently about her love of knitting, crocheting and spinning.  I marvel at our friend's talent and passion!  I have since been eyeing up balls of wall thinking, yes, maybe I can start learning that mysterious (to me!) art of knitting and this was largely driven by my sighting of this brilliant winter hat on Needle & Spindle:

And if that hat isn't enough, guess what it is called?  A Pineapple Stack hat!  I love it!  Our friend designed the distinctive pineapple stitch and offers the pattern for sale via Ravelry.  This hat has even won awards!  I'd like mine beany-style, with a fold-up and pompom.  Yes. 

And back to Karena, she has taken up sewing again with her usual vigour.  She applies the same meticulous attention to detail to her sewing as she does to her art and design.  But Karena has taken this all one step further (of course!) by designing her own fabrics!   What?! you say?  I know, who designs their own fabrics?  Well, take a look at these beauties:

I absolutely love the moths of course, but look, the lillies are brilliant too.  You can purchase these fabrics for yourself through Magic Jelly's shop at Spoonflower.   I have seen the fabrics printed and they look fantastic!  Available in a range of beautiful fabrics including a whole lot of natural fibres - combed cotton, cotton poplin, cotton voile, linen cotton canvas, organic cotton knit, organic cotton sateen, heavy cotton twill or silk crepe de Chine.

Making things is great fun, and I'm lucky to know so many talented creative types.

A Brief Holiday

Through the grainy, hyper-coloured lens of Harinezumi

My partner and I have just returned from a short holiday to Melbourne.   We drove along the Great Ocean Road, which has to be one of the world's great coastal drives, and I took along my bag of cameras, including the Harinezumi.  This little toy digital camera has a number of effects but they all come out looking roughly like a super 8 film, faded or saturated with time. 

 

We arrived in Melbourne via Geelong.  I hadn't been to Geelong before, and I loved it.  It had a lot of great domestic architecture and was very atmospheric.  I felt the past, being in Geelong.  Of particular note was the Eastern Beach precinct.   It was a dream for nostalgics, with sweeping lawns, a brilliant blue paddling pool, handsome red brick kiosks, brightly coloured picnic seating and, best of all, a whimsical fountain of joy!   The fountain itself was wonderful to look at, with lots of shells and stylised dolphins, but surrounding these were four large water birds standing on turtles!

 

We also visited the Heide Museum of Modern Art.  There was a wonderful exhibition of work by Emily Floyd called "Far Rainbow".  The exhibition was made up of a number of different media; prints, wood sculptures, a slide show, even grass matting!  I thought it captured an idyllic early 1970s feel with its primary colours and wooden toy-like shapes.  Of course, there is a more substantial reading of the work, but you can find this out for yourself here!  The two snaps below were taken at the exhibition (no flash, of course).

The Good 80s

Hurrah for Hoarding!

This may come as a shock to you, but the internet hasn't always been around.  I know, imagine!   Magazines used to be my number one path to inspiration, though they often fell short of my expectation, or alternatively, exceeded my ability to be 'cool'.   I kept most of my magazines, not being one to throw away ANYTHING, so I am pleased to be able to present a few images of the covers of an early 1980s magazine called Stiletto.  It was large format, had coloured covers but newsprint within, and it covered off on a wide variety of fashion, music and popular culture, with an inevitable focus on the Melbourne and Sydney scenes.

I remember reading through them (and this was one of the magazines I thought I couldn't quite live up to) and marveling at these strange types who dressed however they wanted and lived their entire lives in glittering nightclubs and bars.  I'm sure the reality was quite different, but they had an impact on me nonetheless.

Now I look at these magazines with nostalgia, but also, I can look at the covers afresh and note how imaginative they are.  I love the collage, the photocopied graininess, the hand-coloured detailing, strident patterns and limited colour palette.  There's no shoulder-padded corporate power-walking here, just good fresh design working within the restraints of budget and technology.   

 

 

 

 

Leaving all that aside, I MUST do a spread on the fashions within - everyone needs to know how to wear a sack well!

The New Melancholy

Autumn, Aspire and Annuals

I know it is stating the obvious, but autumn is here.  It seems to be a bit early, the leaves are well under way to their new colours, there are dahlias out, it smells smokey at night, it's cooler and now, daylight savings is over.  As much as I really don't like (I'm being mild here) the very hot weather, it is sad to see the summer go.  Sad in a melancholy way.  

But I love the small rituals of a change of season.  The decision to pack away the linen and pastel coloured argyle socks, switching from rose scented tea to chai, dusting off the Balmoral boots, raking leaves, ordering violets and looking through bulb catalogues, moving from citrus and herbal scents to woods and resins.   They are small and personal things - I'm certainly not a 'no white shoes after labor day' type of person - but each one is a rediscovery of things forgotten (if only for 6 months), and an anticipation of cool days ahead, rugged up and cosy.

Here's a flower.  A dahlia from our garden, no less, and I see we aren't the only ones keen to have a piece of this:

I was very proud during the week to have picked up a copy of Aspire Magazine, a free publication circulated at various venues around Adelaide, because I am in it!   Well, it wasn't about me in my gracious living room (a la "Hello" magazine), but there was a small article about Shanghai Lil & The Scarlet Fez soaps!  I was very happy about it and I'm chuffed to be in this new, very smart, magazine.   Here's the article, but I recommend reading the whole magazine, of course!

And finally, I am at the Wattle Street market in Fullarton on 12 April 2014, and Pop up at Prospect (Prospect Road) on 26 April 2014.   Come by and say hello and smell the soaps, bath salts, room sprays and perfumes I have on offer!

1960s Colour Inspiration

Capri, by Crown Lynn

We recently acquired a set of Crown Lynn crockery in the Capri range.   Made in New Zealand, Crown Lynn was the largest manufacturer of pottery in the Southern Hemisphere up to the late 1970s, and the "Colourglaze" range was one of the most popular styles.  The "Colourglaze" range was also sold under the names "Capri", "South Pacific" and "Caribbean Ware". 

The range of colours is inspiring, with names like Pumpkin, Jade, Tropic, Duck Egg, Oyster, Clover, Ant Green, Coral, Cocoa, Citrus, Honey and Mushroom.   Apparently, there are many other colours too, so my inner collector (not so inner, really) is all fired up!  Here are some snaps:

 

 

One Fine Summer

A new perfume coming to Shanghai Lil & The Scarlet Fez

A sneak preview!  A crisp floral with citrus highlights. 

1940s Interiors

A photo survey

There are so many wonderful image collections out there, on flickr, pintrest and the like, but it is surprisingly difficult to come across images of interiors from the 1940s.

My interest in 1940s interiors is a personal one, that is, I'm looking for inspiration for our home, so I have put together a short(ish) collection of scanned images from some of our books and magazines, which I think is worth sharing here.  This selection follows on from an earlier post on 1940s fabrics.

The images are mostly of fairly modest homes, a reasonable starting point since we're not likely to be in a position to furnish our home with Andre Arbus anytime soon (which reminds me, I need to speak to those lotto people about this on-going issue...) and I have selected them because each one has a particular feature or finish that interests me.

And why the 1940s?  Well, it's hard to pinpoint, but I'm very fond of art deco, streamline moderne and post-war modernism and the 1940s is the in-between point of these styles.  It's a place where there is a way to blend the otherwise very distinctive and opposing styles spanning either side of the second world war, and that's great for me and my partner and our eclectic tastes.  So, here we are:

1. Textiles: Stroheim & Romann. Ceramics: Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Co. Ltd.  From 'Furnishing the Small Home' - Margaret Merivale (1945).
2. Fireplace treatment. Designer: W. Curtis Green R.A. ibid
3. Room detail. Joseph Aronson. ibid.
4. Studio room by Helen Park. ibid.
5. Room detail.  Oliver Hill. ibid.
6. Dining room, Bowman's Ltd, London.  From 'Design in Every Day Things' - Australian Broadcasting Commission (1941).
7. Hand woven woollen materials by Catherine Hardess of Melbourne. ibid. 
8. Living room of Miss Patricia Detring, Bel Air. Designer: Paul T. Frankl Associates.  From 'The Studio Year Book.  Decorative Art 1943-1948' - ed. Rathbone Holme & Kathleen M. Frost.
9. Scale model of living room.  Designer: Edward D. Stone. ibid. 
10. Japanese pavilion, World's Fair, Paris 1937.  Designer: Junzo Sakakura.  From 'Furniture & Interiors of the 1940s' - Anne Bony (2002).
11. Shangri-La Hotel 1939-1940.  Photographer: Julius Schulman. ibid.

Experimentation

Velvet Cream - a new soap

I haven't made a new variety of soap for a while.   I've been busy just restocking some 'old' favourites after the Christmas rush.   So, yesterday, I whipped up a log of Velvet Cream.   This soap is made up of the usual olive oil and olive pomace - a great base for soap because it is super mild and gentle.   Added to this is a generous amount of cocoa butter and mango butter.   This will give the soap its creamy, luxurious feel.   Finally, I added a dash of castor oil.  I find that this gives the soap a silky feel on the skin.

For scent, I used vanillin and tolu balsam.  I don't know how this will take in the soap - this is the experimentation part.  I haven't used either before.  The vanillin tends to crystallize, which might be annoying, but has a delicious vanilla scent.   The tolu balsam is soft and mellow and has a rich vanilla/resin scent.   Overall, I think the scent is delicious, so I'm hoping it holds in the soap for the duration!   

Here it is then, in its mould.   I'll have more pics after 4 weeks when it is ready to use.

19th Century Papier Mache Mushrooms

The Museum of Economic Botany, Adelaide Botanic Gardens

I don't know why, but I often feel drawn to Victorian things in the days following Christmas.  I think it must be a desire to be grounded in that quiet, solid world of elaborate design, earnest pursuits and brown things after the brash, noisy rush of Christmas.

Boxing Day, I like to pore over (or is that paw over - I do both) my small collection of 19th century gardening books, read a little Tennyson and go through my collection of cabinet cards and cdv photographs. 

So, today, I was pleased to make a visit to town with my partner and we wandered through the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, including the wonderfully stern Museum of Economic Botany.

Within this small museum, there is housed an amazing collection of 19th century papier mache mushrooms, apples, pears and plums, made by Heinrich Arnoldi & Co, Gotha, Germany.   They live in lovely Victorian cabinetry with their original labels.  They were a joy to see!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of Worthy Advice and Bad Art

Book finds

While being a lovely sunny day, there is always time to pop into second-hand bookshops and dig up some treasures from dark and dusty shelves.

My recent finds include "The Practical Way to Keep Fit" (ha!) by Harry Roberts and "How to Write, Think and Speak Correctly" (I know what you're thinking, reader) by C.E.M. Joad.  Both are part of Odhams Press Ltd's quaint range of self-improvement books for the Everyman, probably from the 1920s and both have the same lovely endpapers. 

Knowing how to write, think and speak correctly is all very worthy (an' all that), but the guide to keeping fit is my favourite of the two, mainly for its illustrations.  The text is ponderous and preachy and reminds me of being trapped at a party by a perfectly lovely but deadly dull guest.  The illustrations, however, are a bit of a hoot.  They range in quality, staying on the dark side of mediocre for the most part, but some are really very bad!  Some have quite funny captions and others are just, well, inexplicable.

 

You're telling me it does!

Well, that's all very well for him!

 Not even trying.