3. Describe your personal style.

I'm almost happy with this.

I'd like to say I dress in classic, and I'd like to say I'm elegant. I'd like to. In truth I always end up looking somehow haphazard no matter what I do. It's a rare thing that I'm 100% satisfied with an outfit when I see photos of it later or. My hair's not doing what I want it to, or my petticoat's peeking out in a silly way, or my shoes look wrong - you name it, I've had it wrong at least once. It's great hypocrisy that I'm as particular about the style as I am.

Buuuuut cut the rant, here's some photos - a lolita timeline if you will - of the times when I've thought I'm doing something right. Starting with the old.

PS: yayyyyyy I get an excuse to photoflood!

This was the first lolita outfit I ever made for myself. It was pinstripe! And the stripes matched at the seams! It's still a bit of a soft spot for me.

Some dresses I've made years ago. The first one's my Aerolita-dress that has Aerosmith wings embroidered on, and has seen one of their concerts as well. I'm needlessly proud of this fact! The other two I might have sold away at some point, a very common fate of the dresses I make for myself: I make new ones often (when I do), and therefore the old ones get uninteresting after just one use or so. Shallow, but I am. Btw if you see that background in a photo of mine it means year 2005 or sometime around that. That used to be my kitchen then, on Craftman's St, Helsinki.

Here two dresses that I'm particularly happy with. The one on the left is selfmade, the one on the right is by Tian Shi and it's one of the loveliest wa-lolita dresses I've ever seen. What's worse, she made it so effortlessly, and much as I try to do the same I just can't quite reach the cuteness of design. Please ignore that I'm carrying it horribly.

If the floral 80's monster wallpaper was a sign of my first apartment in Helsinki, this balcony tells you the year is now at least 2008. I moved out of this apartment in 2010 but while I was there I was lucky to have two of the most talented craftspeople I know as roommates, Qkuu and Roweny. Just looking at their working tended to inspire me (although they would laugh to hear this, after all they were the ones who always saw me lagging behind my schedules and procrastinating).

Why yes, I do tend to remember a pose to detail and then re-do it sometime, more about that later on.

The same skirt can work for both lolita and aristo? IDK but that's what I tried. Also note I take posing dead seriously and have apparently always done so.

Same dress, dressed for indoors vs. dressed for outdoors. This outfit is special to me because the top of it is a bit of a design rip-off of AP's Puppet Circus + buttons, coincidentally my dream dress. It would even have had gold velvet etching on it but alas I never learned it well enough to have a go.

Trololo...

I'm still very serious about posing. It's the best way to bring out the best sides of the outfit. Btw the coord on the upper left was a dare by Shamp, if memory serves, the hat was a piece of my Final Project at the school of goldsmithing and she said I ought to build an outfit around it. So I did.

The high waisted skirt in the middle is made out of old curtains I got for cheaps at a flea market. Jus' sayin'.

I spent the summer of 2010 in a student apartment in Helsinki and managed to loly a bit while waiting to move across the Atlantic. Admire the nearly identical pose! I swear I couldn't do that if I deliberately tried to!

Annnnnd then the loli is punching herself inna face in Iceland. The end! No wait it's not, because we f.ex. had a brilliant photoshoot today in the misty fields of lava rock and cloudy seashore... but more about that once I get the photos done.

As a lolzy ending, here's one of my greatest flaws: I don't know how to pose. I've only that one pose, as my friends often remark, and nowadays I even get told to "do the Kaino" for photos which would feel very unfair if there wasn't such a great truth behind it: behold: