Arty, attention-grabbing accessories

Last week’s unusually warm and sunny weather had me skipping out all over the place to arty events, hence the lack of blog posts. One of the more glamorous was a party at Sketch in Mayfair, to celebrate Shingai Shoniwa (of the Noisettes) and hatmaker Katherine Elizabeths’ new millinery collaboration.

One of the biggest hat trends is customization. Hats are being embellished with all sorts of curiosities and turned into works of wearable art. It’s fun to create your own millinery masterpiece too – in fact, Katherine Elizabeth holds hat parties and day-long millinery classes, at Craft Central in Clerkenwell. The next one is this Saturday 22nd.

Now the weather’s taken a wintry turn though, I feel more like hibernating. Forget going out to fashion tribe gatherings, all I want to do is sit in front of the television and cozy up to something soporific, like the X-Factor, with a nice mug of cocoa (Ha! That must account for the curious spelling in my latest post at The Dabbler…)

This morning it was actually cold enough to contemplate wearing gloves - which by the way, also seem to be getting an arty makeover this season. I’ve been waiting for ages to try out the luxuriously embroidered new gloves by eccentric Englishman Mark H at ShopCurious. Mark’s oddly extravagant OR WOT! designs are a small but valiant contribution towards saving niche handicrafts of the British manufacturing industry… Now I’ll raise a cup of cocoa to that.

Will you?