Amaranth Opulent is a line of eco-friendly, one-of-a-kind jewelry by Miss Lumpy. Drawing inspiration from a slew of alternative fashions such as lolita, mori-girl, and steampunk, Amaranth Opulent is inspired to taking organic, sustainably-harvested materials and combining them with findings purchased from independent businesses to create jewelry of beauty and luxury. Every flower and leaf used in this jewelry has been hand-picked and hand-pressed by Aly herself in a sustainable manner, meaning that the entire plant is not picked so that it can continue to live as an important part of its local ecosystem. Jewelry findings such as bases and chain are purchased solely from either local craft stores or Etsy shops because it is important to us that we support small businesses.Amaranth Opulent is devoted to the idea that the corruption of the world humans have created for ourselves can be purified by combining man-made materials with natural components taken straight from the Earth. The society I've found myself is not one I'm particularly fond of, and I can't be alone; call it escapism, but I've realized that I need to contribute something to the world that reflects the old-worldly, the otherworldly, that anything-but-here. If you like getting lost in the woods, if you notice the flower growing between the sidewalk cracks, if your heart wrenches at the beauty of abandoned buildings covered with vines, Amaranth Opulent was made with you in mind.

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This story beings in the ancient way: Once upon a time, there was a young woman who lived on the outskirts of town, near where civilization ends and the Wild begins. She went about her business every single day; she did her spinning and mending, haggled with farmers at the market, and spent the mornings in her herb garden. She went to the well to gossip with the other town girls and braided her long curls in the style popular among them; she smiled at the local boys and farm hands like she knew she was supposed to; she imagined that someday she would be married off to one of them and bear him children, and her young life would fade as quickly as the beauty it took with it. This was the life of all the town girls, and no one had ever complained about it, that she knew of; how painful could it be?
But somehow something felt wrong. The maiden would sometime pause from her embroidery, look out the window, and be caught up in the beauty of the chicory or the sweet pea flowers growing along the dirt road. Somehow, something felt just slightly off: there was something about lowering her eyes from the sunbright window to the dark rows of tiny stitches she was slaving over that just felt horrifically unnatural.
One day when she rose from her bed, she noticed something different in the air, a kind of magical anticipation that stung her eyes and ran fingers of static through her hair. The girl walked to the door of her cottage, still barefoot and nightgowned, and her eyes were drawn to the edge of the wood. There, standing among the yellow toadflax and daisy fleabane, was an elegant doe, her rump speckled with dew and glistening in the early morning sunshine. Their eyes met, and somehow without the young woman's command, her feet started to move towards the animal. Together they fled into the forest; running side by side, the thumping beats of their footfalls were the rhythm of freedom to which they marched.
The young woman fled to the forest, and this is where she remains to this very day. Sometimes the town-dwellers and farmers caught glimpses of her, long blond curls unruly and tangled around twigs and flowers. Her eyes are beyond wild; they are elated, overjoyed, full of life and purity and freedom. Abandoning herself to the forest, she elevated her mind beyond the horrid confines of society and truly become what she was destined to be: The Wild Woman of the Wood.

Psst, remember that project I've been coyly mentioning all summer? The unrelated eye candy, are from a photoshoot for it with Ophanim Gothique and Lolita Nouveau. The lovely models here are my wonderful friends Crystal and Cate. Please stay tuned this Friday, 8/13/10 when I'm going to officially announce this project!


photos care of Sean Walsh

I'm the type of person who, despite an inherent lazy streak, really just does not like being idle. I'm not the kind of person who can sit for hours watching TV. Even being an idle passenger in a car is frustrating and almost painful for me; I'm just honestly not happy if I can't somehow justify what I'm doing as being productive (come on, trawling egl_comm_sales is TOTALLY blog research!) Unfortunately, that leads to an even more uncomfortable sensation: Burn out. Neglecting my friends and family, slacking off at work, getting snippy with my boyfriend - all of these are really A-plus ways to make you feel utterly crappy about yourself and everything else. I've been in a slump recently, and I can tell that it's entirely the fault of this hectic summer: juggling school, work, friends, and the project I've been working on since June (to be announced this week or next!) began has drained me so much that I didn't even notice. I had been running off adrenaline, just going from one task to the next, and it wasn't until my summer class ended and I found myself actually having free time again that I even realized what I'd been doing. It was like when I was working at a smoothie shop full time; fast-paced, frenzied work every morning, a nap when I got home, dinner, school or schoolwork, sleep. Rinse and repeat.

Sure, there's a certain rush to living that life, the go-go-go-quadruple-espresso-no-foam-skim-latte life, but eventually the caffeine rush will fade and the near-catatonic listlessness that ensues is what you'll ultimately remember, and what will ultimately count. It was when I was sitting here a few minutes ago, staring vapidly into a blank computer screen, that I realized what was happening to me. Horror of all horrors, I was becoming another listless desk-zombie! This cannot continue. I had to remind myself of how to break my funk - quickly, before waters get deeper and things get dire.

♥Breathe. Step one, just breathe. Close your eyes - you know those deep, cleansing breaths you've heard so much about? Now's the time to use them. Take a moment, forget the world, and just be.

♥Slow down. You've heard of the Slow Food movement, right? Why stop at food? Live a slow life, at least for a moment. Sit down, look out the window; watch the birds playing or the bare branches twitching in the wind. Listen to the sound of cars, or the absolute stillness of the snow-covered ground. Forget about everything else - the Yahoo!Japan bidding war, the homework you haven't finished, the fact that tomorrow will be another day of your angry boss or that annoying old man getting on your case. Take a moment to just observe, without judgment, the inherent beauty of this world we've been blessed with.

♥Sing and laugh. Both release endorphins, so even if you didn't feel like doing it before you started, you'll be shocked at the feeling of calm bliss that they can cause.

♥Surprise yourself. The most successfully I've pulled myself out of a funk was in February of 2008. I was wandering a not-so-safe street in my city, in the bitter cold, living through the eternal existential crisis that is being human. All of a sudden I found myself standing in front of the better of two tattoo shops in town; in my wallet was the lotus I'd drawn myself eight months earlier. I decided the time for rumination was over. I walked into the tattoo shop, and fate, as She does, gave me a sign that my choice was right: The receptionist had just hung up with a cancellation; would an hour and a half from now be okay? Two hours later I had my first tattoo, a spring in my step, and hope that maybe the universe really was looking out for me.

♥Love something. The risk is thrilling; the positivity is worth it; the outcome will be breathtaking, no matter what. Love loves love, so only positivity can come from love... and no matter how many times love hurts me, I know she'll never leave me truly alone.

♥Create yourself a sanctuary and keep it inside of you. A little bit of sunshine you can escape into: a photograph of a Caribbean island you saw once, a memory of running through a field as a child, or the promise of a hot cup of tea when you finally come home. ("Come home" - don't those words just fill you with serenity? It makes me think of a lover over the phone, inviting her darling to her bedside)

♥Find a mantra and repeat it whenever things get hard. Mine is, "When it hurts too much, take solace in the fact that not only did you survive, you thrived." It's so easy to let negativity affect you; the world seems like it's out to get us at every turn. However, if you can find a positive message that resonates with you, it will fill you with the strength to fight the little battles that you find always come when you're at your worst; your most tired, most stressed, least positive. That's when they attack: be prepared to fight back.


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Ever since giving my one-month notice to my soul-sucking corporate desk job, I've been having what you can call daydreams or delusions of grandeur about changing my hairstyle. While my soon-to-be-ex-boss is very open to the crazier side of life and would have had no problem with me doing any number of ridiculous things to my appearance (he poo-poo'd a septum piercing, though...), public relations and customer service is one of the biggest parts of my job, and there is no way that people who are going to be spending amounts in the five-digit neighborhood on our products would take seriously a girl with blue hair and piercings. Even though the guy signing the checks wouldn't have cared, it would have made my job ten times harder; for two years I've acquiesced to boring and bland.

this red...

Now, since I'm going to be leaving my job while I'm away at school, I don't have such trivialities to waste my time with, so I've been planning a whole-life makeover that would include my hair, dorm room, tattoos, and maybe a few piercings if I'm feeling up for it. Since I don't currently have a job to worry about besides the business projects I've been working on myself, and the main place I've been putting in applications is Hot Topic (don't judge me!!), I don't find myself overly concerned with how people will think of me in this light. I've been vanilla for probably four or five years; I owe it to myself to have a few months of fun.

But now that I have the option of changing my hair, I find myself facing a dilemma. I've been collecting little tidbits of ideas for the past few months as to how I want this style to look - natural red with hints of blue, soft curls, side bangs, versatile and without much styling needed - but now that it's come time to start seriously considering making salon appointments and the price tag, I find that I need more guidance and a more concrete idea before tossing over what could be some of the last of my hard-earned money for a while. If you're also looking into redoing your 'do, here's a few steps you can take to start.

First of all, remember that you don't need to have an exact picture in your head from the very beginning - if you did, you wouldn't be reading this! It's okay to have a blurry, lucid, half-formed idea in your mind when you start out. For example, for months all I've known is that I want to try out both natural red and bright, deep blue - it didn't even occur to me to try them both together at first! As long as you start out with some preliminary ideas, the rest will come with time. This is what I consider "laying groundwork."

...plus this blue....

Okay, so you know you want it chocolate brown, or bright pink, or super short. Awesome- you have your foundations. The next step is to clear those foundations up with some more details. For me, it was at this stage that it occurred to me to mix my two color ideas; I knew that a whole head of blue hair was definitely not the way to go right off the bat, and that I would get bored with only red for a long time, so it was a natural progression. I started focusing on style. To do this, think about your hair now. Figure out what it is that you like and dislike. For example, I think my hair currently is a great idea in theory: I like the idea of a side bang with soft, natural curls, but unfortunately I live in a climate where that isn't always achievable without lots of work, between humid, frizz-inducing summers and dry, static-laden winters. I've been frying my hair by straightening my bangs all the time, and I've been tying back my hair almost every single day for the past few weeks; I also know that just letting it grow is not working out for my hair type and that I need some layers or other types of fancy cutting to tame it into the style I want.


Okay! So I figured out what I wanted to keep and what had to be changed. Now comes the fun part: eyecandy. Flip through your favorite mook - my choice was GLB volume 36 - and see what pops out at you. Another great resource is your favorite photosharing website - my drug of choice is Tumblr, but We Heart It is also up there- anything that'll let you do a tag or keyword search. Almost daily I searched for "blue hair" and "red hair" until I came up with the best depictions of the shades I wanted. That's very important - to us, "brown" or "blonde" may seem like all the adjectives we need, but a stylist often has many different options of each color. To avoid hair regret (and having to empty your wallet for it, too), it's best to go in knowing what you want and having the resources to properly explain it.

...in the style on the left!

If you do choose to go to a stylist (which I recommend, for a big change like this), it's kind of out of your hands from this point. Just keep your eye on the scissors and make sure she isn't going too short, too layered, or just too far from the plan. This is the part I'm worried about, and the reason the last professional haircut I had was when I was about 11 - I just have problems trusting other people with my appearance. Blame it on my astrology - Taurus is self-important and beauty-obsessed, and Scorpio Moon is eclectic and fancies themselves utterly misunderstood, so the idea of trusting someone else to define my aesthetic in a way that I'd have to deal with for months just never struck me as a good idea. The only reason I'm going back is because I need inspiration and would like to see what someone else can do with me. Sometimes trusting the artist is not a bad idea... I'm just hoping this is one of those times!

Oh, Tea Parties... I know most peoples' opinions are kind of a mixed bag- either you love them or you hate them. I've always sort of been on the neutral-positive side, myself; while I've always thought they were adorable and make the calves look shapely and cute, my heritage has cursed me with feet that will never fit into Angelic Pretty or even Secret Shop, so I've had to just sort of sigh longingly and admire from afar whenever I saw other people wearing them. And then came an*tai*na.

Now, I know people have mixed attitudes towards replicas, but in m experience, complaints of copyright infringement usually stop at clothes - of course, I've seen a few people who find it immoral to copy any original design and remake it cheaply, but that's not the discussion to get into here. I'm not one for replicas of clothing, because while lolita sizing is definitely expanding from pre-conceived notions of the standard Japanese body type to suit a more global size range, shoes are usually kind of an afterthought. Every so often BABY used to come out with a few designs that came in a ~gargantuan~ 25.5-26 cm LL and my closet cried out longingly for shoes that would actually fit, but even those were few and far between until, oh... last summer, maybe? So I've mostly been picking up shoes where I can find them from local stores or famously large-sized shoes such as rocking horses (which have come in a wide range of sizes for years) and those produced by Bodyline. Replica stores like Secret Shop have had sizes as limited as the brands have for as long as I can remember, so I was out of luck there, too.


Then I (and most of the rest of the lolita world) discovered a handful of Chinese brands like Miranda and an*tai*na, specializing in replicas and offering larger sizes. It was a joyous day, and I've been checking back on their offerings frequently ever since. In late May, Qutieland, a retailer of an assortment of Chinese lolita brands usually only found on sites like Tao Bao, released the an*tai*na Tea Party replicas to their site. After a few days of waffling, I decided that I had enough funds to allow myself a dream I'd never even considered seriously: owning Tea Parties.

Okay, okay, this is all far too dramatic for my tastes. I ordered my tea party shoes in size EU41 and paid on May 31st. I wasn't around when they actually arrived at my house, so I don't know the exact day that I received them, but it was not more than three weeks after paying, which is crazy fast, in my opinion. The box they came in had been slightly manhandled and beaten up, but the shoes themselves were in perfect condition. As far as fit goes, I wear a US 9.5 and any other standard of sizing is usually a mystery to me, so I just sort of guess which size I qualify as in European or Japanese sizes. While the length was fine, the shoes are, oddly, a little tight in the front, where the actual "fabric" of the shoe lays over the toes- I'm kind of expecting this to go away after they've been broken in a bit, though.


Aesthetically, they're *almost* perfect. The actual body of the shoe is exactly what I was hoping for; however, I'm not super-pleased with the sole and how the shoes are attached to it. The look is rather industrial, in my opinion; they remind me of my Doc Martens. Not very elegant-fairy-princessy. However, the pictures on the Qutieland site do show this detail; it's my fault for not picking up on it. It isn't really a dealbreaker either- I still like them and will definitely be wearing them once the cooler months roll around, as they aren't really broken in enough to wear them without socks.

The lighting is a little off in this picture- the shoes I got are black, not brown!

In conclusion, I'm definitely happy with my purchase. Will I buy more an*tai*na Tea Party shoes? Well, that depends on how well this pair breaks in. I'm leaning towards yes, though. They're so versatile and cute, and if they end up being comfortable too, then hell, why on Earth shouldn't I?!

To buy your own, click here! If the page doesn't load, try refreshing - Qutieland's website is notorious for moody links.