Huli Ka! (The Luxe: A Guilty Confession)

Anna Godbersen's Young Adult (YA) offering, The Luxe, is a fun read that I admittedly couldn't put down. I say admittedly because it's a YA book and my choice of it was partly driven by the book cover. (Aren’t those colors scrumptious? That dress looks like she’s been swallowed by a big pink cupcake, but I actually like it!) My brother went on and on about how the cover may be appealing to me because of something called the Golden Mean, a math/design concept whose definition is too long and profound for me to describe in full here. (It’s really interesting though, despite the math, so if you want to read up on how the Golden Mean figures in everyday design and even music, click HERE.)

The Luxe is “Gossip Girl in 1899 Manhattan.” Even if it has an ending you can see coming from a mile away, I still loved reading it. Maybe because it has all the elements of the classic Pinoy teledrama that I grew up with: the covetous best friend, the love affair with a boy from the “other side of town,” the girl torn between love and duty to her family. All fluff, but I think fluff is good in small doses (like 448 pages!)

Here's the book's website, with fun quizzes and downloads.

But, back to the cover. That dress revived my interest in learning how to bubble-hem, sometimes called a “blouson hem”. I found this at Kingdom Of Style -- a fairly simple tutorial for turning an A-line dress into one with an elasticized bubble hem. It seems easy enough and this can absolutely be done by hand (with some patience). I hope to experiment on an old dress and maybe post the results. (I don’t know how I’m going to find the time to do it, but maybe if I wrote about it, it’ll actually happen!)

Here’s an illustrated guide on how to do a bubble hem in four steps. Complete instructions HERE.




On a further Luxe note, I found out from Amazon that a sequel is soon to come! Hay naku, look at how pretty the cover for THAT is. (It’s inspiring me to make Strawberry Cheesecake!)