Blah Blah Blah is a curiosity shop filled with the weird and wonderful: vintage clothing, handmade accessories and indie zines.
Watches turn out to bracelets with tiny, hand-embroidered clock faces, bags made out of fuzzy fake fur are embellished with portraits of dignified looking cats, and colorful beetles crawl up necklaces.
Blah Blah Blah was founded in 2005 by designer Chen I-shan (陳怡珊) while she was working part time at different boutiques. In her spare time, Chen, whose mother and grandmother taught her how to crochet and sew when she was a girl, stitched bags and clothing for herself. Her friends saw her creations and asked her to make things for them, too.
Photo: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
Encouraged, Chen began selling her totes at artists’ markets and at stores in Taipei City. She opened her own store near the corner of Zhongxiao East Road and Dunhua South Road three years ago.
Chen says she chose the name Blah Blah Blah because “I’m not very good at using words to express myself.”
“I didn’t go to design school, so I think my style is more free-spirited,” says Chen, who used to sew clothing for her Barbies by hand. “I like combining different materials in new ways and mixing up colors and patterns.”
Photo: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
Blah Blah Blah’s signature items are reversible totes and handbags sewn from lively printed fabric and made with handles and frames of raw, undyed leather. Some of the cloth used is vintage, like a bright psychedelic print from a Canadian flea market and a modish floral pattern found in an old fabric store Chen stumbled upon while exploring Taitung.
One of Chen’s favorite pastimes is searching for odds and ends to use in her creations. Some pendants are made from vintage shoe buttons, while other necklaces are strung from tiny cube-shaped beads in primary colors imported from Japan.
Another jewelry series features odd-looking pendants made from tree branch slices that are studded with brass nails like the pegs in a pinball machine.
Photo: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
Blah Blah Blah also carries a colorful assortment of vintage clothing from Japan and Taiwan and a treasure trove of quirky items: ABC practice notebooks from Hong Kong, elaborately beaded bags from the 1950s and 1960s, handmade zines by artist Son (兒子) and colorful rubber toys shaped like letters and numbers that Chen found at the Fuhe Bridge Flea Market (福和橋跳蚤市場).
“I save a lot of little things that I have no idea what to do with at first,” Chen says.
Some of the handicrafts are inspired by children’s toys and books, including Alice in Wonderland. Soft ornaments are sewn from fabric printed with images of clocks and keys and a series of necklaces have pendants made from John Tenniel’s classic illustrations. Sewn from fleece with crocheted heads, “sable” scarves look like cute stuffed animals at first glance, but with leather buttons for eyes and tiny x’s for pupils, the accessories are both whimsical and a little creepy.
Photo: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
One series of necklaces called Toy Chips was inspired by small plastic pendants called wangzaixian (尪仔仙) that were collected by Taiwanese children in the 1950s and 1960s. Chen cast the original pieces, which she found in a friend’s collection of vintage playthings, in sterling silver and bronze; the shapes include a parrot, a bat and a qilin (麒麟), or Chinese unicorn.
“It’s hard to say exactly where my design inspiration comes from because it’s always different,” Chen says. “I just like to make things that are unexpected.”
If one asks Taiwanese why house prices are so high or why the nation is so built up or why certain policies cannot be carried out, one common answer is that “Taiwan is too small.” This is actually true, though not in the way people think. The National Property Administration (NPA), responsible for tracking and managing the government’s real estate assets, maintains statistics on how much land the government owns. As of the end of last year, land for official use constituted 293,655 hectares, for public use 1,732,513 hectares, for non-public use 216,972 hectares and for state enterprises 34 hectares, yielding
The small platform at Duoliang Train Station in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) served villagers from 1992 to 2006, but was eventually shut down due to lack of use. Just 10 years later, the abandoned train station had become widely known as the most beautiful station in Taiwan, and visitors were so frequent that the village had to start restricting traffic. Nowadays, Duoliang Village (多良) is known as a bit of a tourist trap, with a mandatory, albeit modest, admission fee of NT$10 giving access to a crowded lane of vendors with a mediocre view of the ocean and the trains
President William Lai (賴清德) on Nov. 25 last year announced in a Washington Post op-ed that “my government will introduce a historic US$40 billion supplementary defense budget, an investment that underscores our commitment to defending Taiwan’s democracy.” Lai promised “significant new arms acquisitions from the United States” and to “invest in cutting-edge technologies and expand Taiwan’s defense industrial base,” to “bolster deterrence by inserting greater costs and uncertainties into Beijing’s decision-making on the use of force.” Announcing it in the Washington Post was a strategic gamble, both geopolitically and domestically, with Taiwan’s international credibility at stake. But Lai’s message was exactly
Traditionally, indigenous people in Taiwan’s mountains practice swidden cultivation, or “slash and burn” agriculture, a practice common in human history. According to a 2016 research article in the International Journal of Environmental Sustainability, among the Atayal people, this began with a search for suitable forested slopeland. The trees are burnt for fertilizer and the land cleared of stones. The stones and wood are then piled up to make fences, while both dead and standing trees are retained on the plot. The fences are used to grow climbing crops like squash and beans. The plot itself supports farming for three years.
RSS