This piece refers to Hogsozzle 2017 - long gone but the Cosmic DIY's are still awesome! If you are looking for Hogsozzle 2018, check out this link.
The countdown is on and it's only 4 sleeps until Hogsozzle. I've realised that I am no where near as far along with my costume as I was this time last year, so I thought it would be fun to put together a whole bunch of last minute, or super simple DIY costume ideas for everyone else that hasn't finalised their Cosmic Disco outfits yet!
I feel like this would be an easy-medium project if you had a few spare hours and a bunch of pompoms! I'm kind of tempted to recreate this myself actually in a last minute crafting frenzy!
Can't find the original source of this but looks super easy, yellow dye, green dye and some iron-on fabric. Make it more festival appropriate by using glow in the dark or sparkly eyes!
(This post was written in 2017, even though we are now looking forward to 2018, it should make interesting reading if you are playing to hit up the Hog and I now have a special referral link for ticket buying - please do consider using it if you want to purchase a ticket - click here) Hiii!! If you haven’t
snapped up a ticket to my favourite indie festival yet, I’m going to attempt to
convince you to in this post, by telling you exactly what I plan to be doing
over the weekend…I can’t tell you how excitedly I am counting down the days
until we pitch our tents for the first time this year, unpack our ever-growing
festival supplies and start our weekend of ridiculousness with the rest of the
Hogsozzlers (check their site by clicking here)…here’s my plan for the weekend;
Friday Evening...
We’ll arrive,
almost at the same time, sort out passes and tickets and carry our stuff over
to the best spot in the campsite – last year we managed to snag such a good
place by showing up early, even though
we needed enough room for 10 tents we managed to keep a special corner all to
ourselves and I want to pitch there again this year! I’ve been busy briefing
everyone who says they are going to get there first exactly where this prime
spot is…
We’ll pitch our
tents and unroll our sleeping bags (but we definitely won’t unpack or sort out
our stuff!) and then we’ll gather up our drinks tokens and head straight to the
beautiful wooden bar on the top of the hill to grab some gin & juice and
find out who is playing when. The line-up is filled with better-than-you’d
expect music and acts for the price and there are a couple I really cannot wait
to see, including Electric Swing Circus, Mirrored Theory, Little Brother Eli
and obviously, The Turner Brothers.
Late Friday
Night…
I’ll be rolling
around on the hill, surrounded by LED costumes (although we’ll be saving the
big guns for the Saturday!) drinks and fun art installations, I think the bath
full of ballpit balls was super last year and the rocket ship boat has to be
making another appearance given the theme, right?
Very, Very late
Friday Night…
We’ll make our
way back to camp and dig out our camping-friendly supplies, plastic bottles and
disposable cups and make friends with our neighbours. This is essential as if
we do manage to land the camping spot of dreams, we are pretty far from the
main walkway so we won’t get the usual through traffic, we’ll need to ally with
our neighbours for when supplies are running low later in the weekend –
crashing other people’s tents and finding out what festival hacks they
remembered to bring with them is always fun. This year I’m all about the
bulldog clips for hanging things up in your tent, I really don’t want to ruin
another camera/phone/charging device, last year cost me a fortune in
replacement devices and I still haven’t got a decent camera for this year’s
adventures.
Early Saturday
Morning,
Our make-up will
be running, the tents will be full of glitter and mud and chances are, we will
have misplaced either a band member, an instrument or something else of value.
We’ll climb onto the pile of bags in our tents (because we obviously didn’t
bother sorting anything out in the daylight) and drift into a troubled sleep,
half an ear waiting for the announcement that the food places are opening up…
Saturday
Morning,
We’ll start the
day munching on whatever breakfast foods we can get our hands on, hopefully
sitting inside a big old rusty helicopter, because, where else could I possibly
want to eat my breakfast? The first year we went to Hogsozzle the breakfast
offering was…disappointing, to say the least. Last year they scored an absolute
double whammy with the Cauldron and The Wingmen – I haven’t worked out if they
are coming again this year – I believe they have now set up a bricks and mortar
store in Sleaford but I can’t find them online – what’s happened to those guys?
Saturday Daytime
We’ll pop to the
nearby Tesco and pick up supplies, including lots of water because I can
totally make it 27 degrees in my dream weekend right? We’ll eat ice cream and
if there’s any surviving remains of our carefully packed picnic, we’ll probably
eat that too, rolling around in the sun and slowly getting our costume bits
together for the big costume night. We’ll
head over to the Hog Roast as many times as we think we can get away with and I’ll
try to avoid looking in it’s big burnt eye as I chow down on the best pig of
the year…
I seriously
cannot wait to see the costumes this year, did you see that these guys won the
costume competition last year? I mean really, who else could it have possibly
been? So weird.
People really go all out for this one and I’ve spent the last
few weeks in a dedicated Facebook chat group with the fellow Turner Brother
friends and girlfriends trying to come up with ideas for our costumes along the
Best Theme Ever – COSMIC DISCO!! I’m pulling together loads of DIY ideas to
share soon so we’ll be spending Saturday afternoon glittering up, slipping into
our homemade costumes and basically coating every part of our bodies in as much
cosmic silver body paint as possible as well as eyeing up the competition from
our fellow campers…
Saturday
Evening,
One by one, we
will emerge from our cramped tents like
cosmic butterflies, all light-up bras, sparkly crop tops and giant moonboots (I
hope!)
We’ll dance the night away under a perfectly
clear sky, knocking back jagerbombs, rushing from the main area to the hot,
sweaty dance enclosure to the Pig Pen to the brand new Yurt, taking in as many
costumes, acts and experiences as possible – I definitely plan to reach peak
excitement and festival fun tonight!
Late Saturday Night…
I’ll lose all my
friends and become completely disorientated, eventually finding my way back to
our campsite (which is basically home by this point, even though I’m still
sleeping on top of a pile of bags and other peoples groundsheets and all the
water has run out and there’s someone’s mud-filled shoe in place of my pillow…)
The other girls are telling me they will be having a sane one tonight but I’ll
still be going until sunrise.
Sunday Morning…
Sunday is the
day I’m looking forward to most! There’s a huge paint fight to get involved in
(I’ll be hunting down a cheap white unitard on Amazon for this!) and it’s the
day of The Turner Brothers performance on the main stage – the boys have been
regulars at Hogsozzle for the last few years and I can’t wait to see them back
on stage after a break over the winter, it’s been months since I heard them
live and I know for a fact they have some fab new material – I’ll be taking
over their Instagram and hopefully live streaming the whole thing, if I haven’t
damaged all my charging devices by this point!
Sunday Night…
We’ll dance long
into the night but since I’ll have finally unrolled my sleeping bag properly by
this point I’ll almost certainly be in need of more than 40 winks so I’m
picturing dozing, half out of my tent, partly listening what the true hardcore
festival revellers get up to on their last night…
Sunday morning…
We’ll realise we’ve
spent all our money and lost all our stuff but I’m definitely going to use this
morning to cajole everyone into our second annual group photo for the records,
as well as packing up all our stuff and beginning the countdown to the next
festival on our schedule this summer, The Curious Yellow…
Phewwww, I kind
of feel like I’ve relived the last two years there and it’s definitely got me
so pumped for this year – if this sounds like a great weekend to you, pop over
to the Hogsozzle website and grab one of the last few tickets before it’s too
late – don’t forget to say hi, we’ll be the ones with the best camping spot and
the flashing LED bras :)
I’m working on a
blog post about using biodegradable glitter this year, so you have any ideas
for brands and shops that sell glitter that won’t harm birds or the
environment, please do drop me a comment below!
Festival season is back! I honestly don't know how I used to get through winters that didn't finish just as the glittery, sparkly joy of festival time is visible on the horizon. "I don't think festivals are for me" I used to proclaim, "I'm not really a camping kind of gal"
First up is the pig-themed dreamparty that is Hogsozzle - it's the perfect start to the summer. The Turner Brothers are playing, there's a massive roast to 'pig' out on and best of all, the fancy dress theme this year is beyond perfect for my head-in-the-stars self...
COSMIC DISCO!!!!
Can you believe it? Hogsozzle was where I came up with my (deeply unpopular) hashtag - #bringbackcosmic back in 2015. It was the first time I ever saw someone decked out head to toe in pure galaxy print clothing...
I feel like I have posted this poor guys picture several times over the last few years and have never managed to find out who it is - if this is you, please comment below and I will tag appropriately!
So, fast forward a few years and I'm looking forward to Hogsozzle so much, we are going with all of the usual gang, The Turner Brothers and quite a few of our lovely friends. Check out the line up below, you have no idea how excited I am about the Electric Swing Circus, that's definitely going to be top of my must-see list...ahem...after the T-Bros, obvs.
But the absolute most exciting this about Hogsozzle is the dressing up! Last year I posted a series of inspiration posts and shopping guides around the ideas that our group had for the 2016 theme, Childhood Dreams, you can see some photos below and the links to each of the posts I wrote last year.
My beautiful friend Kelly went for a pirate look (click here to see the sources and shops that these fun costume pieces are from!) and she look fabulous, I loved her cute tutu skirt and her enthusiasm for having a cutlass! Click here to straight to my Pirate dress-up inspiration post.
Hayley went for a mermaid look and to be honest, she probably won. She fashioned a light-up bra from plastic shells and LED lights and it saved the day on a number of occasions (why the don't portaloos come with lights? Doesn't matter when your bra is brighter than the sun!) It earned her the nickname Titlamps, which we've pretty much kept for the last year and I know she'll be breaking out those spangly, light-up boobies again this year!
I should probably apologise here for the terrible photo quality of some of these - I may had had a few too many mixed-in-a-tent gins by this point!
I was pretty lucky last year as I was gifted the most amazing Cosmic Space Lady dress from Tickled Pick fancy dress, I'm not sure if they are involved with Hogsozzle this year but I will still be checking out their site for accessories for our groups costumes. I made my headpiece and featured a DIY which I've seen getting quite a few hits already this year, I was really pleased with how it turned out but it got trampled on in the rush of packing up our campsite and it hasn't quite recovered - a great excuse to design a new one, complete with LED's, for this years super theme! Click the below image for my Cosmic Crown DIY.
I also put together some moodboards for cosmic-style make-up which I didn't quite implement last year, but this year I've gathered a huge amount of festival make-up and I'll be rocking at least one or two of these looks over the weekend! Click here to go straight to my Cosmic Inspiration blog post from 2016.
So, there's a round up of last years ideas and aren't I lucky that my Childhood Dream was to have a Cosmic Disco? I'm going all out this year, with DIY's for various LED elements of our groups costumes and convincing as many people in our crew to get involved! Stay tuned - give my blog a follow on Bloglovin' or pop over to Instagram and follow me over there - @katyclouds.
I still haven't quite got used to it being summer. I mean,I don't have to wear my coat all the time but there's something missing from my usual summertime happy feeling. It might be 'sunshine'.
Still, we are just at the beginning and there's loads of exciting things coming up in the next few months so I'm trying to use this quiet, low-key time to relax and try to get enough sleep before the three back-to-back weekends of festivals I have coming up!
I've been thinking all week about which direction to go in with my bucket list. I came to the conclusion that I wanted to make it achievable & affordable. That's why these festivals are all upcoming and in the UK - I'm hoping next year to travel a little more but for now I'm stuck here, so let's make the most of it :)
I've been banging on about this one for almost exactly a year now, to the point where most of my friends, acquaintances and people who work in the shops local to me have heard about how much of an amazing time we had. I'm choosing it first because there's now only one weekend left before we drive over the hills and far away to the magical gardens that Curious has commandeered for the weekend. Highlights include grounds full of beautiful sculpture, music from a huge variety of genres - I'm looking forward to dancing to The Turner Brothers, meditating to the Conscience Collective and experience Happy Daggers (website here) for the first time! - not to mention an atmosphere of such love and calm that I know I won't want to leave come Sunday afternoon.
Underworld, Floating Points, Caribou, Everything Everything, Professor Brian Cox, Aiden Byrne cooking the most incredible food, a midnight feast in the shadow of the Lovell telescope and far enough away from home to feel like another planet - I literally cannot WAIT for Bluedot. I already posted my top three picks at this festival and I have more posts coming up, including all the science talks and comedy shows I want to see. The Invisible Monkey cage is a big priority - a radio show featuring Professor Brian Cox who I absolutely love for his wonderful way of describing superbly complex scientific terms in a way even my little gin-addled brain can understand. I also have a not-so-secret plan to wear entirely cosmic-themed clothes for the weekend. I have a few pairs of galaxy leggings, a super cosmic bag, a Spaced Out jumper and a wonderful space print shirt AND a plan to make my own custom sweatshirt with my favourite hashtag, #bringbackcosmic. Read my top 3 picks for this one by clicking here.
As well as the music, the Cosmic Piano, a million talks on the cosmos and the incredible food, I can't wait to see the site as a whole. It's a pretty big festival and I bet it's going to be wonderfully themed as it's set in some truly beautiful grounds around the Jodrell Bank mission control buildings and giant radio telescope.
For some reason, I think SGP was one of the first festivals that ever came to my attention as something I would like to experience. I've never been, but the theme this year is The Gardeners Guide To The Galaxy which is kind of the perfect fit for me! I love looking at pictures from this amazing festival - set around a lake, they usually have a large installation to party on floating on it, check these out -
Their website is pretty cryptic, but if you do a search for Secret Garden Party images you'll be swept up in the colour and excitement just like I was. Izzy Bizu, Temper Trap and Primal Scream (!) are all on the line-up as well as countless smaller bands to discover. The fancy dress looks mega too - I'm kind of aching to go to this, especially as the theme fits basically all the festival clothes I have this year - I love how space has become super cool to love right now and festivals are embracing that!
One of the most outrageously themed UK festivals - Boomtown has 24 stages set in it's very own City, with 9 districts to choose to spend time in and hundreds and hundreds of acts and activities. Some of the artists form some of my very favourite at-home listening, I've so far missed every opportunity presented to see Parov Stellar live, The Correspondents are so catchy I was singing some of their tunes for days after first hearing them and there's Madness, Channel One and So Solid crew, plus pretty much all the artists on the Psychedelic Forest stage look seriously incredible.
This is one of those festivals where there is a hell of a lot more than music going on in wild, lose-yourself setting. We aren't going to this (yet) but it's right up there on my bucket list, I have a secret hope that a ticket might come up from somewhere - it's basically our only free weekend left this summer so I've entered about 9 competitions!
We loved Victorious so much last year! I'm thrilled that the Turner Brothers are playing there again this year. It's a beautiful setting, all along the seafront down in Portsmouth. Last year there was a fabulous street full of vintage, craft and clothing sellers and the food choices were among some of the best we came across all summer. I had the most amazing burrito from a shiny airstream trailer and some spicy chipotle mac & cheese from a rustic shed that basically won mac & cheese for me, forever.
Here's some of the line-up:
I'll be making Mark Ronson, Echo and The Bunnymen and The Manic Street Preachers my priorities at this one, as well as the The Turner Brothers, who if you haven't heard have an awesome England anthem out just in time for the Euros, check it out:
My hopes are pinned on Festival Number 6 for a last summer weekend with a carnival atmosphere and dancing until dawn. Have you seen the setting? Portmeirion in North Wales was designed to look like a Mediterranean village and it kind of works, with cobbled squares and brightly-coloured architecture set round a central plaza, it looks incredible, especially as you don't need to fly on a hateful plane to get there!
The festival has only been running a few years, but it makes my bucket list because of the wonderful setting. Festivals always make me feel like I'm miles from home and reality and I bet being in this beautiful environment just adds to that wonderful feeling of escapism. By this point in the summer I'll have seen at least one of the bands on the line-up - Noel Gallaghers High Flying Birds are playing Victorious but I'd be most excited for Bastille. I love a good sing-along anthem and they provide them by the bucketful (that was a bucket list pun. Just in case you thought I had written bucket quite a lot in this last paragraph.)
Other highlights are paddle boarding on the Estuary, swimming in the pool whilst listening to music at sunset, an illuminated procession and a spa. A spa! On top of that you only have to take a look down the list of street food vendors to start your tummy rumbling - and there's lots more food to be eaten in more formal settings aswell. I can't do it justice so hop over to their food page for a real feast for the eyes :)
So, three booked, three that are still pipe dreams! I'm excited to hear what you think of my bucket list, whether you have booked any of the festivals here or have any others you think should not be missing for a UK festival bucket list! Comment below with your alternatives :)
