.the princess portal.

photo by linda yvonne

I haven’t done one of these in quite a while, but there have been so many beautiful links I’ve stumbled across this week that I really wanted to share with you!

The Cherry Blossom Girl gorgeous French blogger with exquisite taste and style I just adore her room and all her pretty things! This is more of a photoblog, but brings a little beauty and inspiration with each update

The Lady of Shalott Film Thanks for the tip off from Grace of The Beautiful Necessity. They are making a film of one of my favourite Poems of all time! Lovely stills and trailers on the site have gotten me so excited.

How to Make Your Heart and Your Mind Work Together over at Zen Habits. An excellent Article that fits in with what I was talking about this week with your Fairy Godmother. Its never too late to start following your heart!

Our First Look at Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland Have you heard? Have you heard? Tim Burton is making a film of Lewis Carrol’s classic, Alice in Wonderland! I can’t think of anyone more suited to direct such a film. The costumes from these few sneak peeks are to die for!

My Period Film Collection Still on the subject of pretty flicks, Jenn of the Period Movie Review has compiled the most comprehensive list of historical films I think I’ve ever seen. I’m busy checking off which one’s I’ve seen!

Creature Comforts This is a link I have been meaning to send to my dear friend Emily for quite some time, but I’m so forgetful, sorry! Here it is. A lovely, regularly updated blog with a warm sense of style, perfect for etsy addicts and creative Princesses.

5 Minutes with Princess Skye The brilliant Mizz Hannah interviewed me recently for her blog. While you’re there, check out the rest of her site. Hannah writes some fantastic articles for teens, and she’s only 13! Such an inspiration.

The Princess Portal Archive Page I’d also like to introduce a new little feature on the Portal. We now have an Archive page, which contains a collection of all the Princess Lessons, Profiles, Recipes, Inspirations and Ask the Princess questions that have been posted here over the years. If you’re new to PP or feel like re-reading some older articles its now much easier to browse through past posts.

photo by Zenat El3ain

Although I find it almost hard to believe, today is Princess Portal’s second birthday! It was two years ago on this day that I made my first post. Now, 730 days, 424 posts and 3,703 comments later here we are!

I’m overjoyed to be standing at the end of another amazing year, looking back on what has gone from a small personal blog to a little community where Princesses come to exchange ideas, inspire eachother and feel like they belong with others who share a similar romantic view on the world.

We’ve started several new things this year including the Princess Challenges, International Princess Day (May 5th) and PP had its first makeover to this sparkly new layout. It has been an exciting and eventful year for me personally as well, and I’m looking forward to some even more amazing things happening next year!

Most importantly I want to thank you. If you’ve been reading Princess Portal from the beginning or have just stumbled upon this site recently. The most valuable part of the Portal for me has always been the beautiful and clever Princesses I meet through it who take the time to read my entries, comment with their thoughts, ask me questions and share their incredible stories. You bring a little bit of beauty and hope in to my every day, so thank you!

Contest Entry by Payette

I know you are just going to love this. I’ve finally finished putting together a gallery of all your amazingly cute Princess Style Contest entries and seeing them all on one page has once again, overwhelmed me. There is enough inspiration here to fill several Princess wardrobes with, go have a look!

I’ve recently been very fortunate to have the Portal featured on some beautiful blogs and even did a little interview for the Lovely Lisa of Pink World. I thought you might be interested in seeing how our Princess message is being spread across the internet, and both of these sites are worth exploring in their own right too!

How to be a Princess, Interview at Pink World

“….If you’ve read the Think Pink manifesto you’ll know that, at the very top, it states; “…Don’t wait for others to treat you like the princess that you are…” that’s because both Lola and I know that being a princess is quite possibly the most fabulous-o thing in the world….”

Princess Style with Skye at The Disney Blog

“….Are you a Disney Princess in your heart? If so you might want to check out Princess Skye’s Princess Portal. Skye draws inspiration from Disney’s many Princesses including The Princess Diaries. She recently discussed how to write your own Princess Code and attended a play called “The Snow White Conspiracy” (sounds interesting!)….”

Thank you once again to everyone who participated in the contest, it was a big success and we’ll definitely hold more in the future!

As a part of fashion week we recently ran a Princess Style competition here at the portal and I have been surprised and overwhelmed by the amazing response! We received over 70 creative and beautiful entries! Thank you so much to all of you who sent in a Polyvore set displaying your own unique Princess style. All of the entries were very special because they showed me what your tastes are and what kind of fashion makes you feel like a Princess and I am in awe of how classy you girls are!

Mousse, Sab and I had a very hard time choosing a winner. After emailing each other back and forth and narrowing down out favourites (which were a big list to begin with!) we finall decided on one we all loved equally. The winning entry is:

Princess of the Printed Word by Casi Leigh

Congratulations to Casi Leigh! We all adored your Princess of the Printed Word, its sweet and classic and just what I would love to wear on a trip to the library or sitting beneath an apple tree reading fairy tales. If you would like to email me your address I will ship out your prizes shortly and put you in contact with Mousse to arrange your custom scarf.

We also had two runner ups that we felt deserved a mention here.

La Fée Verte Princess Set by -Sàya-

Pirate Princess by meander

I’m sure you can see just by these few examples how very hard it was for us to choose! Now I’ve had a lot of requests to upload a gallery of all the Princess Style contest entries. I am currently working on this so please be patient, It will hopefully be up soon!

Once again, thank you to everyone who entered, I never imagined we’d have such a wonderful response!

photo by Daylight

I want to thank all of you for the amazing response we’ve had to the Your Princess Style Competition. We’ve received over 60 entries so far and they are all gorgeous, original and stylish. I know we’re going to have such a tough time picking a winner, so I’m glad I have Sab and Mousse to help me judge!

A few of you have asked if we will get to see all the entries after the competition is over. I think we’ll definitely have to arrange some sort of gallery, because these sets are too beautiful not to share and I know I’ve picked up some inspirations for my own wardrobe just by looking through them!

This is a quick reminder that you still have 12 hours to get your submission in, if you haven’t already. The deadline is Midnight on Wednesday 5th November GMT. You can check the time here: Greenwich Mean Time.

Mail me your entry!

photo by ordinary guy

I’ve been a busy little Princess lately, and have been implementing some exciting new features to the Portal. Firstly, I’m happy to announce that ‘Ask the Princess’ is back!

For those who are new to the Portal, ‘Ask the Princess’ is a page I previously ran on Princess Portal where readers could write in to me and ask a question of interest to them, it may be about fashion, lifestyle, personal advice or anything at all. Unfortunately I found that the time spent on answering all of these questions promptly was preventing me from having time to create new content for this blog, and that the space provided did not allow me to give as detailed and informative answers as I wished to.

As a solution to this I am still accepting ‘Ask the Princess’ questions, however I will be responding to one a week on the blog with a more in depth answer. I hope this will work better for all of us. I look forward to hearing your questions, please use this form to submit!

You may also have noticed the new threaded comments system on each of the posts. This functions similarly to other blogging systems such as Livejournal, allowing you to reply to previous comments as well as posting your own. I’m really excited about this because it makes it much easier for me to respond to your comments and hopefully it may generate more discussion between fellow Princesses!

There will be some more little changes popping up soon, so keep an eye out!

photo by sabrina wong, a small teaser of a shoot that we did recently, more to come!

I most sincerely apologise for the unexpected break over the last few weeks. Thank you all for your kind comments and emails, I’m touched by your concern and so sorry to have worried you!

There is no one reason I can give you to explain my absence lately, suffice to say that all is well in my little kingdom, I’ve simply been dealing with a lot of real life things and had a lot on my mind which has made it very hard to sit down and focus on writing. On top of this I have been working a great deal more at my other job which has left me tired and with less time than usual to spend online.

What has been happening with me lately? Well aside from work I’ve had some lovely adventures. I went to the Markets a few weeks ago with some friends, bought delicious cupcakes and scented soaps and generally enjoyed the gorgeous spring weather. I’ve met up with some lolita friends for shopping and lunch (and more cupcakes!) watched some gorgeous movies (look out for new reviews coming soon!) and generally kept pretty busy! I’ve also been organizing my birthday party which is only two weeks away now, so its been quite hectic at the Palace!

I hope to get back on track with blogging this week and bring you some interesting new entries, I’m afraid there will be no Princess Challenge this month because I have left it too late, but the responses for last month’s challenge are up and we will have a new one on the 1st of October!

Thank you all so much for your patience and continued support of the Portal. Much love,

I love the feeling at the very end of winter, when the days are starting to get longer and the skies clearer and just around every corner you can find some little flower budding in to life. This is the time when the cherry blossoms flower, clouds of fairy-floss pink on naked branches. The freesias with their heady scent pop up between the pavement like little golden trumpets heralding in the spring. Its on such days that I want to sit under a tree by the rivers edge and read poetry, or watch the mother ducks herding their little fleet, simply soaking up the beautiful newness of the world.

I’ve been doing some spring cleaning around the Portal aswell! You may have noticed the larger images I’ve started using, as they fit so nicely in to the new layout. I hope that they also fit well in to your RSS reader and you are enjoying the new look.

I mentioned before that I will still be doing ‘Ask the Princess’ questions, but in a different format. The reason for this is that I have started recieving a LOT of questions lately, and as much as I love replying to them it takes up a good deal of my time that I would like to spend updating the Portal with new content. I’ve also been feeling guilty about not being able to respond to your questions as quickly as possible, and sometimes a few weeks go by before I can catch up! I’m so sorry if you’ve missed out because of this.

Therefore, I’ve decided to do an ‘Ask the Princess’ feature every friday. I will answer one question recieved that week or previously with a full entry, and much more detailed answer. I hope that this way, even if I can’t get to all your questions I can give better answers that may hopefully be helpful to other readers aswell. For the moment you are welcome to email me your questions and later I will set up a form page for the new feature.

Thank you all for your understanding and patience, I hope you will like the new changes!

Thank you all for your patience over the weekend while the site was down. I hope you like the new look! Princess Portal has been running for 1 year and 8 months now and I decided it was time for a change of decor. The layout keeps my Swan Lake theme but with a new shade of purple/pink and some soft vectors. I have made the text larger and easier to read and will be inserting more pictures now that I have all this room!

There are a few more changes coming up, you may have noticed that there is no longer an ‘Ask the Princess’ page, never fear, it’s not gone for good but I will be implementing it in to the site in a different way from now on. Over the next week or so I will be going through the archives tagging posts and removing emotes, so please bear with me if a few of the older entries look a bit messy.

I also joined Twitter today, and I’d love to make new friends over there so if you have an account please say hi! I will be twittering whenever I make a new blog post so it’s a great way to keep up with goings on here at the Portal, as well as seeing what I’m up to from day to day. Follow me!

Lots of moving, lots of changes, lots of sparkly new ideas, watch this space!

Over the next few days The Princess Portal will be undergoing some maintenance and changes and may be down temporarily. I have some updates to configure and some exciting new plans, I hope you’ll look forward to our little makeover, its going to be something fresh and new!

I plan to have everything back up and running by Monday so thank you for your patience and understanding. See you all soon!