I don’t think I need to tell you all how much I love tea parties. I will use pretty much any excuse possible to hold one 😀
So when the lovely Celeste mentioned she wanted to enter a Nuffnang contest about the Mad Hatter’s tea party I said “Come on over it’s tea time!”.
Some of you saw a teaser on Twitter on Saturday so here is a guest post by Celeste of what happened that day ^_^
Enjoy!
<3 Violet
With the long weekend in sight, it was a perfect time to unwind.
And what better way to unwind than to have a beautiful tea party with the lovely Violet Le Beaux?
We all know that Tea Parties are the love and joy of the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland, in fact, our very own Violet was channeling a little bit of Alice today, with the long straight blonde hair and the black headband. Just needed a beautiful blue dress to go with it… Hmmmm wonder if we could swipe one from the Tim Burton exhibition?
I do so love Alice in Wonderland. But everytime I read through the book, I felt that the Mad Hatter’s tea parties always lacked a little something… Can you guess what it was that it lacked?
It lacked a little PINK, and a little Charm and was also sorely missing in some princess action.
So we changed it around, to make this tea party perfect! Starting with the adorable little pink tea pot, which was perfect for tea for two. Tea for the day was Rose and French Vanilla from Dilmah, very very yummy!
It’s not just teapots that need to be pretty. We polished our very best fancy tea set and coaxed the flower pixies to come out to play. You can’t just set a tea set down and call that a tea party! I mean, next you will be saying that merely having tea would be good enough!
Every single aspect has to be perfect. For the perfect tea party, you can’t go wrong with cake tea spoons. There’s more than one way to eat your cake, after all. Violet keeps a collection of such silverware beauties around for when princesses and maidens come round for tea. Which is quite often, as we do love our teas.
Just look at the amazingly beautiful hanky that Violet embroidered! Polite tea party conversation involved the ooh-ing and aah-ing over such delicate handiworks and there was much discussion on how we could add more pink to the world. Pink world domination! In the gentlest and most princess-y of ways, of course.
Pour out the tea, give it a swirl with your cake spoon, and you are ready to go! Tea Party to relax your weary souls, and something the Mad Hatter himself would have been proud of. Had he been a fan of pink of course. Oh, and of princesses. It’s not very Mad, but it was definitely very Rad.
And what tea party would be complete without nibbles and cakes? I brought along for us all, Chocolate and Coffee Fudge Cupcakes, don’t worry I’ll share the recipe with you soon. It was quite rich and quite decadent. Fit for a beautiful spring afternoon’s tea party.
We had a beautiful afternoon, having our very own tea party with a nod towards the Mad Hatter for sharing his love of tea parties with us. There’s really nothing more relaxing than having a girlie afternoon with your best girlfriend over some decadent cupcakes and amazingly delicious tea.
I felt really silly when I realized this felt kit that Retro Jet Girl bought me was a tree… for the week before I actually made it and read the instructions I thought it was a mushroom XD Epic fail on my part!
So basically this set was for a tree key holder thingy. It’s a lanyard which has a keyring on the end of it and your keys pull up inside of it and are hidden. Very cute!
Again this is not a tutorial I came up with, I was just following instructions ^_^
What I used:
1 Square dark green felt
1 Square light green felt
1 Square red felt
1 Larger rectangle brown felt
Needle, thread, scissors
Leather rope for the lanyard part
Random beads
Key ring
So the first step was to cut out all of the pieces. This is exactly what you need:
First thing to do is sew 3 red circles on to the green part of the tree. I used brown thread like this to represent the stalks:
Next I stitched on the beads and a couple of contrasting leaves. I repeated all of this on both of the green tree pieces.
Lastly I stitched on some stars with light yellow thread and added some sparkle for the apples ^_^
Next thing was to stitch on the little faces to the brown stem of the tree. I love how everything in Japan blushes XD
This is how your pieces should look at this point:
Sew the green bits to the brown using a running stitch…
Now it’s time to put it all together. Tie the rope to the metal ring and knot the ends together so it’s secure and you can hand it around your neck.
Sandwich it between the two tree parts like this:
Now using a blanket stitch go around the outside and sew them together. Don’t sew together the bottoms of the brown part, the keys need to go through there! I blanket stitched them separately. I also made sure to leave room for the strings to slide through the top.
And this is how it ended up:
So intensely cute right?? I don’t wear lanyards usually so I tied mine to the inside of my handbag, it’s long enough that I can unlock my door without detaching it from my bag so I will never lose my keys ever again 😀 Very awesome for someone forgetful like me!!
My background in design means I tend to notice the little things. Little things like packaging and the way products are presented. Sure just having a product that is presented poorly probably won’t stop be buying it if I really want it but I think that brands who over look nice packaging really miss out on a selling point because if a package is nice enough I find ways to reuse them and thus have their brand in my house and mind for longer.
With the abundance of products in the goodie bags from MBBE it was quite hard to try and pick something to start off and try (I know my life is so hard right hahaha:P) but something caught my eye…
MOR Emporium Lychee Flower Body Butter. *Beautifully* packaged. So much so that I pried off the little plastic seal as a keep sake and kept the box for trinkets 😀 Tick number 1!
So on to the actual body butter! Comes in a large round black plastic container and retails for $29.95.
Texture-wise this body butter is fairly thick and a little on the waxy side, it felt very luxurious going on but I don’t think it’s slippery enough to give massages with which is what I mostly use my body butters for. Value-wise I thought the size:price ratio was about average for a product of this quality.
The biggest point: I cannot describe to you how good this smells, there are simply no words. I seriously wish I could invent smell-o-vision blog posts for this because it is the best thing I have ever smelt in my life. It’s really fruity and sweet and… good. My bad descriptions are why I am no good at wine tastings XD
Verdict: Thick texture, FANTASTIC smell, reasonable price. DO WANT.
So MOR were lovely enough so send me out one of their little gift sets. This one is also lychee flower fragrance and contains a perfume oil and a soapette. It retails for AU$19.95. Details here.
Again super props for the packaging. Everything about MOR screams decadence at an affordable price to me. I swear when they created this all, they had me in mind XD I’m so imagining the conversation… “Ok so Violet likes pink packaging… check! Reusable tins… check! Pretty vintage floral designs… check! Attention to details… check! etc etc etc”
Anyway…. let’s start with the soap. Packaging is a reusable tin which I now store my bobby pins in 😀 The soap again has that same delicious smell. I found the smell to be quite strong (in a good way) when it was in the tin but then once I got it into the shower it was more subtle. It felt lovely and buttery on but did still leave that icky soap feeling which I’m not a fan of, the feeling only lasted until I got out of the shower though.
The perfume oil is I think my favorite of all the products I tried. Again, has a super cute re-usable package which I’m thinking might live in my handbag to keep bobby pins or lipstick in. Glides on smoothly and has just enough scent to be enjoyable without being overpowering. It’s the kind of scent that is pleasant but the guy at the other end of the train carriage isn’t going to get a wiff of XD
I’ve worn it several times now and almost every time it’s gotten a compliment 😀
VERDICT: For the set I think the value is very good, I probably would have bought the soap tin even if it didn’t come with the soap XD The smell is heavenly and I think they would make very good gifts coming up to Christmas…. specifically gifts to me so I can try the other flavors (marshmallow anyone!?)… Are you reading this Mum?? DO WANT
I love face masks and pretty much anything that involves putting it on and being able to relax for a few minutes so I was very happy to try the Absolutely Gorgeous Pink Clay Exfoliating Maskwhich came in my MBBE gift bag.
I was even more excited when I checked out their website and all of their products are 100% paraben free as well as being Australian made and owned! The cute pink girly logo on the site helped too XD
Ignoring all of that the mask comes in quite a big container as you can see and it retails for AU$34.95. I’ve used it maybe 5 times so far and have barely made a real dent in it yet, so I think the price is fair considering the number of uses you would end up getting.
Application is quite smooth, and the smell was pleasant but not overpowering. My skin is very sensitive and now that I’m looking on the website, it actually says this is not suitable for sensitive skin >_<
The mask has tiny little beads for exfoliation which were a little hard on my skin and the first time I used it there was a minor burning sensation so I would agree that this is best for less sensitive skin.
The results are really good though, after using it my skin felt really smooth and I’ve definitely noticed an improvement after several uses 😀 I would definitely be interested in trying out some of the other items from the range as it’s so hard to find decent quality products which are paraben free and don’t cost an arm and a leg *_*
VERDICT: Suited for less sensitive skin but still does a really good job and is paraben free. A bit pricey but considering the volume still quite good. DO WANT.
Illustrator. Strong tea, knitting, watercolours, and making a video game called Moonlight in Garland. Living with her adorable husband Jimmy, fluffy puppy Miss Lottie and Bergamot Bunny in Melbourne, Australia.
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