Cancan hats are another trend that seems to be everywhere right now. Of course they’ve been around for practically forever with various names… straw boater, basher, skimmer, katie, senni etc. Here in Aus they are actually part of a lot of private school uniforms. I’ve always loved them because the remind me of picnics in the park with a nice cup of tea!

Anyway whatever you call it what I’m talking about is this:

Image courtesy of google, full credit to the owner.

Because they’re popular now they are quite expensive. So I decided to DIY my own ^_^

What you need:

• Round top straw sun hat
• Scissors
• Needle and thread
• Glue Gun
• Ribbon and lace for decoration if your hat isn’t decorated already.

You can easily pick up a big wide brim rounded straw sun hat for $2 from a thrift store and if you check out junk stores you can probably find one new for not much more than that! I happened to have one from back in my Country Lolita days that I had decorated with ribbon and lace but I’ve never actually worn it because the shape looked silly on me… time to make it all flat and pretty

Ok let’s get started!

At the top of the hat you will notice that the whole thing is made of a big spiral of straw which it stitches together. Carefully wedge your scissors into the top of the spiral and cut a few of the stitches.

Gently pull it apart, continue cutting stitches if you need to.

Start unraveling the sprial and cutting the stitches as you go ^_^

Keep going until you get to around this point:

When you get to here there are two options depending on the type of hat you started with. Some of these sun hats have very straight sides and some of them are basically a gigantic dome.

If you’re lucky enough to have one with straight sides then you can skip the next few steps.

If you have one with curved sides (like me) you will need to continue unraveling the hat until you to get to a point where the part that’s left is completely straight. This point might be different for you hat but mine was just above the ribbon band here:

Now you should get your needle ready and thread it.

Ok now it’s time to put it back together so the sides are straight and the top is flat!

Because the straw has been in a curved position for so long you will most likely need to bend it straight before you put it back together. Make sure to be gentle when you do this so you don’t damage it. I straightened it by putting it flat on the floor and gently bending it the other way.

Now you need to start winding the straw back into place. You can either do it the right way and stitch it in place or the quick way and hot glue it in place. Either way secure it as you go around.

You can see that the way I’ve put it back in place is much more vertical than the original pattern.

Keep going until you think your hat is tall enough and then do one more rotation around the top to make sure it is flat enough for the top of the hat not to be on an angle!

When you’re finished you should cut the excess straw off and secure the ends. I am going to cover the straw end with more decoration at the end so it doesn’t show.

Now let’s make the top! Get your left over straw and arrange it on a flat surface in a spiral.

You should measure the spiral to make sure it fits the top of your hat exactly and pin it in place.

Now stitch or glue your top in place.

Continue until it is the right shape and diameter. You should stitch the end of the straw around so it forms a circle like this:

Cut off the excess and this is what you get:

Do make sure that it fits the top of the hat before you cut the ends so you don’t have a gaping hole in your hat!

At this point I cut off the elastic string which holds the hat on your head because it was pointless and in the way.

Now on the inside of your hat, glue/stitch the top in place

You should get something like this:

Hurray it has a flat top!!

Now we’ve made the top shorter and flatter the large brim looks a bit silly! So let’s make it shorter

Find the edge and snip the stitches. It should come apart very easily.

I pulled out maybe 3 or 4 rows of it. Now secure the edge back in place.

And you get this…

Last step is decoration! I wanted a nice big rosette style thing on my hat so I cut off the long tulle tail…

And added another one of top. This also covers the join around the hat. Again hot glue or sewing is fine here.

TAADAA!

And there you have it, an adorable cancan hat that cost me nothing And I have another cute hat to add to my arsenal of bad-hair-day-hiding-tools

What do you guys think?

The way we get to the end of this story is a little long and rambling but it ends in nail art so I’m sure you won’t mind

A few months ago my Mum went on holiday to the Gold Coast and discovered a shop called “Del Sol” which makes products that change colour in the sun. Very 1990′s right? Well that was my attitude until she mentioned that they made nail polished that change colour in the sun!

She brought me home 4 of their polishes to try out. I was a bit skeptical at first but they actually change surprisingly well!

These are the colours in normal inside light:
Red with silver glitter
Blue with a pearly finish
Clear with silver glitter
Pink with a pearly finish

In outside light they change to:
Purple pearl finish
Red glitter
Purple glitter
Green pearl finish

I couldn’t remember the order I had them in while I was taking the outside photos so here are the photos matched up to their outside colours!

How freaking cool is that?

So back to the nail art story, I’ve been wanting to do some Alice in Wonderland themed nail art for years now but I’ve never been able to think of a design that would do it justice. Now that everyone is talking about Alice again I thought it was high time to try it out and the first thing that came to mind was colour change. You can’t get more Alice than that!

This is them inside:

This was also my first attempt at doing 3D acrylic. To be honest I’m not really happy with how these turned out, the idea was so much cooler in my head. Also I think that if I had spent more time practicing my skills I would like the end result better. I’m all out of the acrylic liquid now but I’m going to get some more and try again! Practice, practice, practice! The 3D parts are the Heart and Club card suits, the playing card and the White Rabbit on the thumb. I didn’t have coloured acrylic so I used clear and painted them after.

And outside:

I really loved the idea of the colour change polish but I don’t think I used as well as I could have. It works great on the index nail that says “Alice” because it looks plain until it’s in the sun but the other little details like the Cheshire Cat turning red-purple weren’t as obvious.

Another problem I had when taking the photos

Comparison between the two:

A close up of the hat and rabbit on the thumbs. The hat band changes from red-purple but because it was over the black it’s hard to see. The background of the rabbit also goes from silver glitter-red I am really proud of my White Rabbit though! My first 3D thing that actually looks like it’s supposed to

So conclusions:
-I currently suck at 3D acrylics but I will practice and get much better!
-These Alice nails weren’t great but I now have ideas for even more spectacular ones.
-Colour change polish is completely pointless but also very cool.

Also on a side note the adorable Momoberi gave me a mention on her blog too and I didn’t find out until I’d already written that last post! She was inspired by one of my hair tutorials ^_^

Have a great weekend everyone!

Evening everyone! Ok so tonight I’ve just got a couple of things to take care of before we get back to regular posting tomorrow.

• Firstly remember I did a review on Skin MD moisturiser a few months back? A lot of you had questions about where it was available and if it would be available in Australia any time soon. Well they currently don’t have plans to stock in physical stores in Australia but they do ship internationally. The only thing with this is that a bottle costs $18 and the shipping is another $9.95 which is not exactly cheap when you haven’t used the product before

Violet to the rescue of your bank balances!

If you want to order and you enter the promotional code “VIOLET” you will receive 20% off your order!

I know I’m going to be stocking up

• Secondly my blog has also been featured on lots of other blogs lately !

I did an interview with Pretty Wonderland about blogging.

I was featured on All Women Stalk in the post 7 Great Fashion Blogs.

I was featured in a “blogs we love” post on The Beauty Stop.

Tabby over at Life of Mine wrote this adorable post about me.

I’ve also been receiving some lovely emails from you all and I just wanted to say thank you all for continuing to read my blog. I hope I can make it even better in the future!

• Following on from that in an effort to make things even better around here I’m going to be making a couple of changes. Nothing major, just a few things here and there so please don’t mind as I tinker with the site. If something doesn’t work please let me know and I will fix it up! If there is something that you want to see on the website I’ll be putting up a little poll so you can have your say ^_^

• There is also a competition coming up for you all to look forward to!

Lots of love!

Ok this post is pretty huge if I do say so myself, it even has two tutorials… that’s right two! I’ve been getting a lot of nail polish related requests lately so here is a gigantic post to take care of some of them!

Firstly a lot of people have been asking how many nail polishes I have… the answer is 87. That sounds like a lot… and well it is a lot but I’ve collected those over the last 4 years aaaaand a lot of them were gifts and the ones I bought were all like $2 so it’s not actually the gigantic money pit it sounds like!

Question 2: how do I store them? Well if I’m going to be making a lot of nail art to sell at once then I set them all up on a table organized by colour. Other than that they all live in a draw organized by whatever I shoved in there first.

With that many polishes how do you choose colours that go well together?! Well I make swatches out of old fakes nails and paddle pop sticks like this:

I got the idea from one of your blogs actually… but I can’t for the life of me find the post and I’ve been searching all morning >_< If it was you just let me know in the comments because I want to credit you!! *edit* some has said it was invented by “krisprimps.bradandkris.com” but I haven’t ever been to her blog so I must have seen it somewhere else!*/edit*

A random selection:

I use white nail tips so when I need to test out how opaque a white polish is I paint the tips black first.

So how do you make them? Well let me show you with the new Lilac polish that Eyeko was kind enough to send me

Gather all the items above, you need:
-A glue gun
-Paddle pop sticks
-A pen
-Old false nail tips
-Various polishes you want to swatch, I try to save them up and do around 10 at a time.

First count how many polishes you have and get that many paddle pop sticks and nail tips.

Heat your glue gun and put some glue on the back curve of one of the nail tips.

Press it down onto the edge of the paddle pop stick. Be very careful not to burn yourself!

Add some extra glue to the back to make sure everything is secure.

Rinse and repeat for how ever many you need…

Now wait until all of that is dry and paint one coat of polish over the whole thing.

Wait for it to dry!

While we’re waiting for it to dry here’s a mini review of the Eyeko polish:

The application was quite good it was a nice consistency and very shiny after application. It was opaque/the colour in the bottle after 2 coats. This next photo is a really good representation of the colour, it’s nice and soft and reminds me a lot of OPI “Do you lilac it?”. I didn’t find the smell of the polish over powering either which was nice.

The packaging is super cute too which is a plus!

The bottle is quite small at 8.5ml for £3 but for a boutique company that seems to be fairly standard. So the verdict = good! Everything they have is themed on a very cute manga which they update on the site every week, here’s some of the cute info they sent through:

Now back to the tutorial! After the first coat is dry write the name and colour of the polish on the other end of the stick!

Just like this

Now time for the second coat, this time you should only paint the top 2/3rds of the nail.

Then leave that to dry. Once it’s dry you should paint one final coat on the top 1/3rd of the nail.

So you should have something like this, the numbers represent the number of coats. This doesn’t mean much for a polish as opaque as this one but when you have a more sheer polish it’s much more useful to know how many coats you’ll need for the finish you want. Now you can see at a glance without having to trial and error it every time.

This is an example of some polishes where the differences are a little more obvious, especially the orange.

So there you have it! Now it’s time for a nail art tutorial Today we’re going to make a pretty but easy lace finish on a base of the Eyeko Lilac Polish. Video is below!

Hope you enjoyed the double tutorial post! And please let me know if you have any other nail art related questions <3

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So this is going to be my big Melbourne post I’m sure you’re all sick of hearing about it by now! There is one more post coming up about something we did down there but it’s a surprise so I suppose you’ll all just have to deal with hearing about it for a tiny bit longer ^_^ I’ve actually got a lot of other photos from down there to be used in tutorials and the like as well…

But on to the photos!

So on the first day we mostly just rested because we had to be up at 2am that day for the flight. Sight seeing on 2 hrs sleep really isn’t very fun, so we took it easy and just had a little wander around Box Hill shopping center. That night we went out for a yummy dinner and got our first taste of Melbourne traffic, 2 1/2 hours for a 45min trip LOL apparently no one told us that there happened to be an ACDC concert on that night… oh wait that’s not true we were stuck on the flight with a crazy ACDC fan! He had been waiting in line to check in with us and struck up a conversation about how awesome ACDC were and how he was flying around the country to see every concert, we were polite and then somehow we ended up next to him on the flight as well >_< Most awkward 2 hours  of pretending to be asleep ever.

We also met SuperKawaiiMama‘s adorable children Miss 5 and Miss 2 who have more energy than anyone I’ve ever met! On the Friday we also went shopping… ok yes we did a *lot* of shopping! You’ve already seen the photos from the tea party on the Saturday so now we’re up to Sunday which was Valentines/Chinese New Year!

We went down to China Town for CNY and saw the dragon dances as well as more shopping…

James bumped into Mr Gadget outside and 5min later we bumped into Fashion Hayley! It was so strange to keep bumping into people we knew in a city we didn’t live in!

Our outfits for the day:

People kept asking for photos as well which was quite amusing. Some guy even wanted us to take photos with his kids >_< The strangest part of that day was being hit on by a skeezy old asian guy who apparently thought I was 15… Gross and all kinds of illegal!

Delicious lunch that day:

Mr SKM enjoying the delicious lunch:

Ok yes there was a lot of cam-whoring that day!

The dragon (edit apparently when there are only 2 people it’s a lion) eating up some yummy looking watermelon:

Those fire crackers were so loud!

Of course the whole time I was trying to keep up with you guys online as much as possible!

Including making fun posts like our Valentines Day Entry to the Nuffnang competition. This was taken while I was getting ready ^_^

SuperKawaiiMama’s yard also made a great backdrop for all of the photos. So pretty and green!

And we had a lot of fun being ridiculous!

James demanded I include this because he thought it was hilarious

Miss 5 decided my make up wasn’t pretty enough one day so she gave me this awesome make over! Ready for a night out yes?

One day we went wandering around the city by ourselves, it was really beautiful.

That night we were supposed to meet up with my awesome old friend Steampunkerie but I managed to twist my damn ankle on the curb in China Town so we had to cut it short and had drinks instead. I had the weirdest green tea and icecream concoction I’ve ever tasted, it was really yummy though!

That afternoon we caught the train home and were surprised at how clean, easy to use and efficient it was!

Living with another creative girl with similar interests produced a lot of late night crafting sessions

That night we made hair clippies, mine is the rosette on the left ^_^

We ate a RIDICULOUS amount of delicious food there, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten out that much in my life. It was SO good!

So much food!

We did a huge amount of shopping, I loved all of the imported Asian make up stores like The Face Shop and Missha. I’ll have some product reviews for you soon from there once I test everything out

We also visited some Op Shops and got some great bargains! The highlight of which was an old guy stopping his mobility scooter and saying “An old guy like me can say it… YOU LOOK REALLY GROUSE! Really beautiful young lady!” I have to say, I’ve been described as a lot of things but “grouse” is new on my list! For the overseas readers, grouse is really old Australian slang for awesome eg. “This beer tastes grouse mate”.

James was in his element taking photos of everything, I think he really enjoyed having so many locations to shoot at and new interesting back drops!

Here’s another one of his:

On the last day we all ruined our awesome diets with a fantastic meal of McDonalds…

There was a carousel at the airport, so awesome!

After a long awesome filled week it was time for a very sad farewell ;_; (you just need to pretend that I’m not laughing in this photo ok?)

Back to Brisbane and back to the horrible humidity On the plus side hopefully we’ll be back in Melbourne sooner than you think!

Thank you so much to all our wonderful friends who made our trip so great! Special thank you to SuperKawaiiMama, Mr SKM, Miss 5 and Miss 2 for letting us stay with you and showing us such a wonderful time! It’s awesome to know that we won’t be alone when we move down!

<3

When we decided to take a trip to Melbourne, the one thing I *really* wanted to do was have a big meet up where I could catch up with all of my blogging friends and everyone else we knew in Melbourne ^_^

SuperKawaiiMama was completely awesome about the idea and organised a tea party for us at the new Cristina Re flagship store. I had only heard of Cristina Re in the sense that she makes the beautiful scrap-booking supplies and stationary and I had no idea that there was a beautiful little cafe attached!

The cafe was decorated with beautiful butterflies:

We had a great turn out! From left to right below:
Super Kawaii Mama, Me!, AuroraHime, Nicole from Circa Vintage, Esme and the Laneway, Fables in Fashion, Kitty’s Drawings, Petite Valse

Being that we were pretty much all bloggers we had a huuuge amount of photos by the end of the day!

There were two token boys there as well, Kitty’s Drawing’s partner Johnny and James who was being the photographer for the day ^_^

Here he is!

Everyone was dressed so immaculately!

The setting was delightful and oh my god the food… the food!

There was so much food! We had spinach quiche…

Macarons:

Tiny delicious cupcakes:

And the most beautiful hand made chocolates:

James ate about a billion of the delicious sandwiches!

Everywhere you looked there was something else beautifully presented!

It was quite funny, not many of the people who came had actually met in real life before but I don’t think there was an awkward pause the whole time! We bloggers sure can chat!

SuperKawaiiMama and I chatting to our hostess, who was the friendliest person in the entire world!

I so love this photo:

We ended up staying right up until closing time because we were having so much fun

Some of these photos are by James and some are by SuperKawaiiMama

Esme and the Laneway looking beautiful as usual!

Some of the yummy food:

There were several yummy teas served that day including mint, lemon, chamomile, fruit and others that I’ve forgotten. We had a lot of fun trying to work out which tea was which because they all came in the same tea pots Lucky dip tea!

I was totally jealous of Aurora Hime’s nails, they had little bunnies on them!

SuperKawaiiMama, Aurora Hime and I all had crazy nail art on so we had to take group photos

More food… because I just can’t get enough of it! The service at the cafe was really great, and they just kept bringing more tea as we drank it all.

I wanted to take this chandelier home with me!

We had such a wonderful time that day, it was a really lovely introduction to Melbourne and it was great to finally meet some of the people I’ve been chatting online to for years! I can’t wait to go back!!

Thanks so much to everyone who came <3 <3 <3

I am still spending much too much time having fun here in Melbourne so I’m going to photo spam your a little bit. I promise there are going to be a bunch of tutorials when I get back so you’ll all just have to put up with it You guys are totally going to love the photos from the tea party too!

A while ago James and I went antiquing at the Woolloongabba Antiques Center which was a heap of fun. Basically it’s a gigantic warehouse that has a whole bunch of smaller shops inside it selling all manner of antiques and pretty things.

Here are a few photos from the day!

I spent so much time looking around at everything, I swear I could lose days in antiques stores

We found some awesome old roller skates that I really wanted to buy!

So many jewelery display cases, so little time >_<

There were so many beautiful scarves, I wanted to take them all home!

Bonus picture of the day, at the vintage hair setter

By the time you’re reading this I’ll probably be on a plane on the way home back to my own bed and back into the swing of normal blogging ^_^

So the back story to this review is all about how for years and years and years of being teased with Lolita jewelery and dresses with macaron themes without ever tasting one… they were just so damn pretty but living in Brisbane I didn’t think that I would ever get the chance to try one so I stopped looking and tried to put the idea of deliciously cute sweet treats out of my head.

But I didn’t do a very good job and one day I was complaining on my second twitter account about how much I wanted some and one of my friends Roundragon did some research and found that there was a bakery called Twist n Roll who specialize in macarons! When I found out I almost fell off my chair in shock!!

They have a stall at the New Farm Farmer’s Markets (at the Power House) but it’s only on every 2 weeks so…. today we ventured out to New Farm to find them!

It felt like it was a million degrees out in the sun today so James and I kept cool with ice green tea with honey and mint and a lemon slushie thing. Yum!

After we explored for a while we managed to find the stall.

Cute right? I loved the little Eiffel Tower and the gigantic tree of macarons ^_^

I decided to be cautious and try a large Raspberry one for $3.50 so I could see if I liked them

Here is a nice close up…

And the insides…

So the verdict? OMG YUMMY!

The shell was crispy and the insides were gooey. It tasted very fresh and packed with raspberry flavor. The man and woman who were running the store were lovely and chatty, they were both French and super bubbly and friendly!

In fact I enjoyed it so much that I went back…

And bought 6 small ones ($2 each) in each flavor! They had sold out of caramel and pistachio so I got raspberry, chocolate, coconut, lavender, lemon and an orange one which had chocolate filling like a Jaffa.

They started out like this…

And very soon turned into this… I have to say that the only reason I didn’t take a bite out the raspberry one is because I took it home for James’ Mum to try!

James tried the coconut one and loved it and Oh and James got a German hotdog thingy which he greatly enjoyed…

So my final thought is that macarons are freaking awesome and I’m going to be visiting the Twist ‘n Roll bakery next time I’m over in Rocklea! If you are in Brisbane, you can see all the locations here. Looking at their website I’ve just found out they deliver… Oh this is going to be so bad for my bank balance!! ^_^

I know I know I know I’ve been promising this forever! I finally finished it

Apologies for the crappy film quality, originally I wasn’t planning on making this into a tutorial so I wasn’t very careful when I filmed it. I have new software which I’m now learning to use so this is the last of my badly edited/made videos ^_^ So the quality is not great this time but hopefully you can at least get a good idea of the techniques and try it out yourself.

Make sure you let me know if you give it a try, I’d love to start a “Readers Photos” section! Anyway I hope this has helped a bit!

Today James took the photos of the first batch of cool nail art that I’m going to sell so expect a post about it very soon I’m so excited about this!

I’ve been a bit sick today so I’m off to bed. Night night

So while I was away the Nuffnang Christmas Party was held and my gosh did we party!

The night started off with me being in a grumpy mood because I couldn’t get my hair or outfit to work I had planned to do this huge awesome gigantic ball of hair but it didn’t go so well so I desperately had to scrape it into hime style in like 2 minutes before we left ;_;

We were running very late and there was no parking near by so we had to run up a gigantic hill (yes I was wearing heels) to get to Bohemia. So when we finally arrived we met the lovely Miss Sharon (above).

And my Mum (above left). That’s right my Mum has started her own blog! As soon as she starts posting I’ll give you all the link

We waited for others to show up (around 15 people RSVP’d) but no one did! So we made the best of it and had an awesome night!

James was driving but Sharon, my Mum and I decided to order a bunch of cocktails to try. To be perfectly honest none of us usually drink so we only had a sip of each one LOL.

Most of them looked very pretty but holy bajeebus were they disgusting! I can’t STAND the taste of alcohol! YUK!

James was clearly the star of the night! I can’t believe he can hold up that heavy camera to take photos of himself >_< This next one is such a terrible photo but I like it for some reason anyway:

Of course being a typical blogger I can twitter with one hand and take delicate sips of some disgusting green tea concoction with the other…

There was sooooooo much food! We decided to only get 1 platter in the end but there was still so much! We each ended up taking home a doggy bag

How cute is Sharon!? Her dress was so pretty and she even had matching blue earrings!

James thought this would be hilarious…

My outfit for the night… Ok it’s mostly white but the blue sailor top I was planning had a gigantic pink stain on it I didn’t know about until last minute

My Mum was wearing the Christmas nails I made for her and she was being the perfect blogger taking photos of everything

Our lovely photographer for the night:

Bohemia has a free Nintendo Wii with a big screen so we played bowling!

Next time we want to go bowling at a really alley

Nuffnang sent me a package with yummy blue candy canes:

We put them to good use!

And I had a fancy little name tag, everyone else got name stickers and they put them on their arms so they looked like gigantic bandaids >_<

The whole party! There might not have been many of us but we had a great time anyway! Next time all of you guys who RSVP’d better show up!!

We had so much fun, thanks Nuffnang!

Cheers and Merry Christmas everyone!

Have you guys been to any awesome holiday parties yet?