Flowers and Foods – Melbourne Snapshots

by VioletLeBeaux | Nov 23, 2013 | Life

This is a nature themed Snapshots! Well nature and food… I like food.

Favorite cupcakes ever are from Cupcake Central in Melbourne Central, the guys there are always SO nice.

It’s best to eat them in a place that has a lot of cute tiny flowers.

I’m pretty sure it makes them taste better.

I’m not really sure why but I’ve been a bit obsessed with taking really low angle photos of tiny bits of nature lately I think really should hurry up and buy a macro lens so these don’t look quite as awkward.

Why yes, my phone does totally sparkle like this normally, why do you ask?

Melbourne-Nature-Park399

At QV there’s a pop up tea house which is super cute. I want to go!

I love that it’s finally the season for daisies. For some reason they seem like the happiest flowers.

We took a night walk for groceries and I played around with some long exposures. James is a very patient teacher XD

I love that everyone in this shot looks like a ghost except for that one couple.

This shot is like ultimate Melbourne, architecture and a ghost tram ^_^

Bonus photo:

Someone left this book near our apartment on the ground and so like a true hipster I had to take a photo. I think the only thing that could make this more of a terribly cliche hipster shot is if it was in black and white.

How To Store Hair Accessories- Home Sweet Home

by VioletLeBeaux | Nov 22, 2013 | Craft, Hair, Home Sweet Home Tutorials, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Tutorial

So my mission in life seems to be how to store hair accessories in the best way possible. I’ve written about it before. A lot. So yeah. The perfect way doesn’t really seem to exist. But that sure doesn’t seem to stop me from trying again and again and again.

The latest thing I’ve been doing is using them for decoration in the form of a big flower bouquet…

It sure beats what I was doing before then… which was keeping them in a pile:

The key to this method is to have pointy sticks which form the bouquet which you can clip the hair ties/bows/whatever to. I made mine out of wire wrapped in yarn and then mixed them in with some fake flowers for good measure.

Start by cutting a length of wire and then hot glue the end of your yarn to it.

Wrap the yarn tightly around the end of the wire and continue to the other end.

When you get to the other end glue in place and cut the excess.

Make a heap of them.

Now begin to arrange your flowers. I bent the ends of the wires so they were curly and interesting and then arranged them between the other sticks, leaves and flowers I had.

Next I began clipping on some of the larger hair flowers and accessories.

I have a lot of them so it took quite a while to fill in all the gaps…

But once it was done it looked pretty cute!

And in the Bathroom it does look huge but it’s a good way to display everything so I won’t forget what I have and can colour match them to my outfits.

The rest of the bathroom is pretty bare because I was giving it a big clean. How cute are the bee tooth brush holders though?? Everything will be spring themed soon!

So I’ve been using it this way for a few months and it seems to be walking the line between pretty and practical very well so far. I’m pretty happy anyway! Let me know what you guys think or if you have any suggestions I can try out! I think I probably need to start whittling down my collection but I’m a sucker for cute accessories and I like having things in a rainbow of colours… you know… just in case I ever want to have a neon yellow outfit… I don’t think I’m fooling anyone. I may just be a hoarder.

Stripy Knitted Neckerchief Tutorial

by VioletLeBeaux | Nov 20, 2013 | Clothing-Tutorials, Craft, Other-Accessory-Tutorials, Tutorial

Neckerchiefs! I love them! Knitted neckerchief is really hard to type without wanting to spell it knitted kneckerchief…

But back on track, for today’s project let’s make a stripy knitted neckerchief! This design and length is great because it can double as an usamimi. Winner!

You need:

2 colours of yarn
Knitting needles
Crochet hook or a yarn needle

Start by knitting a triangle of the first colour. Do this by starting with one stitch and increasing one stitch at the beginning of each row until you have 12 stitches on the needle.

Knit this in a stockinette stitch.

Change colours and then knit for 10 rows.

Change colours, knit for 10 rows etc until it’s long enough to go around your neck and down the other side.

Decrease one stitch every row until you have one stitch on the needle. I think it’s nice to end on the same colour you started. Do not change colours or tie off.

Now increase one stitch every row until you have 13 again and continue making stripes in each colour until it’s as long as the first half you made.

Decrease every row until you have one left and tie off.

So what you want to have is a really long snake with two pointy ends and a thinner part in the middle. You should be able to fold it in half and have them match up perfectly.

So fold it in half and stitch around the edges. I found the easiest way to do it was to use a crochet hook and single crochet around the edge to seal the two pieces together. You could also easily blanket stitch. I chose to do it in the lighter cream colour but contrasting would be cute too.

Now here’s the important part. When you reach the end you want to skip stitching the two halves together for one square of colour. I continued crocheting past that square but I just did it to the top piece rather than stitching them together.

Stitch all the way around the other side and again make sure that you skip the same square on the other side.

What you will end up with is a hole you can poke through: