It was quite warm and absolutely packed! There were a lot less stalls than I was expecting and most of them were just selling random bits and pieces or food.

James was severely disappointed when he saw this stall wasn’t about “Starcraft” the computer game which he spends far too many hours of his life playing hahaha!

Probably the most interesting thing there was the petting zoo!

The flavour of the month here in Melbourne seems to be frozen yoghurt, I’ve seen like 3 new places open over the last month. Of course it was my sworn duty to try them all! After much personal sacrifice in testing (as you can see below at one of the new stores) I have decided that the best one is still from the fruit place in the food court at the bottom of Melbourne Central. $5 for a gigantic cup of strawberry yoghurt? Yes please!

Crossing off another thing that people have been recommending, I finally made it to the Lupicia tea shop and concur that they have an awesome selection and the man that works there is awesomely knowledgeable. I got the “Granita” flavoured tea and it’s been lovely as an afternoon snack!

Also I’ve decided what I want for my birthday this year, this gigantic cupcake! You can judge the size by the regular cupcakes at the far left. WANT.

Speaking of birthdays it was James’ 24th this month 😀 He celebrated as any typical boy would: with a large amount of junk food XD

Other than photography equipment, his biggest wish was for an American style cake from Costco. According to him Australian cakes taste different >_> He picked out this design because he says it had both of us already on it, then added a reference to the Old Spice guy and taadaa…

I feel the need to point out that only 3 people including us were going to eat this cake and it didn’t even fit in the fridge! Even weeks later our freezer is full of cake XD

We’ve been giving our apartment a big make over and to make room for things I’ve been moving all of the furniture around and re-thinking our storage. Part of that meant that my awesome diy cardboard shelves had to be stripped of fabric and thrown out. James took them downstairs and our building manager took them out the the rubbish collection point. I have a *really* terrible memory and our apartments have a high turn over of student tenants who throw a lot of perfectly good furniture out… so of course later that day I was looking out the window and James and I had this conversion:

Violet: Oooo look! Some’s put a big set of shelves out for collection! What a good find! We should go have a look, maybe we could use them in the bedroom, more storage is always good.

James: >_> Seriously?

Violet: What?

James: Those are your shelves… you threw them out!

Violet: No! They can’t be! They look way nicer than the ones I made!

James: Seriously.

Violet: *frantically zooms in with the camera to get a better look* Ah. So they are. Nevermind!

James: -_-‘

The lovely Jessicat is in town at the moment for university so we jumped at the opportunity to hang out! I met Jess at the Nuffnang awards in 2009 and we’ve been chatting online ever since.

There was lots of hot chocolate and shopping that day.

As well as failed attempts at cam-whoring due to photo bombing XD

Both of us were wearing incredibly impractical shoes so that was the main thing we looked for. These were Jess’ offending shoes, poor girl was hobbling around until we could find her some thongs (also known as flipflops for the US readers).

This is one of the dresses I almost bought, reminded me of ETC but when I went back it was gone ;_;

There have been a lot of visitors over the last few weeks actually, my Dad came down for dinner too.

He and James talk a lot about cameras so I had a lot of time to check out the nice decor in the hotel he was staying in!

Not all of the visitors were good though… I should introduce you to my arch nemesis: the sparrow that lives in my building.

If you follow me on Twitter you’ll have heard about him before, he’s a jerk. Every day he comes and sits at my window and stares at me. I think he’s casing the joint for a robbery. What a jerk. He does it to everyone, if you look out the window you can see him doing his rounds: look in the window on the 1st floor, plan the best way to come back and rob them of things like bread and seeds, jump to the second floor, look in the window, plan the best way to come back and rob them of things like bread and seeds and so on.

I knew he was planning something evil. Then one day he came and sat at my window as per usual… and he threw a little rock at me! Damn you little bird!!

Last week he came to visit again and I was stupid enough to leave the window open… and he came inside!!

Evil little bird come to rob me of all of my bird seed. Look at him eyeing off Miss Rosebud, clearly he has the cold dead eyes of a killer *_*

So no, in case you were wondering, I haven’t gone completely crazy. This is just what happens when I spend most of my time staring out the same window with only a bird visiting me 😛

Back to regular scheduling… James was asked to take photos backstage for Illamaqua at the Myer fashion show event so I went so I could write for them and also be James’ assistant for the day. It was a super fun day, you can see the write up over on the Illamasqua blog.

As well as being able to see the awesome make up artists do their thing I was really excited to see the L’Oreal hair team! The styles they were doing were all involved a lot of teasing for volume so I was able to pick up tips and tricks to use in my own hair. Below I’m with Mark who came over to compliment my hair, he was very sweet and it was such an honour to have a compliment from a professional considering I cut and dye it myself!

Lastly here are a couple of photos that James took to test out the camera stuff he got for his birthday. Unfortunately he has a habit of using me as a guinea pig without letting me know first so we have a lot of these SURPRISECAMERAFLASH photos XD

I leave you now with a hilarious cross stitch set I found at a junk store. It’s an “adult” bookmark kit. I can’t tell you exactly what makes it “adult” but I do have to wonder if the flower picture on the front is slightly misleading and by following the enclosed pattern you end up cross stitching something naughty 😛

So what have you guys been up to?