Life Archives - Violet LeBeaux - Tales of an Ingenue

Happy Halloween

by VioletLeBeaux | Oct 30, 2019 | Life

It’s been a while and I guess I’ll get into that another time but I thought it would be nice to come back on Halloween because I don’t know… we had a Halloween party and I felt more like myself again?

So as you know, James loves Halloween. He loves Halloween possibly more than he loves me >_> which is fine. >_>

Every year he tries to do something more elaborate and now that we have our own proper apartment to decorate, he’s even more into it.

Growing up in Australia, we never celebrated because it was more of an American holiday. But people seem to be getting into it a lot more these days so it’s easier to find decorations and whatnot!

This was our finished spread!

Of course, I don’t actually like parties so Celina and Toby just came over and we ate a lot of food and watched the Addams Family. Perfect afternoon!

We decided to go with the Addams family because we both really loved them growing up. I was always more into Wednesday but as an adult I think Gomez and Morticias relationship is goals. I also hate that I used the word goals that way.

And of course Lottie needed a costume too but dogs shockingly don’t like to wear hats so this was her only photo.

James bought a jacket from a thrift shop and I added the stripes with masking tape. I thought it was funny that he and Toby ended up looking like opposites. We had a bit of a struggle to try to find a suit that looked the part and wasn’t super expensive so we settled on something that actually fit over the idea of something that had the wide pinstripes.

I bought my dress from a thrift shop too and altered it to make the bottom tighter. I used the left overs to make some sleeves. Tbh I kind of wish I had enough to make longer more flowy sleeves but I think it still ended up being quite decent!

Originally I bought a $5 wig from Big W to go with it but it was so bad that I couldn’t make it work. I gave styling it a go but just ended up melting it hahaha!

In the end I bought some temporary black hair colour spray and ignored the warnings of “do not use on blonde hair”. It worked shockingly well!!

Of course I ran out with one blonde spot left and after a brush through, it looked pretty grey. Celina ended up having to stop on her way over and pick up some more so I could finish it *_*

In the end I think everything turned out really well!

For food we had mummy sausages, witch hat calzones, spider bread, spider choc dip, zombie brain cheese dip, slime cake, eye truffles and a heap of other thing. The ideas were either found on Pinterest or from our old recipes.

I have new uncomfortable diet restrictions from finally having my allergies diagnosed which have been really hard to work around but I was able to eat about half of this stuff which was really great. I really miss eating interesting and fun foods.

We had a bit of a snafu the night beforehand when James burned his hand very badly while dealing with molten fudge. While he was set up on the couch with his hand in water I finished off the fudge and took direction on making the second half of the cake.

Luckily James’ hand healed a bit over night and he was able to finish up everything he had planned the next day.

By the end of the party the hair spray had lived up to its $4-ness and rubbed off on everything it touched including my entire back XD

I was terrified of it not washing out properly. After 4 washes I ended up back to a slightly dirty blonde…

Another round of washes and I was back to blonde. Worth it for $4!

So I don’t quite know how to finish this off… how did I used to finish blog posts? While the lead up was a bit stressful the outcome was fun and hanging out with friends eating cute food is basically my favourite thing.

Wedding Rings!

by VioletLeBeaux | Aug 9, 2018 | Life

Ok I’m finally in a better place to talk about this so let’s talk wedding rings!

James proposed to me with a lovely ring he bought of Etsy as a placeholder. He agonised over it for literal YEARS until he settled on one and had to get Tobias to order it for him so he could keep it a surprise.

He was fully intending on me just wearing it for a while until we could shop together for something nice but I fell in love with it, it was the completely perfect design for me. So rather than finding something different, I designed the wedding band around it and then had the engagement ring remade in better quality materials. Unfortunately the original seller couldn’t remake it in solid rose gold (they only did plating) so we had to find someone new.

Here’s an awkwardly angled photo of the end result:

I did a lot of research on materials and got a LOT of quotes before we settled on Emi from PopRing. She used to have an Etsy shop which is where I ordered from but has since moved to her own website.

I knew I wanted a moissanite for the main stone and I really didn’t care about the others. It ended up being cheapest to go with diamonds for everything in the crown and white sapphire for the leaves of the engagement ring.

My ring philosophy was: who cares so long as it’s pretty. I’m not a purist, I only cared that it was durable, pretty and not so expensive that I’ll feel guilty if I eventually lose it or damage it.

The quotes I got from a variety of online and offline sellers varied wildly from $500-$10,000+. I chose Emi because she was quick to reply to my emails, offered helpful suggestions and the price was great.

This was my original first sketch:

This was what that that evolved into:

This was the first sketch that Emi sent back:

And after refining it more this is what we settled on:

Here’s a photo from the first cast we did. I wasn’t 100% happy with it because I thought it looked like it would be way too tall for my finger.

So we went back and forth with crappy photoshopping to decide on a more delicate design.

The second casting was perfect and a few days later it arrived at my door.

I am really not good at jewellery photos but it looks a million times better in person!

I’m glad I went with moissanite because it sparkles like a rainbow unicorn from outer space.

Here is a comparison to the original engagement ring (new bottom, old top).

The only difference is that the newer one is shorter so it fits with the crown well.

The crown fits on top perfectly:

We designed the crown part so that (assuming I don’t lose it first!) many years from now, if I want something more subtle I can remove the top curls and have them turned into scallops.

Of course, I’m not exactly interested in subtle right now.

The great irony is that after looking forward to wearing it for months, I broke my finger a week after the wedding while we were on honeymoon and my fingers were so swollen that I couldn’t wear it on the correct hand for about 3 months!

And I’ve been wearing it for a year now and it still looks brand new!

While the process of getting it made and researching and buying something so expensive (the most expensive part of the wedding!) was quite stressful, now I’m able to look at it and be happy that I got exactly the perfect ring for me.

Warook Animal Farm Day

by VioletLeBeaux | Jul 24, 2018 | Life

Earlier this year we went to visit Warook Farm. We’re on a mission to find a petting zoo for grown ups but they seem to be fairly few and far between here haha!

It was super hot but that obviously didn’t stop James from being James. I think he should have sheep groping as his back up career. Seriously, wtf is going on here:

The main draw for us was that they have many different kinds of farm animals that you can feed and pet, like this super cute hairy cow.

The farm is divided into different sections and we the paddocks first to see the bigger animals.

Look at this pony doing a poor job of pretending to be interested in my conversation!

The animals in this section were really curious and friendly (probably because we paid extra for food).

There was a selection of alpacas, sheep and goats here as well.

Clearly these guys were all full because the only one who was interested in me was this extremely forward goat.

The camels weren’t shy either and pretty much just went for it. This is a photo of me discovering that the camel’s skill level to take all of my feed is much higher than my grip strength >_>

What a smug jerk.

Not like friendly goat, he just wanted to be friends. Nothing to do with snacks!

After the heat got a bit much we headed to the other side of the farm.

For some reason, what I was wearing that day was just irresistibly delicious to animals as you’ll soon see.

My bag? Delicious.

My skirt? DELICIOUS.

Worst version of the Coppertone Girl ever.

And look at him there with no remorse!

This parrot had a go at my camera too, clearly I wasn’t making friends today haha!

After that excitement, we wandered in the shade of the small animal area with bunnies and guinea pigs.

As if that wasn’t enough excitement for the day, we headed to Caldermeade Farm next as it was right near by. It’s good James was finally able to grow some hair too!

That was just a quick stop off though as we then headed to Main Ridge Dairy to cool down and get something to eat.

Obviously all we ate was cheese.

It’s a goat’s cheese dairy so everything was themed around that including a goat’s milk milkshake.

Which was interesting…

And James managed to drop an entire wedge of cheese into my milkshake while he was gesturing wildly and spent 5min trying to fish it out before I decided to cut my losses >_>

The cheese was absolutely delicious though!

On the way out we got to play with some baby goats. I know they’re called kids but I thought it would sound really weird if I said we were playing with some random kids >_>

They were really sweet!

Until one of them tried to eat my sunglasses!!! DELICIOUS!!

I need to figure out what made me taste so good this day so I can attract more pets!

WHAT THE HELL??

So cute though!

What a nice day full of delicious animals, I mean animals who find me delicious. Whatever!

BOOP!

Werribee Rose Garden

by VioletLeBeaux | Jul 16, 2018 | Life

Things here are starting to settle down, so I wanted to start posting again. No guarantees but let’s see where this goes?

A few months ago (*cough* ok like a year ago *cough*) we drove out to Werribee Rose Garden to catch it in full bloom!

Entry to the park is free but there is a gold coin donation box at the front which helps to maintain the beautiful flowers.

The last time we went there weren’t many flowers actually blooming but this time it pulled out all the stops!!

My dress is from Bodyline. I think it looks a lot nicer with the cream belt so I’m thinking of removing the bow straps on the back and sewing them in.

The flowers were honestly amazing. I love macro photography and while it’s cliche, flowers really do make great subjects.

Even better if you can get a bee to model for you too!

Look at us looking like adorable opposites!

This is more accurate, I think I said something highly inappropriate to Celina but maintained the smile for the photo ;D

But obviously the bromance is strong in this group so we should probably stop competing with who’s closest!

Definitely recommend the garden in full bloom if you time it for a really hot day you can even manage to get some photos without 2930804 tourists in the backgrounds haha!

Violet and Jimmy got Married!

by VioletLeBeaux | May 3, 2017 | Life

Time for the obligatory wedding post! I’m *really* not a sentimental or wedding-y person and now that it’s over, I really just want to go back to being a normal, non-stressed out person again… so I’m going to try to get all of the details out in one post so I pretty much never have to talk about it again 😀

Credit and massive thank you to Tobias at Surfaced Studios for the awesome photos!

Venue – Conservatory Gardens

James proposed at the Conservatory Gardens so we decided to have the wedding there too because it was pretty and cost effective. It books out super quickly so if you want to book, get in ASAP. We actually ended up having to change our date a few times even after thinking things were 100% confirmed and telling people to save the date because things kept changing.

Neither of us are big wedding people (and I really hate parties and big social events in general) so we opted to have just immediate family and closest friends there. We also didn’t want to waste a lot of money that could be put towards something like a house deposit later. I really wanted to elope alone but James had always imagined something surrounded by loved ones etc so we went with that.

Big weddings are great for people who are into that kind of thing but it’s just not me. I often felt really uncomfortable and frustrated with people forcefully projecting themselves onto the situation and telling me how I MUST be feeling. “You must be SO excited!” No. I mustn’t be anything and just because my feelings are not the same as your expectations doesn’t mean I am wrong or invalid. Not everybody likes these kinds things and that’s ok!!

I hated pretty much every second of planning it. Even if everything had actually gone to plan I would have hated it. And that’s ok too!

For such a small event, there was a shocking amount of work that went into it. It really wouldn’t have been as much if it was possible to rely on plans which we made but frankly almost everything we actually planned, cared about or put work into had to be moved, cancelled or changed at some point. On top of that, the 9 months we had to put the wedding together included a lot of other real life unavoidable stresses which made things a hundred times worse. I’m sure if this had been something that I had actually been dreaming about since I was a little girl I probably would have had a nervous breakdown over it all at some point.

Luckily it wasn’t and we continued on and made the best of things.

We arrived with Celina and Tobias a bit early so we could take some photos in the garden outside before it started to rain. Obviously this was the first day in ages that it had threatened to rain and it was unseasonably hot haha!

We went back and forth over whether we should bring Lottie as well because dogs are allowed in the garden but last minute decided it would be too crazy trying to look after her. It’s a shame because she would be so cute in the photos but with everything else going on it was just not worth the amount of stress.

Cute photo:

James taking it too far…

Result of tiny pieces of dandelion in my hair and eyes hahaha… I think I should make this my user photo everywhere now XD

My outfit details:

Dress – Portmans for ~$160.
Petticoat – ebay ~$9
Comfy shoes – Rose gold flats from Target ~$7. I added pink ribbon laces
Pretty shoes – Pink bow heels from Aliexpress ~$25
Jewellery – Leaf bracelet, and another leaf bracelet that I bent into a headband (~$15 each), necklace (~$25) all from Lovisa
Engagement and wedding ring – Custom made by Emi at PopRing and designed by us
Hair flower – fake flower from Spotlight which I glued a bobby pin to
Cardigan – Not pictured. (~$85 of yarn) Designed by me, a billion hours of stressful last minute knitting and finished the day before the wedding because it was very important to me… didn’t get to wear because it was randomly a million degrees that day. Melbourne weather!

I wore the shoes in before the wedding and they were still uncomfortable enough that I ended up wearing the sneakers for everything except photos and the actual ceremony!

The quality was actually really good though especially considering the price. I would definitely repurchase from there but next time I will remember to only buy shoes with ankle straps as I am not coordinated enough to wear plain ones.

The dress was probably the first wedding thing I bought other than ordering the rings. I didn’t want anything too expensive and wedding-y that I couldn’t wear again. I had bought another dress from Valley Girl previously which I was planning to use if I didn’t find anything nice but this one randomly popped out at me with perfect timing.

The original underskirt was really tight and short so I bought some similar fabric and replaced it with a longer gathered underskirt which could flare out easily. I didn’t want to have to be yanking it down all night! I considered cutting the skirt and sleeves a little shorter but I ended up being too worried about other things to have time.

Now that it’s over I’m thinking of cutting it the way I originally had in mind so I can just wear it regularly.

Once we got inside the garden, we set up our snack table at one end. The garden caretaker was so nice! She let us bring some things in early so they didn’t all get rained on and said I looked like the White Queen from Alice in Wonderland.

The upside of the garden is that it is an absolutely beautiful venue and you really don’t need to do any decorating. The downside is that even if there are signs up everywhere saying PRIVATE EVENT and the doors are closed, tourists still try to come inside and look around after it’s closed. It closes at 5:30pm but my Mum had to herd tourists out for at least an hour after that and we kept seeing tourists putting their cameras up to the window to take photos of us which was quite awkward.

I had spent the whole night before and morning making the cake. We considered buying a plain one somewhere and just decorating it ourselves but I couldn’t find anywhere that I liked. Woolworths was out of stock of half of my usual cake making supplies so I used unfamiliar ones, the cakes didn’t rise as much as planned so I ended up stacking 3 of them to get the height!

They were out of my regular marshmallows for the fondant too so poor James had to go out twice to get other ingredients as the fondant failed and turned into a big goopy mess!

The top of the cake was made by gluing some fake flowers from Daiso to a paper plate and sitting it down on top of the cake. The glass platform is from a thrift shop which I usually use to hold make up brushes and the bunting was $2 from Target’s party section.

I shouldn’t have worried or put so much work into the cake as the gardens were so warm that the fondant started melting on one side anyway and after a few minutes it had developed a large tumour on one side hahaha! Everyone pretended not to notice but I was slightly worried that at some point that it would pop and rain the melted icing inside all over the table.

The cake toppers were Sylvanian Family bunnies which then went on their own honeymoon to Japan which you will eventually see when I finish the editing of photos!

The rabbits were an adventure in themselves as I had ordered them off ebay but AusPost lost them half way so they took almost 2 months to arrive from Japan. My Mum bought us some back ups in case they didn’t arrive but they made it the day before the wedding!

Caramel popcorn and my favourite candies!

We had originally picked out our menu very carefully (with much taste testing!) to be delivered through various delivery services but on the day it didn’t end up going as smoothly as that! The place with the vegan food was closed so poor Celina spent ages trying to order from another place… and then after they cancelled her order with no notice, a third place! Some food eventually turned up so that was good.

We had a mixture of Korean, Greek and burgers with other random snacks. All of the paper plates and cutlery was from various $2 shops and the decorations were just random flowers from Spotlight left over from my hair accessories.

The doilies underneath everything were a wedding gift, hand crocheted by Anna who is an absolutely amazing crafter!

It was a nice, casual set up 😀

On the right you can see those green little boxes piled up behind the menu, each one of them has a cactus or succulent for a guest to take home. We chose them because succulents are hard to kill, like our love. HAAAAA!

Thank you extremely confused Deliveroo driver! This poor guy probably thought he was going to get serial killer style murdered delivering food to a creepy park at night XD

Originally our plan was to have the ceremony right at the start and then move on to food, cake, photos etc and ice cream afterwards but our celebrant had been delayed by traffic coming from a very long way so we opted to do the food/cake/photos first while it was still light out.

We took all of our family photos up here on the cute little bridge. It’s over a tiny pond with koi fish in it.

I will post some more detailed shots of the rings next time. So much work went into them I think they deserve their own post!

The ring box was a wedding gift from Kim, it was absolutely perfect!

This is my favourite sign of all time. I know it’s not… but I really feel like it looks like “Don’t poop on the plants” XD

I made James’ boutonnière a few days before out of flowers from my hair accessories and ribbon that matched my sneaker laces. I also made him a fake pocket square which you can see in the other photos. It’s fake because his vest didn’t have a real pocket so it couldn’t fit a whole handkerchief in it… so I folded a piece of fabric up, cut the bottom off and stitched it inside the fake pocket.

So, we did the cake cutting…

… and I stabbed the cake tumour open. It was slightly unsatisfying as nothing actually came out, it was just an air pocket haha!

I didn’t actually eat any of it in the end but apparently it was pretty ok!

During the cake cutting our celebrant Benn arrived and we set up for the actual ceremony. He made it just in time as our time slot at the gardens was about to end and it was getting quite dark!

Finding a celebrant was probably the most difficult part of wedding planning to be honest. We originally interviewed Benn and wanted to book him right then and there but we weren’t able to get the date he was available for to work with the venue so we had to go with someone else.

The other celebrant we booked was not at all professional. He didn’t listen to what we actually wanted and kept pushing for things like romantic sand pouring and a longer ceremony with poetry readings from friends to “make our parents happy”. That is not who we are and people who tell me that I’ll regret doing things a certain way, like they know more about me than I do are just the worst.

We couldn’t find another celebrant who had our day free so we booked him anyway and 2 days before the cut off date to legally file the paper work to get married he pulled out due to family reasons. I wouldn’t normally fault someone for that but I had been trying to contact him for several weeks to confirm our script and he kept putting me off and giving me the run around saying he would phone this weekend… nothing… oh he lost our number but would definitely phone… oh he would email… oh he forgot to email… oh bla bla bla excuse. If he had been honest from the first time I asked to confirm our script or reached out to me at any point I wouldn’t have been nearly as pissed but as it was, we then had only 2 days to desperately scramble to find someone else to perform the ceremony otherwise we would have had to postpone the whole damn thing. Extremely ridiculous! There were a lot of other problems there but ugh moving on.

We were super lucky that Benn was able to step back in and perform the wedding. The garden was able to change our booking to be 30min later than originally planned so we could start late enough for him to get from his previous booking to our location and he was nice enough to take our booking even though it was his birthday!

And married! By the time we did the ceremony it totally dark but the lovely caretaker must have been watching and doing the lighting because when we went to do the kiss it suddenly turned pink! Thank you awesome caretaker!!

This below is the face of someone who knows it won’t be long before she can leave, take off those shoes and go to bed 😀

We signed our documents and packed everything up as we were running way over time by this point. The garden looks so pretty at night!

Lastly we headed over to a post wedding ice cream dessert at Dex2Rose. Everyone seemed to have a decent time and the ice cream there is always good 😀

So there you go, married after 9.5 years. And I can say with certainty that I will only ever do this once because OMG NEVER AGAIN.

Being married is great but seriously… Weddings are the worst.

Thanks again to Celina and Toby for the great photos and video and also for doing all the set up and pack down and driving us etc. And thanks to everyone who came, you guys are the best! 😀

I will edit a vlog… at some point. Maybe. Or not. I don’t know. Weddings >_>