Melbourne Snapshots Beauty Events!
Snapshots time… finally! And you know what? I found a random folder I never posted originally so we’re starting off with photos from last year!
Snapshots time… finally! And you know what? I found a random folder I never posted originally so we’re starting off with photos from last year!
So you’ve probably noticed the lack of craft here lately. It’s come from a combination of having no crafting time and being uninspired.
My life is very heavily scheduled, until this year James and I didn’t take weekend or evenings off and when one thing goes out of whack the rest tends to follow quickly until I feel I’m constantly treading water instead of actually moving forward. And for a while that works, I’ve crossed off so many long term projects from my list this year and I’m making decent progress toward some more, but eventually I just get burned out.
I’ve been running around so much trying to get things done that the house is a mess and when the house is a mess I feel less like doing things. It snowballs until I end up back in front of the computer for 14 hours a day rather than crafting or doing something creative. And if I do have a minute spare all I want to do is procrastinate. I’ve gotten distracted already several times just writing this article >_<
Being in an apartment that isn’t particularly appealing doesn’t inspire me and if I’m not inspired I just don’t want to craft.
So it’s time to do something about that 😀
Welcome to my new series “Violet and Jimmy’s Home Sweet Home” ^_^
We’ve lived in this apartment for almost 2 years now (in fact my birthday is the 2 year anniversary) and in that entire time I’ve never done much to make it ours because we only ever sign a 6 month lease and every six months I think:
And after 2 years worth of “we’re only going to be here for another 6 months” I’m at the point that I’m sick of waiting for *someday* and I am more interested in *right now*. Someday is when we’ll finally get that dream apartment but there’s really no reason that I should sit around making excuses to live in a place that doesn’t look the way I want until then. RightNow is a very important step to get to Someday and so it’s time to do something about.
This series is going to be something different. It’s going to be 1 part rambling post like this, 1 part craft tutorials as I go and 1 part art journaling the progress.
It will be on going, I have a whole apartment to make pretty and when we do finally own our first home I will obviously have that too. Hopefully some of you who are in the same boat as I am can relate to this and it will inspire you to stop waiting around and give things a go!
So the first step to changing things is making goals. Throughout these posts you will see my diary pages which are a combination of pen, water colours and stickers. I don’t have neat hand writing and my style tends to be very chaotic so I will provide transcripts below them with other notes included. My math teacher used to say that clever people always had terrible hand writing because their brains worked faster than their hands could and that’s what I’m sticking to 😉 Also my spelling and grammar sucks so there you go! So what am I trying to get out of this project?
Basically I want to go through everything we have and reevaluate whether it should be here. If I can make it better I will but if it’s something that doesn’t fit and has no use it will be de-cluttered!
So what kind of obstacles will I be up against?
Inspiration isn’t something that I can magic up but I think that by having a well kept to do list with a range of small quick projects as well as the bigger ones I can combat that. Money is something I can control to a certain extent and I will work harder at putting some savings together but realistically I’m just going to try to reuse the things I already have in different ways and burn through my craft stash. Time will probably be the biggest killer here. James and I have been trying to cut back on working after hours so no more nights and weekends which is nice but not particularly realistic. To a certain extent at least, working for yourself means working when there’s work and that means sometimes you have to do late nights or weekends. What I am going to do is make an effort to have at least one evening a week for doing these projects. If possible I will actually do them in the mornings so I can take better quality photos and not have to set up flashes but that will obviously depend on schedules. I think posting here about it will make me feel a lot more accountable especially for procrastinating because I’ll feel guilty if I don’t follow through XD Funnily enough I think it also has a bit to do with what we have to watch or do in the evenings. I always do my best craft when we’re watching great TV or playing great games but nothing is really grabbing my attention at the moment. I’ve re-watched most of my favorites fairly recently and James is playing Grand Turismo 5 which is one of the most boring games of all time to watch. Let me know if you have any good recommendations! So all in all I’m feeling pretty good about this! I’m looking forward to doing some of the projects I’ve been wanting to tackle for years and I’m really looking forward to having and awesome looking apartment which will make me feel great until we can buy our first place. Hopefully it will be a good start to make bigger changes and better things for the future and I hope you all enjoy it too ^_^ Super props if you actually read all of that, I think this is the most I’ve written here in months… so that’s a good start *_* Wish me luck! |
Last weekend I was invited to visit a Japanese hair and nail salon in Prahran called Tsumiki Design. I’ve decided not to go to many events this year because I want to focus more on crafting and having time for James and myself but when I got the invitation for the Tsumiki event I couldn’t RSVP fast enough… a Japanese salon!? With stylists specialising in Japanese techniques!? And Japanese nail art!? YES PLEASE!
I’d honestly given up looking for a place like this in Aus a long time ago after several bad experiences but I always get my hopes up when something new hair or nail related comes up so my brain said full steam ahead 😀
Celina, James and I arrived a bit early and were greeted at the door with delicious orange mocktails. The decor of the salon was so luxurious, everything looked like it was from a magazine, so beautiful! We relaxed on the beautiful antique looking couches and flicked through Japanese magazines looking at hair and nail designs. They had all of my favorite magazines including Nail Up and ViVi. At this point I also starting making mental notes of the decorations in the place because I kind of want our dream house in this style XD I have couch-envy: I know I need to stop posting decor photos and start talking about my experience but SO PRETTY! After everyone arrived and we had settled in with our magazines and drinks we were introduced to the salon owner Taka, his stylists and the representative for Yuko straightening system. We watched a video of a model getting her hair treated with the system and the change was pretty amazing, I have frizzy hair so it’s something I’ve always wondered about doing so watching the video made me want to learn more about it. I tend to like the volume my frizz gives though because it makes my hair look like cotton candy so I don’t know if I could commit to completely straight silky hair, I’d love to see how easy it is to curl and style treated hair afterward though. Have any of you guys tried this kind of system? Did you enjoy the results? Next we all broke off to get treatments done, some girls went to get their hair styled while the rest of us went for nails. Celina was first up for nails because she needed to leave early and I sat in on her appointment to watch and take some photos 😀 The nail artist at Tsumiki is none other than Clara H who has a great reputation around Melbourne for doing the best Japanese style 3D artwork. I’d seen her work before online and she’d been recommended to me so I was excited to see her work and get to experience it first hand! She did little flowers on Celina’s fingers and they looked lovely. She needed something work appropriate and the end result looked really beautiful. I was next in line for nails but unfortunately I had some stick-ons which I’d hastily done that morning thinking there wouldn’t be enough time for us all to get our nails done. Because of the time constraints Clara removed my stick ons and redid some nicer ones with a beautiful floral bow design. She invited me to come back when there wasn’t a time limit so she could try out something more over the top and do full acrylics. I can’t wait to show you all the other set she did, they are AWESOME! Hint: they are themed on a certain bunny mascot who’s name begins with B and ends with ERGAMOT 😀 Wall of TINS polish… now I have polish envy too! XD There were very fancy Hors D’oeuvres too by a famous local chef. While we got our nails done the other girls were being treated to head massages and cut/colour/treatments. I was last through the hair area I think and it was nice because it gave me a chance to chat to the stylists as well as Taka himself! I was given a shampoo and a lovely head massage then they completely blow dried my hair straight. Zomg it looks so long straight! Especially since I just cut a bunch of it off *_* I didn’t want to do a cut/colour at the time so Taka suggested doing big crazy waves for styling instead and I loved that idea because I’ve never seen myself with waves. They had 3 stylists working to wave each section and tease it up with powders, it was so much fun watching the transformation in the mirror! I loved the style, it reminded me of Kumickey’s older mermaid hair 😀 SO CUTE! Actually having my hair like this makes me think getting a perm so I could do it properly for a few months! Mermaid! Once everyone was styled and had beautiful nails we were given a lot of information about the different products and sponsors of the store and I found quite a few products in the gift bag which I was interested in especially the Yuko Aqua G Base Hair Water which I’ve already started using. So overall, I felt like a princess the entire time I was at the salon. The design and fit out really give a feeling of luxury and I found it really easy to drift off and relax in such a nice setting. The staff were genuinely friendly and really went out of their way to make our stay relaxing. I know it wasn’t just politeness put on for the event too because when I went back to get my nails done by Clara today every single one of them remembered me, asked questions following on from last time and were just as lovely. So yes I would totally recommend both the salon section and the nail section if you’re interested in Japanese styles and techniques. It was very cool to be in a salon that had magazines I actually read and whose stylists knew all of the trends and styles I see online. I’m absolutely looking forward to going back when my budget allows for it! Thank you so much to everyone at Tsumiki for such a wonderful day and making my hair awesome! Thank you to Clara H for super cute nail art, I can’t wait to show you all the finished proper acrylics she did for me today!! Bonus shot… CHAIR ENVY POSING! >:D Double bonus shot, while I was getting my nails done today Taka showed us this video of a day in his life that his wife made from their FB page, it’s so funny! Totally gangster XD |
Since I started doing hair tutorial videos one of the most common things I’m asked is for a hair care routine video. I really want to sit down and do a detailed video on that but in the mean time I thought maybe a hair history might be interesting!
So when I was 14 I dyed my hair for the first time, I was going to do it black but changed my mind to bright red at the last minute. No pictures of that because it would involve digging through boxes of old school stuff but I will get them out next time we move so you can all laugh at them XD
After the red, I let it all grow out when I was around 17 and did blue, that didn’t last long and was replaced with green and eventually black after it faded. My hair was quite long up until the black at which point I got sick of it and cut it into an angled bob with a short fringe!
After a while it grew out and I evened it out to this…
I really enjoyed how low maintenance this style was though I think I missed a lot of opportunity for awesome styling because at the time I didn’t have a curler or a straightener or even a hair dryer so this was the extend of my styling: This was when I started experimenting with bigger hair too, though I didn’t have much hair to do it with haha! After that I started to grow it out more and started dyeing red over the top. The black was very unmovable so I ended up with a nice red>black gradient. And so the love of gradients began 😉 I started getting more adventurous with my hair at this point too so started teasing and blow drying my fringe sometimes too. Up until around now I didn’t really wear any make up either unless it was for work but I started experimenting with different looks too. It was around now that I also discovered my love of hair extensions 😀 That lasted for a while and then on a whim one day I bought some blonde dye and went for it. I started lightening it in stages. Again the black didn’t budge and I concentrated the bleach at the top to form a gradient. The next stage of lightening: This was the time I started using hot rollers too and I alternated between them and pin curls. We started having to travel more often so I became the master of restyling pin curls over several days XD This was taken in Singapore after I had such a late night I ended up sleeping in the pouf as well as the pin curls hahaha! Eventually I stopped lightening at around this shade. And through all of this time my hair was steadily growing out. When I started growing my hair I wasn’t too sure how long I actually wanted it but it never really got to a point where I said “Ugh my hair is too long, I want to cut it off!” so I just kept going. I played around with a lot of different styles too.
I bought my mini straightener and learned to make curls, this is probably one of the best things I did as fas a styling versatility goes. And while I’m sure it’s contributed to the damage a bit, I wouldn’t give it up! When we moved to Melbourne I started to be more adventurous with my hair extensions. I thought a lot about dying my hair pink but didn’t have the courage to try it for a long time. Instead I played with wigs a lot more so I could completely change my look every day. When I finally did go pink it was in the form of a gradient again and had a couple of shades of pink/orange mixed in. I absolutely adored it and finally found a style I thought was actually me 😀 Totally even had one of those blowing in the wind moments in the middle of a shop too 😉 While the shade of pink has changed and the styling changes regularly I still love my hair this colour. Above all I think it suits my personality well 😀 Over the last few years my hair has been through a lot, teasing, spraying, bleaching, dying, curling, straightening, you name it. In general it’s in pretty good condition. The biggest hair sin that I probably commit is that after a string of bad experiences I haven’t been to a hairdresser since I was 17. It started out as being too paranoid of having another bad experience and then budget constraints meant DIY was a must. When I have the budget for it I will totally find a fantastic hairdresser here though. My hair growing up was rebellious, frizzy and untamable but I think I’ve done a decent job of whipping it into shape. At the moment the only thing I’m really concerned about is split ends. This was taken around a month ago and shows our friend Hughie and I having an epic hair-off competition 😉 He’s taller than me but mine was curled so I think we tied! Since then I cut off around 3 inches and added some more layers to get rid of the split ends! I’ve done a lot to my hair and put it through some crazy stress but it always seems to bounce right back and even though I’ve done some really damaging things in the last 10 years (since I started dying it) the condition is still pretty good. So Dove has asked me to try their Nutri-Oil system to see if I can improve the condition of my hair more. I’ll be giving that a try for the next few weeks and seeing how it goes! I’m not holding my breath for anything spectacular because my hair seems to be at its best when I leave it as natural as possibly but I’m definitely interested to see if this is any different. Here’s a bit about it from the press release:
So we’ll see how that goes over the next few weeks. Have any of you guys tried it yet? I’d love to know any hair tips you have too!
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Special version of Snapshots today 😀 I’m still crazy tired from Sydney the last few days so in this version you guys can come up with your own photos captions!
These are the photos I took at the Lunar New Year day and some others as a bonus, I’ve numbered them so you can commentwith the number with any hilarious captions you can come up with XD
Enjoy while I take a bit of a nap!
As you’ve guessed from the title I’ve finally set up a proper Youtube Channel for our V-Logs 😀
So my main channel will be used just for hair/beauty/craft/art type things and this new channel will have all of the fun random stuff we do around Melbourne. This way you can just subscribe to the parts you like ^_^
Or click here for the tutorial channel!
And here’s the video we made announcing it ^_^
And the first couple of uploads!
I’m updating once a day for the first week then the V-Logs will be weekly from then on. The other channel will continue to be 2-3 videos a week so lots to watch!
I’m really looking forward to getting into doing V-Logs again, I had so much fun doing them in December 😀