Life Archives - Page 46 of 57 - Violet LeBeaux

Invitation: A Bit of Chocolate Heaven at Koko Black Melbourne

by VioletLeBeaux | Jul 12, 2010 | Life, Notices

Just a quick note tonight…

That’s right there is a Nuffnang blogger meet up happening in Melbourne and Penny from Jeroxie (Addictive & Consuming) and I are organizing it ^_^

So if you happen to be in Melbourne and you looooove chocolate as much as I do you should come and join us at Koko Black in Collins Street at 1:30pm Saturday the 24th of July.

If you would like to come along please RSVP here: A bit of chocolate heaven at Koko Black so we can keep track of everyone.

I’m hoping this will be a really good chance to meet a lot of you lovely people in real life instead of from behind the keyboard and because it’s a bigger event hopefully you won’t be too shy to come and say hello ^_^

We hope to see as many of you as possible on the day! 🙂

Let me know if you’re coming so I can look out for you!

Nuffnang's Chocolate Tea at The Langham Hotel Melbourne

by VioletLeBeaux | Jun 22, 2010 | Hime Gyaru, Life

A few weeks ago I was invited by Nuffnang to attend a chocolate High Tea for fashion and food bloggers at the Aria Bar and Lounge at the Langham Hotel.

I’m not really a fashion or a food blogger but they couldn’t hold a High Tea without me so off James and I trundled across the river to be social!

The place was just spectacular! I felt slightly out of place in somewhere so fancy XD

I couldn’t believe how many other bloggers turned up! Everyone was so lovely and it was great to put faces to a lot of blogs that I read. I hope we can stay in touch 😀

I didn’t think that it could get much better than that but then my partner in crime Grace from Living Footprintsarrived in her regular hilarious manner and we had an absolute ball having non-high-tea-appropriate conversations!

And OMG THE FOOD!

I’m no food blogger so let me do my best here… there were delicious finger sandwiches, scones, endless tea/coffee/hot chocolate and you are going to drool over the best part…

UNLIMITED CHOCOLATY DELIGHTS!

The decor was impeccable and everything was themed in Alice style.

We got to meet the head pastry chef Markus Bohm and let me tell you, he is awesome at his job!

He even made us personal chocolate and passion fruit souffles!

I did my nails especially for the occasion with little macaron stickers that Leanne at The Fashionate Traveler sent me! I also did an effect to make them look as if they were dipped in chocolate…

Jamesgreatly enjoyed himself with his tiny sandwiches…

This is how he entertained himself:

It was almost too cute to eat but they were all too delicious not to!

I had such a lovely time meeting new bloggers who (as soon as we get the net switched on at home) I will definitely be catching up with again soon!

Graceand I are always a model of composure in these situations…

Yes always…

Seriously though check out that strawberry thing in front, it’s actually called “Strawberry chocolate Vacherin with Elderberry cream” and it is one of the best things I’ve ever tasted.

It’s kind of cruel making me relive all these tastes over and over again to write this… I want to go back again Nuffnang!!

Grace, Sarah from 100Datesand I showing that we all process great restraint.

So much fun! Let’s do something like this again soon, these are meet ups I can get on board with!! I <3 you Nuffnang!

Have you girls ever done high tea? I can’t wait until we actually have real furniture in our house again so I can invite everyone to tea at my place! Until then, maybe we can go to the Langham Hotel for tea together 😀

The Long Trip to Melbourne…

by VioletLeBeaux | Jun 20, 2010 | Life, Travel In Style

First off you’ve probably guessed that there is no Sneaker Sunday today, it’s all about Melbourne…

That’s because Valerie is off jetsetting around New York and after all of the ideas you suggested last week I decided to take this week off and bring you something much more informative next week ^_^

Secondly I just want to give a shout out to the girl that recognized me in Melbourne Central yesterday, you absolutely made my day 😀 It’s so weird to have people recognizing me on the street but it is very fun so I hope if any of you see me out you’ll come and say hello and take a photo or something!

Thirdly SuperKawaiiMama and Fashion Hayley were lovely enough to let me leech off their internet so I could upload all the photos of our journey down from Brisbane to Melbourne via Sydney ^_^

I’ll try not to bore you with all the landscape photos, James hadn’t been on such a long drive before in Australia so he was very interested in the landscape… It all looked the same to me!

Green, green, green, brown, green, brown, green ,green…. cow… green, brown, green, green…

I kept myself entertained with knitting and juggling the camera/video camera to document it all. I also ate a whole lot of candy!

It rained a bit on the drive but it sure did make some pretty rainbows!

This was how I spent the first 14 hours of the drive…

This was the face I made after visiting Australia’s most disgusting public bathroom… I won’t go into details but let’s just say that someone had actually stolen the toilet seats WTF?!?!

James has an obsession with giant things, like the Big Pineapple etc. For non-Australian readers, we have lots of landmarks that are gigantic fruit. Here is a large prawn:

And a big banana coming out of James’ beard…

After driving for around 12-14 hours we made it Sydney. We checked into out hotel which was in a less-than-desirable area and ran out again like crazy people to find the restaurant we were having dinner at. Of course we were *fashionably* late!

We met up with The Fashionate Traveler, ChaiGyaru and VintageGrrl and had a very lovely dinner!

The only slightly clearer photo… For some reason the only photos I got were from my tiny video camera which didn’t do too well in the light 🙁 For other photos you can check out ChaiGyaru’s post or The Fashionate Traveler’s run down of the night.

I was so sorry that we couldn’t stay longer with them, the quick dinner we did have was so much fun! I can’t wait to see you girls again!

James and I poured ourselves into bed after that and got up early for another day of driving!

We saw a lot of windmills…

For some reason I had a mad urge to have a picnic here… 😉

This is what kept us going:

Oh and also this:

This photo really says something… James grew this mustache on a dare but then he refused to shave it because it irritated me! Dashing or just tickly and annoying? I’m going with tickly and annoying!

Green green green brown green cow…

I was so sick of driving when I saw something that made it aaaaaall better…

That’s right Violet Town! I’m pretty sure that if you have the same name as the town you get to be the mayor right?? It’s perfect because it’s even the town of flowers apparently XD

After 2 days of driving we finally made it to Melbourne and to Super Kawaii Mama’s house and just fell into bed. I even refused a cup of tea which should tell you how tired I was!!

We found our own apartment 1 week after that and moved in 😀

At 2221.1km it was a hell of a drive but I’m glad we did it, we had a lot of fun on the way ^_^

And in case you ever doubted my skills at Tetris this is all of our stuff… and I actually fit it *all* into a Mitsubishi Outlander 😀 WIN!

Hope you enjoyed our trip as much as we did! What has your longest road trip been?

We are loving it here in Melbourne and there are so many big awesome things coming up that I can’t wait to share with you all!

Sneaker Sunday! Moving Shoes :D

by VioletLeBeaux | May 30, 2010 | Life

It’s Sneaker Sunday again!!

We moved all of our things into our new apartment yesterday and because I’m out shopping for furniture today I thought I would talk about the art of Sneakers and moving house!

This is my new living room window by the way… and this is the outfit I wore on my birthday to start moving things into our house ^_^

So everyone knows that picking shoes that are right for the occasion is very important and moving house is no different!

I chose to wear my sneakers to move in because the are comfortable for lots of walking and heavy lifting.
These are the sneakers I own with the most padding in them and it’s important to have something supporting your feet when you are going to be adding a lot of extra weight to them.
Because my sneakers are pink I chose an outfit which included highlights of pink throughout. The rest of the outfit is mostly monochrome so the pink stands out and pulls the outfit together making the sneakers really seem like they belong rather than being an after thought.
We drove down to Melbourne and everything had to be taken in our car, which meant that space was at a premium! To be able to fit as much as possible in the car I avoided wasting space by stuffing my sneakers and shoes with socks and underwear.
In the car we put the big boxes in first and then used small items such as the sneakers to fill in gaps! You would be surprised how many sneakers you can fit beneath the seats of your car XD

I hope my quick tips have been a little interesting and I should hopefully be back to normal posting schedules very soon. I have so many fun things planned for your guys, I just can’t wait!!

For more Sneaker Sunday check out Valerie’s post on super cute New York themed toenail art!

A little note..

by VioletLeBeaux | May 25, 2010 | Life, Notices

I was planning another big tutorial yesterday but a lot of things happened which made me very upset and frankly not in a mood to blog at all.

It has come to my attention over the last few days several unscrupulous people have been stealing my work from this site. A couple of you wonderful readers have emailed me and left comments about others online taking parts of my blog, be it photos, writing or whatever else and claiming it as their own and I’ve had about enough of it.

Unless otherwise stated, everything on this site is done by me and is copyrighted to me.It makes me so sad because I put hours and hours and hours a week into writing, making and thinking up content for this site. The tutorials not only take hours to make and photograph but there is then the editing, uploading, inserting, writing, editing and replying to everyone. It makes me really upset when some people think it’s ok to just take something that I’ve spent so much time working on 🙁

This is not just an isolated incident either, I have found my content in several different locations that have not been authorized.

I absolutely want you all to feel comfortable doing my tutorials and to get inspiration from my site but there is a difference between inspiration and taking something I’ve created and claiming it as your own. For example, taking my photos, cropping my watermark out, adding your watermark and saying you did it IS NOT OK! Pretending you created something that I did IS NOT OK. Writing almost the exact same tutorial that I’ve specifically created and posting almost photo for photo copies and claiming you came up with the idea IS NOT OK.

I am more than happy for people to use my images in posts which are related to my work but ONLY IF YOU ASK PERMISSION FIRST. It is just common courtesy and not at all hard to do. I have a contact page and an email account which I can be easily reached at. And it’s not just images that have been finding their way around the net under the guise of other people’s work. So let me say again IT’S NOT OK TO TAKE MY WORK AND PASS IT OFF AS YOUR OWN.

This blog is supposed to be about creativity and inspiration, please be inspired to create something beautiful of your own rather than stealing it.

If you see something that I’ve created somewhere other than this blog PLEASE let me know 🙁

Have any of you other lovely bloggers had this happen before? What did you do about it?

How To Make A Pretty Jewellery Display

by VioletLeBeaux | May 19, 2010 | Craft, Life, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Tutorial

Lots and lots of you have written in and asked for a way to store necklaces and bracelets like a pretty jewellery display stand or something. Well this is how I store mine so I hope you find it useful!

Remember when I was talking about candy cane themed crafts? Well this is it 😀

To be honest because of the colours I used it reminds me more of an old carousel which is even cooler than candy canes!

What you need for this pretty jewellery display:

An old tea cup tree, I bought mine at a thrift store for $1
A sheet of felt
Thick ribbon
Thin ribbon in another colour
Scissors
Glue gun
Premade bows or ribbon for bows

I find the easiest base to start with is an old tea cup tree, these were very popular in the 80’s over here so thrift stores are full of them minus the tea cups now. If you can’t find one you could always make one out of wire and cardboard or something similar ^_^

First thing to do is pull off all of the arms bits of the tree so you have a stump. The arms will probably be held on my screws but if not then you can just reattach later using whatever method you want.

Then take your wide ribbon (I’m using velvet so it protects my jewellery) start at the bottom and spiral it up to the top. Hot glue it in place as you go and you get this:

Do the same thing on all of the arms you pulled off. Then you should add the thin ribbon to disguise the gaps between the thick. Do it to each pair of arms then screw them back in, you might need to poke holes in the ribbon for the screws to go through. Use a little extra glue to be on the safe side.

The ends of my tree were hollow so I poked the end of the ribbon in and glued them in place. This is what it looks like when it’s all put back together…

Now place your tree onto the felt and trace around the edge. You want two circles.

Cut them out 🙂

The first one is for the bottom so the tree doesn’t leave scratch marks on your bench, just hot glue it on.

The second one will be for the top. Cut a straight line into the middle and then a hole the size of the middle pole of your tree.

Put it on like this and glue it down:

Now we need to cover the edges of the felt/rest of the stand. Normally I would do this with the same red felt ribbon but I ran out so I used a matching red satin ribbon. Basically I wound it around the bottom edge until no silver was showing and glued it in place.

I added a gigantic bow to the top and smaller bows at the ends of the branches to disguise the holes/ends of the ribbon.

Totally cute right?

Now the only thing left is to add your jewellery!

Because there are so many arms it’s much easier to find specific pieces than if they were just thrown in a box and tangles occur less frequently.

And there you have it ^_^

Now I’m frantically trying to pack away my craft supplies today in time for the move *_* I hope you enjoyed the pretty jewellery display tutorial and it gives you some ideas about storage!

A few weeks ago I was invited by Nuffnang to attend a chocolate High Tea for fashion and food bloggers at the Aria Bar and Lounge at the Langham Hotel.

First off you’ve probably guessed that there is no Sneaker Sunday today, it’s all about Melbourne…

It’s Sneaker Sunday again!!

Lots and lots of you have written in and asked for a way to store necklaces and bracelets like a pretty jewellery display stand or something. Well this is how I store mine so I hope you find it useful!

What you need for this pretty jewellery display:

Explore…