Art Friday! Trip to Melbourne

by VioletLeBeaux | Feb 5, 2010 | Art, Life

Oh wow it’s Friday already?! This week has just flown by! This is a drawing I did a little while back, nothing special just some practicing ^_^

I’m a little swamped with work today but this weekend I’m going to be shooting the photos for a whole bunch of new posts. And even more exciting news is that next Thursday James and I will be flying to Melbourne for a week! I’ll try to update while I’m away but I might just schedule a couple of posts just in case!

We’ve been thinking of moving to Melbourne for a while so we’re taking the chance to catch up with lots of old friends and check out the city a bit. If you’re in Melbourne and want to catch up drop me a line! Or if you have any suggestions to were we should go and check out or any “can’t miss” shops let me know!

I’m really looking forward to a week of hanging out with lovely people in Melbourne and taking a little bit of a break!

My Perfect Vintage Christmas Competition

by VioletLeBeaux | Feb 2, 2010 | Competition, Life, Outfit Of The Day

Quite a while ago, well before Christmas in fact, Super Kawaii Mama aka Candice DeVille had the most awesome vintage Christmas competition ever.

It was her Perfect Vintage Christmas Competition and I made a video entry (you can watch it here). And guess what? After voting on a semi finalists… I won! HOW EXCITING IS THAT?!

Firstly I want to say a huuuuge thank you to Candice for holding the competition, I really enjoyed making the video and omg prizes!

Firstly a 30 Pound gift voucher from Notorious Kitsch!

I had SO much fun picking out everything from Notorious Kitsch, there were just so many things on their website that I couldn’t decide :O

What I ended up with waaaaas:

-I Married A Monster From Outer Space greeting card
-Looking for Trouble pouch
-Of Course it Buys Happiness business card holder
-No Reason Note book holder
-Sew n Save Tin
-Je T’aime Paris magnetic Address BookAll of that for 30 Pounds! One of the coolest parts? She threw in an awesome set of mini emery boards in the shape of an old hotel match book! SO COOL! I keep them in my purse now for emergencies 😀 Fiona was so delightful to deal with and she really went the extra mile to find cool things that were in stock for me 😀 Go check out her store now!

Prize number 2 was a swimsuit from For Luna!

They make the most beautiful swim suits I’ve ever seen. They are all retro themed and have really flattering cuts. One thing that I *really* liked was that you can choose some of the designs to fit your bra cup size. As a girl who is slim but *cough*curvy*cough* I have a lot of trouble finding swim suits that well… fit. After chatting to Vicki about which style would suit my figure the best as well as be very supportive I picked one out 😀

This is what arrived at my door… How cute is the packaging?!

And this is the swim suit, you can see it on the site here. It’s made of quite thick material and it has boning in the sides to give you a really nice shape.

Okokokokok after much debating I decided to post some pictures of me actually in it.. but I’m completely self conscious so be nice ok! I normally don’t even leave the house without stockings and a cardigan so this is quite out of the ordinary! I’m also a little paranoid that the photos will end up somewhere I don’t want so extra water marks today sorry!

Hahaha so pasty and white, I love being pale! Epic tanning fail=

I really can’t say how much I LOVE this swimsuit, I used to hate swimming and going to the beach because I was always scared of having a “costume malfunction” but this is so supportive and nice that I go swimming with James all the time now 😀

What you don’t check your false lashes while you’re swimming too?

James played with the colours here to make it look really pretty!

How cool does my hair look here? Next time I want to order this one and feed my leopard print obsession some more!

Last but definitely not least I got a $100 gift voucher from Blue Velvet Vintage.

I had a huge amount of fun trying to decide what to choose from Blue Velvet Vintage, there were so many pretty things on the site that I came very close to spending a lot of my own money too *_*

Adorable business card!

So what did I get? First I got this super cute bracelet by Sarah Coventry. Unfortunately a couple of the rhinestones had fallen off in transit but they were very easily fixed and Theresa was extremely apologetic. Anyway it looks so pretty on!

The other item I got was this super awesome purple pleated skirt from the 1950’s!

It was way too long on me so I took it up around 10 inches very carefully and taadaa:

Too cute right?

I absolutely love it!

Thank you so much to Notorious Kitsch, For Luna and Blue Velvet Vintage, I really appreciate all the wonderful gifts they made Christmas extra special!

Special thank you goes out to Super Kawaii Mama for being incredibly awesome and holding this competition! LOVE.

What do you guys think? Did I pick well? What would you have gotten for your vintage christmas prize?

Twist n Roll Bakery Macarons Review

by VioletLeBeaux | Jan 23, 2010 | Baking, Life, Review

Today is a food review for a change, one for the Twist n Roll Bakery!

So the back story to this review is all about how for years and years and years of being teased with Lolita jewelery and dresses with macaron themes without ever tasting one… they were just so damn pretty but living in Brisbane I didn’t think that I would ever get the chance to try one so I stopped looking and tried to put the idea of deliciously cute sweet treats out of my head.

But I didn’t do a very good job and one day I was complaining on my second twitter account about how much I wanted some and one of my friends Roundragon did some research and found that there was a bakery called Twist n Roll who specialize in macarons! When I found out I almost fell off my chair in shock!!

They have a stall at the New Farm Farmer’s Markets (at the Power House) but it’s only on every 2 weeks so…. today we ventured out to New Farm to find them!

It felt like it was a million degrees out in the sun today so James and I kept cool with ice green tea with honey and mint and a lemon slushie thing. Yum!

After we explored for a while we managed to find the stall.

Cute right? I loved the little Eiffel Tower and the gigantic tree of macarons ^_^

I decided to be cautious and try a large Raspberry one for $3.50 so I could see if I liked them

Here is a nice close up…

And the insides…

So the verdict? OMG YUMMY!

The shell was crispy and the insides were gooey. It tasted very fresh and packed with raspberry flavor. The man and woman who were running the store were lovely and chatty, they were both French and super bubbly and friendly!

In fact I enjoyed it so much that I went back…

And bought 6 small ones ($2 each) in each flavor! They had sold out of caramel and pistachio so I got raspberry, chocolate, coconut, lavender, lemon and an orange one which had chocolate filling like a Jaffa.

They started out like this…

And very soon turned into this… I have to say that the only reason I didn’t take a bite out the raspberry one is because I took it home for James’ Mum to try!

James tried the coconut one and loved it and Oh and James got a German hotdog thingy which he greatly enjoyed…

So my final thought is that macarons are freaking awesome and I’m going to be visiting the Twist ‘n Roll bakery next time I’m over in Rocklea! If you are in Brisbane, you can see all the locations here.
Looking at their website I’ve just found out Twist n Roll Bakery deliver, oh this is going to be so bad for my bank balance!!

Christmas Nailart and he last few months in pictures

by VioletLeBeaux | Jan 11, 2010 | Life, Nails, Outfit Of The Day

In which we start with nail art and it just gets more random from there….

I’ve been wanting to do a proper update for a while but I just haven’t had the time >_< So I present you, the last couple of months in photos!

I made my Mum some Christmas themed nails for her work party:

I like the nails that look like presents!

And the stripey ones. Stripes are awesome 😀

I made this cake when my Mum came over for dinner.

It didn’t turn out very well but it was pretty yummy! I think next time I need to just stick with icing because I tired to paint roses on the sides and it looked terrible!

One day I went to brush my teeth and there was a lizard in the sink who couldn’t get out. He was stuck because the sink was slippery >_<

He was scared of us (I named him Steven by the way) so I used the string on my pajamas to make a ladder for him. He got out and lived in our bathroom for a few days eating the ants.

One day he tried to venture into the lounge so we had to put him outside in case someone stepped on him 🙁

BYE STEVEN! He lives under our back steps now.

We discovered that there was a Japanese bakery that just opened up at one of our favorite shopping centers… and went a bit crazy. Turns out that as pretty as the below cake looked it was disgustingly stale >_< Luckily their other things are absolutely delicious so we’ve been going back almost every week!

These are the photos James took on Christmas Day. I didn’t get any of the morning when we went to my Dad’s house so here are the ones from lunch with James’ family. The food was so yummy!

And the table was very pretty ^_^

Candied yams… we don’t usually have this in Aus, it’s very American. I’d never heard of it until James introduced me but it’s sooo yummy!

Group shot!

I stole some of the decorations from the crackers to make my bow more Christmas-y.

For New Years we went to James’ Parent’s unit in Mooloolaba. There was such a pretty view from the balcony!

Oh course it always had a breeze in the most inappropriate times XD I still love this photo!

James wanted to try out lots of new camera settings so I got to do lots of cam-whoring.

And I wanted to show you how glittery my nails looked in the sun…

So glittery! I can’t believe I forgot to take a close up >_< They were seriously all pink and silver glitter with some cute black hearts.

For dinner that night I had Okonomiyaki from a street vendor, so over priced and not very nice. I give it a 5/10 because they didn’t have extras on top.

The view from that night, there were lots of street stalls there.

A kiss at midnight!

And the pretty fireworks.

It was a pity that half of them were behind that tree. Pretty anyway 😀

So there you go! I’ll be back again with another nail art tutorial soon ^_^

Merry Christmas Everyone!!

by VioletLeBeaux | Dec 25, 2009 | Life, Notices, Outfit Of The Day

<3 Have a great day!

Nuffnang Christmas Party 09

by VioletLeBeaux | Dec 23, 2009 | Hime Gyaru, Life

So while I was away the Nuffnang Christmas Party was held and my gosh did we party!

The night started off with me being in a grumpy mood because I couldn’t get my hair or outfit to work 🙁 I had planned to do this huge awesome gigantic ball of hair but it didn’t go so well so I desperately had to scrape it into hime style in like 2 minutes before we left ;_;

We were running very late and there was no parking near by so we had to run up a gigantic hill (yes I was wearing heels) to get to Bohemia. So when we finally arrived we met the lovely Miss Sharon (above).

And my Mum (above left). That’s right my Mum has started her own blog! As soon as she starts posting I’ll give you all the link 😉

We waited for others to show up (around 15 people RSVP’d) but no one did! So we made the best of it and had an awesome night!

James was driving but Sharon, my Mum and I decided to order a bunch of cocktails to try. To be perfectly honest none of us usually drink so we only had a sip of each one LOL.

Most of them looked very pretty but holy bajeebus were they disgusting! I can’t STAND the taste of alcohol! YUK!

James was clearly the star of the night! I can’t believe he can hold up that heavy camera to take photos of himself >_< This next one is such a terrible photo but I like it for some reason anyway:

Of course being a typical blogger I can twitter with one hand and take delicate sips of some disgusting green tea concoction with the other…

There was sooooooo much food! We decided to only get 1 platter in the end but there was still so much! We each ended up taking home a doggy bag XD

How cute is Sharon!? Her dress was so pretty and she even had matching blue earrings!

James thought this would be hilarious…

My outfit for the night… Ok it’s mostly white but the blue sailor top I was planning had a gigantic pink stain on it I didn’t know about until last minute 🙁

My Mum was wearing the Christmas nails I made for her and she was being the perfect blogger taking photos of everything XD

Our lovely photographer for the night:

Bohemia has a free Nintendo Wii with a big screen so we played bowling!

Next time we want to go bowling at a really alley 😀

Nuffnang sent me a package with yummy blue candy canes:

We put them to good use!

And I had a fancy little name tag, everyone else got name stickers and they put them on their arms so they looked like gigantic bandaids >_<

The whole party! There might not have been many of us but we had a great time anyway! Next time all of you guys who RSVP’d better show up!!

We had so much fun, thanks Nuffnang!

Cheers and Merry Christmas everyone!

Have you guys been to any awesome holiday parties yet? Did you get to any of the Nuffnang Christmas Party in other cities?