The Pineneedle Collective: Katie Buddle

Showing posts with label Katie Buddle. Show all posts

Saturday 10 May 2014

DIY Egg Brooch/Hair Clip

Hello! Because we are both free from uni, Katie and I have decided that every Tuesday is now going to be Craft Tuesday (we really need a better name. Any suggestions?) Anyway, we have wanted to make these clay fried eggs (I wanted a brooch, Katie wanted to make a hair clip) for a while now, so on our first ever Craft Tuesday we decided to give it a go! The original tutorial that we used is from Girl Guts, but it's always nice to see things in motion too, so we decided that we would make a short little video tutorial on what we did!

The materials that you will need are listed in the video's description. Enjoy!

Tuesday 15 April 2014

Blue! Polka Dots! Gingham! And Maths!

So check it out. I'm friends with a real-life Spice Girl.

Dress is from Bonne Chance | bag is thrifted | socks from a market | shoes from Yeswalker | hair clip c/o Sarsparilly

Now that I've convinced Katie to start blogging I'm fairly sure that my outfit photos are going to become 15% more ridiculous. Having someone to take photos with is much more fun than hanging out alone with my tripod or my grumpy boyfriend (who only becomes grumpy when I ask him to take photos, please keep that in mind, but it's not much fun).

So! My outfit. I was somewhat disappointed with this Bonne Chance dress as it literally has no room for my bust - I can only squeeze into it if I don't wear a bra and have my boobs flattened like crazy! While their other dresses usually fit me around the bust, this particular one is almost like a child's dress that has been scaled up but they forgot to account for puberty. While I love Bonne Chance's gorgeous dresses, their sizing is a little inconsistent - for example this one, although it gives the exact same bust measurements, is a LOT more roomy. However, it has inspired me to make a tutorial for you guys to show you what you can do when a dress is too small for you, but you really want to keep it! Stay tuned.

Katie's outfit in these photos is also 50% acquired from my own wardrobe - I gave Katie these pants (which I wore here) and boots (which I wore here), and I really like how she styled it up in a completely different way to what I would have done! It's really interesting seeing your clothes being used for a style that you wouldn't normally wear yourself! I have also slowly been learning that giving away your clothes to people who'll actually wear them loads is much more satisfying than hoarding them forever and never wearing them, haha.

So how are you all? I'm super, super busy and wish I could be posting more!! Uni has been stressing me out like a motherflipper, meaning I can't take as many photos of my outfits as I would like! If you have instagram, I have been documenting more of my outfits on there lately because it only takes 2 seconds - so you can follow me there (as "littlepineneedle") just in case you've been missing my outfit posts lately ;)

Lastly - this video is SO good! Maths & philosophy, I'm nerding out! You should appreciate this video even if you don't really like maths (I'm somewhat terrified of maths myself, and I am hoping that watching videos about it will trick me into suddenly being good at it... or something. Yup).

All the love in the world,

Friday 11 April 2014

Red Hair, Docs & Polka Dots | Gender & Genetics

Even though it was raining non-stop yesterday, Katie and I had very important plans to take outfit photos, and neither the rain nor the fact that it made our hair mega-frizzster could stop us!

I dressed both myself and Katie up in my new dresses from Bonne Chance collections - and I had way too much fun doing this because Katie is basically like a porcelain doll (with the ridiculously pretty long hair to match). These Bonne Chance dresses are an absolute dream - though I have to say that if you're any bustier than I am (which isn't very difficult), size up! They're also very short - which for me, means that I get to wear my super cute lace bloomers underneath, hooray! Both of our shoes are thrifted authentic Dr Martens - and both pairs were less than $10, I am proud to say. I got these Mary Jane airwaves for $4 just last week - it was one of those op-shops finds that you make where you start hyperventilating in the middle of the store because you can't believe your good luck (um, other people do that, right? Or is it just me?)

Hop along to Katie's blog to see more photos!

As has been the mission on my blog for a good year, I want to dismantle the stereotype that you can't be interested in fashion and be smart at the same time! In the same vein, while you can get together with your friends and spend the day dressing up, taking photos and talking about dresses, you shouldn't have to hide the fact that you're also passionately interested in physics/geology/politics/feminism/food photography/statistics or whatever else floats your boat! So not only are Katie and I collaborating on our outfits today, we're also collaborating on our general nerdiness ;)

While I'm a biology/genetics major, Katie is a gender studies major, so I think that this is fitting to talk about today: there was a discussion going down on real scientists this morning which encapsulated both (and read through all the tweets if you have time/are procrastinating, it was a fascinating discussion!)

Science, especially where genetics is concerned, often makes the mistake of using the words "sex" and "gender" interchangeably, when they're both actually two very different things. Science is also littered with gendered language. For instance, in scientific textbooks, the Y chromosome is often referred to as the "male" chromosome.

While sex is, traditionally and from a genetic point of view, determined by the chromosomes you are born with (and in no way restricts you to being either female or male), gender is something that exists on a continuum, that is fluid and informed by individual identity and culture.

The word sex is not interchangeable with the word gender.
— realscientists (@realscientists) April 10, 2014

This discussion led me to this article, which is what I want to share with you all:

"Researchers determine Y-chromosome mutations reveal precariousness of male development".

This research done last year shows that even the chromosomes you are born with does not determine your sex - a father with XY chromosomes can have a daughter with XY chromosomes - and additionally that the "switch" that turns on male characteristics in a developing foetus is actually not a very strong switch at all, and very small environmental factors or mutations can stop that switch from flipping. Whereas the development of vitally important organs like the heart, brain or lungs have many genetic safeguards to prevent something like a small environmental change affecting their growth, sex determination is not under the same pressure. It has been theorized that this "weak switch" is helpful for spreading genetic diversity - it's beneficial to the population to have individuals who defy traditional sex binaries. Or, it might just be a random accident.

But whatever its cause, through our genetic makeup, sex is evolutionarily designed to be fluid, and "biological sex" might reflect the spectrum of genders more than was ever thought.

Sunday 23 March 2014

Gingham pants, good friends and deadly microbes

Blouse, pants, cardigan and bag are all thrifted | Shoes are Naot | Cherries are c/o Sarsparilly

Look at me, wearing pants! What an unusual sight to see. I found these gingham pants at that "buy per kilo" op shop I visited the other day (whose name I am very selfishly withholding lest all the trendy Sydney kids descend upon the place and take all the good stuff), as well as this cardigan! I paired this with some dress-brogues and cherries, and my house-purse for good measure. Oh, and an old man decided to stand across the other side of the road and gawp at me the entire time that I was taking photos. Next time that happens, I'm going to stare right back at the person until they walk away. People can be so rude when you're doing something so "unusual" as standing on the street taking photos of yourself, goodness.

So something very exciting happened last week - I convinced my good friend Katie to start blogging (and I even designed her blog for her)! This means I finally have someone (who doesn't currently live in Japan) who'll take photos with me in awkward public places - which means less awkward-looking-selfies-because-I'm-being-stared-at-on-the-street, woo hoo! - AND she's also super cute and wears the coolest stuff so I'm too excited to take photos, make things and chat about blogging together! While we do have (somewhat) different styles, our outfits usually complement each other - we usually match on the whole red hair/red lips thing, and are both partial to a dressing like a 1950s pin up model now and again!
Anyway, you may have seen me plugging her new blog all over social media (I'm too excited to have a blog friend who lives just around the corner!) BUT if you haven't had a read yet, you should go and check out her blog, Buddle & Squeak, and say hi!

Oh and can you believe these photos were taken on an iPhone (and unedited??) I might as well go and throw my super-fancy SLR in the bin now. Yikes.

Also, thank you all so much for your feedback on this post when I was thinking of changing my blog's name to "The Pin & Needle Collective". Well, I've decided to keep the Pineneeedle Collective as is! Sure, I might not have liked the name when I first started blogging, but it's come to be representative of this whole space right here, which is a fact I definitely can't ignore! So, I've decided to stop being embarrassed when people ask me what my blog is called, and embrace The Pineneedle Collective as a name! *woo*

So because I'm in a creative mood right now (and also wanting to learn how to embroider), check out these sciencey microbrial cross-stitches!

Alicia Watkins from Etsy makes these amazingly nerdy & cute cross-stitches of various microbes and diseases (and that's probably the first time plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria, has ever been called "cute"). I'm smitten. Particularly with the two cross-stitches below!

Although these two guys here can cause some pretty deadly illnesses, they are also two of the most important microbes to science, and I work with them in the lab all the time.

E. coli loves to grow everywhere and is super versatile, and so they are the microbe of choice for molecular biologists. By using E. coli, you can clone lengths of DNA, make biofuels, and make important proteins for medical purposes (to name a few applications)! For example many brands of insulin (used by people with diabetes) are made inside an E. coli cell!

Bacteriophage, on the other hand, are viruses - and they're able to latch onto bacterial cells such as E. coli using those long green "legs" you can see in the cross-stitch above, inject their own DNA, and take over the cell, often hijacking it to make thousands more copies of itself... then ungraciously bursting the cell into pieces. What a badass! However just like E. coli they've revolutionized biotechnology, and are extensively used in research laboratories for things like cloning DNA. And because they're such great bacteria-killers, they're also used to help "sanitise" foods such as cheeses, meat and poultry.

I hope that you've all had a lovely weekend so far!