The Pineneedle Collective

Tuesday 22 December 2015

Community Captions and Translations for my Videos!

Hello! Salut! ¡Hola! Some exciting news - my youtube channel was approved to have community captioning! This means that anybody with a youtube account can go and provide new captions for my videos in any language. You can add captions in real time using a program on youtube, so they're fairly easy to do. Then, they're reviewed by other people to make sure they're correct. Some lovely human being just provided Latin American Spanish subtitles for my DIY crop top video, for example.

Any help that you could provide would be super appreciated! If you enjoy my videos and want other people to be able to enjoy them too, then it would be awesome if you could help out with captioning!

Videos that you can translate into other languages:

You can add subtitles to any of my videos by doing this:

Or you can click on the following links below!

Make Thrift Buy Videos

Get Thready With Me Videos

Others

If you're able to add captions to any of these videos, you'll have my eternal gratitude and you've also helped to make the world a tiny bit more of an accessible place :) so THANK YOU!

Thursday 17 December 2015

DIY Swing Dress

Helloooo! So I have just re-discovered swing dresses and how amazing they look on me! :D Something I love about doing this youtube series is that it forces me to create things that I wouldn't have come up with on my own. I've discovered so many cool styles that I wouldn't ever have made or bought for myself thanks to Make Thrift Buy. Now I've made 3 swing dresses and I'm sure there's going to be many more soon!

Here's the video:

Tonnes of love!!!

(And THANK YOU for all the thought-out, wonderful responses to my previous post. Gahhhhh! You're all the best; so many wise words were spoken! So happy to have you all in my life, even in this small way!!)

Sunday 13 December 2015

Reflecting on Change | Favourite DIY Top & Pants

Long time no fashion post! I've finally come to accept that the nature of my blog has fundamentally changed. When I first started blogging -- gosh, 4.5 years ago -- it was all about showing off my cheap fashion purchases. Slowly, DIY projects began to feature as I discovered my crafty side. Next, my blog became a platform for talking about science, and then a place for me to explore fashion from a more socially-conscious stance. 2 years ago, I toyed with the idea of making a Youtube channel and tentatively uploaded my first video. Posts slowly changed from "look at the stuff I'm wearing!" to "make the stuff I'm wearing!" And here we are today.

Because I began to spend more and more time on my youtube channel, I started to feel like I was neglecting my blog. I felt bad about this because, after all, my blog and its readers were fundamentally important to the initial success of my videos. But as video-making became more and more time consuming, blogging and outfit photos fell by the wayside.

But I finally am in a place where I don't see this change as a sad or negative thing. This blog has been an incredibly important space for me for the past 4 years - it's allowed me to express myself and my style, gain a lot of confidence, make friends, learn how to sew, learn how to communicate science, meet up with wonderful people, escape the daily struggles of living with a chronic illness, and so much more. Just because I'm not as active on it anymore doesn't negate any of that.

One really positive thing that's come from not blogging my outfits everyday is that it's given me a lot more freedom to play around with my personal style. When my content was all about my daily outfits, I always felt like I needed to stay "on brand". If I started wearing something completely different from my usual style, I thought that people would lose interest. I mean, I was always fine with playing around with different fashion genres a little bit, but I still had my set "style".

This, however, is soooo not an outfit would have ever worn previously. I'm not even wearing winged eyeliner!! (What!) I've started wearing snapback caps and pants! Sometimes I dress really minimally, with a simple black top and grey skirt! What?! But this has actually been really liberating for me - recently I felt like my style was in stasis and didn't feel comfortable in what I was wearing a lot of the time, so it's been exciting getting to play around with lots of different styles!

But I have been wondering - Is anybody still out there, reading what I have to say on this blog? Say hi if you are! Especially if you're an old friend of the blog, I'd love to hear from you. What are you up to these days?? While I guess it's cool (and, frankly, terrifying) to have a couple of hundred thousand people regularly watching my videos, it does make me a bit sad to have lost the more closely-knit community that I had around my blog!

Anyway, onto my outfit: this top has to be one of my favourite DIY patterns I've made so far. I've made three of these and recently converted it into a swing dress as well! It's so damn flattering on my body, but probably my favourite thing about it is that I don't have to wear a bra with it (coz it's kinda tight-fitting and holds everything up?? haha). This necklace was a lovely present from Cristina at Now or Never Jewelry, who makes all these pieces herself. It goes with these high-neck tops soooooo perfectly. 10/10 recommend giving her store a visit!

Outfit details

Top - DIY

Necklace - c/o Now or Never Jewelry

Pants - Thrifted

Shoes - Naot Kedma

Lipstick - Bella by Stila Cosmetics

All my love,

Saturday 12 December 2015

DIY Onesie / Kigurumi!

I MADE A ONESIE! This is one of the most time-consuming tutorials I've ever made (~10 hours of filming and 30+ hours of editing later!) but I'm really really happy with how it's turned out!

I hope you all enjoy it! :)

Wednesday 2 December 2015

THE STYLE PILE - a new series!

I have this box, sitting in my craft room, that’s filled with half-finished projects and clothes that I thrifted, AGES ago, with the intention of fixing and doing something cute with them, but have ended up ignoring by throwing them in this box to never think about them again. And it’s turning into a bit of a problem.

This inspired a new youtube series.

In each episode of this new series I’m going to randomly grab an item out of this box and finally fix it, until the box is empty. This series is mostly going to be focused on simple fixes, so they’ll be pretty short little videos, but hopefully they will help teach you some simple sewing techniques and cover more of the basics, and at the same time help you to make your clothes cuter/better! Anyway, I hope you enjoy this new series - I’m really excited about it!

Episode 1:

Episode 2:

Saturday 28 November 2015

DIY High Neck Crop Top

Salutations! This is one of my favourite made-from-scratch DIYs thus far. I'm already working on two more to add to my wardrobe: a really pretty ribbed grey version and a floral version! :D THEY JUST GO WITH EVERYTHING!

Enjoy! (p.s. extra details such as time for the project can be found in the description box of the video on Youtube!)