$100 giftcard giveaway from US Trendy! // CLOSED

Hello and happy December, beautiful blog readers! Today on my blog US Trendy is giving away a $100 giftcard for their site. As Christmas is coming up, this would be a pretty awesome Christmas present for yourself, or for someone you know. A little bit about US Trendy first. US Trendy is an Indie Fashion Marketplace, featuring 14000 designers from over 100 countries around the world. They stock bang-on-trend but unique, indie pieces and designs, so you can be sure if you're shopping here that you're not just going to just look like everyone else. Some awesome brands that they stock you might know (and possibly my favourites too, haha): AX Paris, Miss Patina, Chicwish, Kiki's Boutique, Kindred Sole & Messes of Dresses. There are 4 steps you need to take in order to enter, and you won't be able to win unless you complete all 4 steps. You will need a Pinterest account to enter! 1. Follow US Trendy on Pinterest (pinterest.com/ustrendy/) 2. Go to ustrendy.com and find your favourite items 3. Create a Pinterest board called "My US Trendy Wishlist" and add your favourite US trendy items here! Tag each one #ustrendypineneedle so that I can track your entries. Check out my board here to see how it works! 4. Lastly, post a link to your board, plus some way for me to contact you, on the comments below this post. I'll be judging the boards on the basis of their creativity and choosing a winner, so take your time :) * for example, a good idea might be to put together one totally awesome outfit on the board ;) * Competition is open internationally and ends on the 15th of December, so you have just over 2 weeks to enter. Also it'd be nice if you were following my blog in some way - be it GFC, Bloglovin', facebook, twitter etc - any of them are fine ;) Good luck!

I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike

This is possibly the third post on my blog that I've named after a Queen song. Haha.. However I'm going to go right out there and unashamedly state that I love Queen. I have so many good memories from every party ever in my teenager years dissolving into long Queen medleys (particularly Bohemian Rhapsody), that hearing a song by them never fails to bring a smile to my face. Plus, Bicycle Race is awesome. Anyone else secretly love Queen (or at least have a soft spot)? wearing skirt - c/o Oasap top - c/o Oasap ring - c/o Oasap socks - Tutuanna sunflower clips - the Little Pineneedle shoes - Label Shoes c/o Chictopia Speaking of bikes, and seguing into some science, did you know that while physicists can build a telescope to see what elements made up the early universe and accelerate particles to the speed of light in gigantic underground tunnels, they don't really know how bicycles work?? It was thought to be for many years either the gyroscopic effect, or the caster effect, but it's been shown through building bicycles that either don't have or counteract these forces that bikes still work without these forces. A bike will keep moving without its rider as long as its accelerated constantly, but as for why... scientists still don't have the answer. I think it's pretty amazing that science has been able to tell us so much and contribute such a great amount to our lives (I mean, computers?! Internet? Medicine? Our much increased life spans? The human genome project? The LHC?!!) but we don't know how bicycles work! Got to love that. Anyway, I should also mention that I have a bunny rabbit ring. And it's awesome. Hope you're all having a beautiful week! It's summer tomorrow, eek! (Sorry, Northern Hemisphere :( )

Sunflowers

Here's an outfit I made to go with my new DIY'd collar clips! I matched the sunflower clips with this floral vintage skirt from Japan - one of my favourite items in my wardrobe in fact, although I never remember to wear it! wearing blouse - Vintage sunflower clips - the Little Pineneedle skirt - Vintage bag - Vintage socks - Cotton On Body shoes - Vintage Sunflowers are often used as an image to depict the sun... so today I'm going to talk about many suns (whew, that was a stretch, bear with me). I discovered a beautiful, incredible astronomy based site today - it's called 100,000 stars and it's a new google chrome plugin. note: I think you need Google chrome for it to work. Starting with our sun as the centre of the visualisation, it allows you to zoom right out and view our whole galaxy from every angle, as well as giving the names and positions of stars that we can observe on the galactic plane. Click through to the site and watch the "take a tour" video... it's so beautifully made and will definitely have the effect of making any of your problems seem... well... insignificant. Mind blowing, I think is the correct term to use here. Hope you're all having an amazing day,

DIY Sweater/Collar Clips Tutorial

I've never been so excited about a project than today's one! Want to learn how to make your very own customised collar/sweater clips? This is how you do it. WHAT YOU NEED There's quite a lot of materials you will need for this DIY, including: note: moulds must be silicone to go in the oven. You can even use silicone ice-cube trays if you want! I got my moulds here. But search for "silicone mould" on ebay or somewhere similar if you're not from Australia! Maybe you could use these? (Mine is kids modelling clay designed for ages "4 and up", haha. But it works!) WHAT YOU DO Step 1: Preheat your oven to approx. 150°C (300°C). Step 2: Tear off a small amount of clay. Roll it into a little ball, and press it gently into the mould. Press it gently down and smooth out the edges. Then use a knife (I used a butter knife, haha) to scrape away the excess. Step 3: Place it face-down on a baking tray, and pop it in the oven for about 15 minutes. (The larger your mould, the longer time it will need in the oven) Step 4: Making sure it's dry enough, carefully lift the mould (if it's dry the mould should lift easily). If it's still a bit wet (ie has dark patches), then leave it in the oven for a bit longer, but you can take the mould out now if you want. Step 5: Paint! Use acrylic paints. Heavy-bodied paints are better as they come out thicker and more vibrant. Step 6: Once the pain is dry, use a paintbrush to apply a layer of Mod Podge. While it's drying, move on to the next step. Step 7: Separate a small section of chain with your pliers. Attach these to your clips, one on each end (make sure your clips have little holes in them to attach chain to!) Step 8: Use strong glue (mine is woodworking glue, but craft glue probably works fine as well) to attach the flat side of your clips to the back of each flower. Let it dry overnight, and you can wear your clips in the morning! These blue flower clips are still drying as I type this up. But here are some I made earlier... and they can be worn on your sweater or your collar! And you can buy any kind of moulds to use for your clips, or you can mould the clay by hand! Here's some examples of other shapes I made while I was making these clips... Hope you enjoyed this DIY, and if you happen to make your own collar clips, send me a photo - I'd love to see what you come up with! And if you have any tips or tricks (I just started making these, so I'm possibly doing something wrong somewhere), let me know about them!

Little Red Boots

I bought myself the cutest red boots ever as a present for finishing my exams. I’ve been at the beach, and (more or less) wearing this outfit every day, occasionally swapping the shirt and skirt for denim shorts and a t-shirt. I am really enjoying pairing pops of red with light blue and white at the moment. wearing skirt - DIY tie - c/o Flapper Girl backpack - c/o Oasap blouse - vintage hat - c/o Wholesale boots - Ebay So when I was down at the beach the other day I became really fascinated with these little guys (there were hundreds washed up on the beach and they're pretty poisonous - not great for swimming). (image source) Also... "Mr." blue bottle is an entirely inaccurate term, as you are about to see.  They are known as "Blue Bottle Jellyfish" (aka "Portuguese Man O' War"), but as I found out, they aren't jellyfish at all - in fact they are actually "siphonophores", and they aren't even one animal, they're a colony of little animals called "zooids". Each zooid is it's own free-living solitary animal, but these asexual and specialised zooids remain attached to each other in a big colony - the blue bottle - for their entire lives. Some zooids perform the "eating" function for the blue bottle, some are the swimmers which propel the creature through the water, and some perform the function of the poisonous stinger, but they all work together in a colony to make up what appears as one creature! Here's a link to an awesome site about siphonophores, and I want to share an extract from it which I thought was really cool: "Siphonophores challenge us to think about what we mean when we call something an individual, a concept that we usually think of as being quite straightforward. Is a single zooid or an entire colony the siphonophore “individual”? ... Humans function as ecological, behavioral, and evolutionary individuals. But they are made up of many cells. So is the entire human an individual, or are each of the cells individuals?" Anyway, siphonophores are my new favourite creature.