The Pineneedle Collective

Monday, 1 April 2013

30 Days of Dressing Up: April 2013

I hope you all enjoyed my April 2013 "Dressing Up" challenge! Hopefully this will help inspire your wardrobes for this transitional month (we're heading into winter here, but for most of you reading this, you're probably right in the middle of Spring!) You can get a lot of different outfits out of only 12 items. Also, check out March's "31 Days" here.

What's your favourite combination?

Sunday, 31 March 2013

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Saturday, 30 March 2013

A Colourful Mermaid

This is a very colourful outfit that I have been planning in my mind for quite a long time - I just had to wait for all of the pieces to come to me in the mail (all the way to Australia, so it's been a while!) I'm very happy because it turned out exactly as I imagined. I'm going to save this outfit for an overcast, rainy day.

blouse - c/o Oasap

tights - c/o Oasap

shoes - c/o YesWalker

skirt - c/o Faith & Lola

necklace - c/o I Love Crafty

Some days, I just want to post pretty outfits on my blog. The science I'm really focusing on at the moment at uni is all about eukaryotic transcriptional and translational regulation and how cells regulate their mRNAs, eIFs and other proteins to control gene expression. While I am finding it very fascinating, it's not the easiest thing for communicating here (in fact I showed it to Luci, who just said "yeah... that was all gobbledegook. Like, I got some words were in English, but that was all I understood.")

So I hope you all don't get mad at me for missing out on a science fact today. Alright... a little science fact then. Many of you were interested by my Synaesthesia post the other day, and said that you also strongly associate colours with numbers or letters, but don't actually see them. Have a look at Ideasthesia. Probably, the majority of people have some form of this (just look at the "Kiki and Bouba" effect, for instance. Why would most people associate a spiky shape with the word "kiki" and a rounded shape with "bouba"? Do we all have a predisposition to synaesthetic-like-qualities?).

Thursday, 28 March 2013

Synaesthesia

Beige, stripes and a bow-tie! These are some amazingly cool new stockings from my sponsor Oasap. Though pricey, I'm happy to recommend these ones because they are thick and don't seem like they'll ladder easily (I've also worn them for a few days, and they're all good so far!) There's also a black & white version instead of the so-called "nude" version for anyone with darker skin - I've always though it's pretty unfair that standard "nude" colour always actually means "nude white person" colour, because there's a heck of a lot more skin types out there than this so called "nude". Anyway. They're still cool tights.

blouse - c/o Choies
skirt - Wholesale
tights - c/o Oasap
shoes - Chicory (Japan)
hat - c/o Wholesale
bag - Vintage

After talking about colour perception in my last few posts, a number of people brought up synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is one of the first things to get me interested in neuroscience and the study of human perception, and it's an incredibly wonderful and weird phenomenon!

Synaesthesia is a rare neurological trait, leading to the crossing over of perceptual information: that means people with it can "see colours" in numbers or letters, "taste" words, "smell" days of the week, or "feel" that certain words or numbers have distinct personalities. It can involve any of the senses. Someone talking, for example, can simultaneously be perceived as sounds and as a taste on the tongue by someone with synaesthesia. The most common form is what is called "grapheme colour synaesthesia", where individual letters and numbers are associated strongly with different colours. This type can often help synesthetes with memory tasks where long strings of words, letters or numbers need to be remembered.

It's unclear which parts of the brain are involved in synaesthesia, although a leading theory is that it's due to "cross-wiring" in the brain: neurons (brain cells that can conduct electricity) that are meant to be in sensory system cross over into another sensory system. There is also a theory that all babies are born with "cross-wired" brains, which as we grow, are "pruned back", and that synaesthesia is a failure of the brain to do this properly. (Though the word "failure" puts synaesthesia in a negative light, which I don't think it should be at all. I think it would be a pretty cool thing to have - although experiencing the taste of mouldy detergent every time you heard a particular person's voice wouldn't be so awesome).

The wikipedia page on Synesthesia provides some pretty sweet reading.

Hoping you're all feelin' fine,

Tuesday, 26 March 2013

30 Days of Dressing Up: April 2013 (preview)

It's almost April, which means that I'm doing my "Month of Dressing Up" series again! Make sure you check out my last one, March 2013, if you missed the series the first time around!

Anyway, this time I thought I'd make it more interactive for you guys. Below are the items I have chosen to style, and I was wondering if you could suggest any killer combinations. I've already thought up a whole lot, but it's very possible I've missed a few, so if you want your suggestions to appear in my 30 Days of Dressing Up for April, then let me know what you think! (Try and stray away from the super obvious ones if you can. Some unusual combinations that just might work are particularly what I'm looking for.)

Links to the items:

a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l

My previous 31 Days of Dressing Up is here for inspiration.

Giveaway: Win an item of your choice from Tomorrow Never Knows Vintage / CLOSED

Hooray for giveaways! I have another giveaway for the lovely readers of my blog - one item of your choice from TNK Vintage! An adorable and very well-priced vintage boutique operating out of Toronto, TNK Vintage is also offering the readers of my blog a 50% off discount code until the 15th of April - just put in at the code 26790 at the checkout to use it! So if you want to grab something before it disappears... it might be a good idea to use the code and get the item now.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Please use the Rafflecopter widget above to enter this giveaway. There is one mandatory entry and a bunch of additional entries to boost your chances of winning! Please make sure you do them properly, or your entry will be invalid (I do check!)

This giveaway is open internationally until the 15th of April. Good luck!