Pale Polka Dots & Pastels / How Are Seashells Made?

Since I moved out of home I have not been able to buy myself any new clothes - otherwise I wouldn't be able to afford to eat - however this vintage dress is fairly new. I got it from my (now) local markets about a month ago, from a girl who was basically my exact age, body size and style and getting rid of all her old clothes. I could have easily made her a very rich lady that day, but I had enough self control to only buy one of her amazing dresses. I chose this one for the amazing collar detail, and the interesting separation of the top and bottom halves of the dress (the top bit is all lace underneath). I decided to make the collar detail even more interesting today by adding these supppper cute kitty collar clips sent to me by the incredible Ladybird Likes. Ladybird Likes makes the coolest brooches out of old sewing patterns and wooden cut-out animals... you definitely should go and check the shop out! dress - Thrifted clips - c/o Ladybird Likes tights - Ebay shoes - c/o Sammydress hat - c/o Wholesale When I visited the beach last week, I went on a little bit of a sea shell-collecting rampage. They were so pretty, I couldn't just leave them lying around on the beach! #hoarder4lyf After checking nothing was living inside them, I cleaned all the junk out of them and let them dry. I had planned to do something crafty with them, or something... (if you don't already have the mind of a hoarder, you wouldn't understand the strange urge that makes us collect everything which might be even slightly useful some far-off day in the future)... but then I accidentally left them sitting on this table and went home without them. Still, I realised that I didn't have a clue how sea shells are created. Are they created by living creatures? Are they made out of living tissue like cells, or are they more similar to rocks? How on earth do they form the shapes that they make? So I did a little bit of researching. Sea shells are made by sea creatures from the mollusca phylum, including snails, clams and oysters. The shells are not made of cells though - rather, they are made of calcium carbonate, which is excreted by the sea creature in a bottom-up fashion. The shell is actually what is called their "exo-skeleton", which basically means a skeleton which exists outside the body. The shells must be able to grow larger as the sea creature grows, so this bottom-up way of growing works well to accommodate that. The newest part of a sea snail's shell, for example, is the opening of the shell where the animal's head peeks out (the largest part of the shell). The Scientific American has written a really good answer to this question, which I reckon you should read if you are interested in shells (it's also got stuff about turtle shells, which are very different to sea shells). Hermit crabs, on the other hand, whom I also saw plenty of on the beach that day, don't make their own shells like these other sea creatures do - they borrow the shells that the molluscs make. That's like wearing another animal's skeleton. Crazy hermit crabs. When I'm older I'm totally going to be that nerd-parent who enthusiastically tries to teach their kids science things when they're on school holidays and just want to build sand castles. Ah well ;) I hope you're all super well! Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Carousel / DIY Science Experiments

This gorgeous new dress lent itself perfectly to long, curly orange hair and a big floppy hat. Isn't the print on this dress lovely? I really, really want to wear it to some kind of amusement park, a fair or even to some market stalls. Visually, it would go so well with fairy floss and a big old-school rainbow lollipop. *Sigh* if only I knew people who  were crazy about doing a whole day's worth of themed photo-shoots, and really wanted to use me as a model. I had to take these photos on my own with a tripod, and it's okay because it's just in my backyard, but taking the whole set-up out to an amusement park on my own would be a little bit too daunting (and difficult)! dress - c/o Sheinside socks - c/o Sock Dreams shoes - c/o Chictopia Shop bag - Thrifted hat - somewhere in Osaka wig - c/o Choies I'm going to do a little series on DIY home science experiments! Here's the first: putting a corn starch solution on a speaker. This is how you make it, although I claim no responsibility for ruined speakers. I am so going to try this out soon. First, let this video inspire you: What's happening? Well, this corn-starch solution, called "oobleck", is what is known as a "shear-thickening" fluid. This means when you apply force or stress to the liquid, it becomes thicker, or more viscous. If you threw oobleck at a wall, rather than exploding in all directions like any normal fluid (like water) would, it will instead bounce right off the wall before settling on the ground and becoming a puddle of goop. You can see a cool video of people running over oobleck here. I'm not entirely sure what's happening in the above video, but I guess that the sound waves, which are causing vibrations, apply a small amount of stress to the liquid, causing it to become slightly more viscous as the vibrations move it around, which give the weird temporary moving "monster" structures you saw above. Or something else is going on, because oobleck is a fluid with some really weird properties (if you guys know how it works, let me know!) Also, apparently, lower frequencies work best, so use a song with a lot of bass or deep voices :) Good luck! Let me know if you try it out! p.s. I announced a 1 million pageviews giveaway earlier today, if you missed it! Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

1 Million Pageviews Giveaway! / CLOSED

I reached an excitingly arbitrary number of pageviews on my blog a few weeks ago - 1 Million! That's 1,000,000 times that people have looked at my blog. Whoa. So I wanted to thank you all for visiting my blog with this little giveaway (and I may do another with something handmade by me :D). This giveaway is a collaboration with a long-time sponsor of mine, OASAP! The winner will get one of the items in the above picture of their choice (most are available in many different colours as well). Up for grabs is your choice of the following: Candy Skater Skirt | Denim Shorts | Mini Mesh Skirt | Triangle Print Shirt | Striped Letter Denim Cutoffs | Crochet Vest | Eagle T-Shirt | Cloud Sunglasses All you need to do for one entry is to register on OASAP, but there are several other ways of gaining extra entries as well! Use the rafflecopter widget below to enter. a Rafflecopter giveaway (Results of the Cichic giveaway will be announced shortly, by the way. Thanks for your patience!) Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Stripes, Denim & Science Museums / The World's Smallest Movie

I'm wearing pants! What is this unusual thing? I just counted, and out of all the outfits I've worn on my blog, I've worn jeans just three times. Usually, I don't wear jeans because I feel like they look too casual, and I feel too boring wearing them (I am someone who dresses up even when going up the street to buy bread). However, when I saw these stripey ones on Sheinside I thought I'd give jeans another go, because the bold vertical stripes are far from unnoticeable. My friend Hannah gave me these badges that she thrifted the other day. Aren't they sweet? I LOVE the science museum one, and they go super well with this denim tie-shirt. jeans - c/o Sheinside denim shirt - c/o Oasap badges - Gift from my friend Hannah (thrifted) shoes - c/o Topb2c Did you guys catch this the other day? Using a machine that can move around single atoms on surfaces, and by moving atoms one at a time, scientists at IBM have created "The World's Smallest Movie". The images in the movie are magnified about 100 million times, and the whole thing was captured at -260°C. Each frame features a separate picture, put together using a stop-motion animation technique. The movie itself is not going to win any Nobel prizes, but it shows the kind of awesome things you can achieve if you work in science. And it does raise possibilities for future technologies. Atoms, the smallest "unit" that makes up everything in our universe, including your computer, your chair and you yourself, are so incomprehensibly tiny. I can't even believe that we can see and image them, let alone show off and make a movie out of them. Here's a link to a video about the making of the movie, which is worth a watch, but I've embedded the actual "World's Smallest Movie" below for your viewing pleasure: Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Between Two Lungs

My friend Hannah popped around to visit today, and I really liked her outfit PLUS we were kind of matching, so I convinced her into taking these dorky photos with me. But did you notice - she is wearing an amazing anatomical lungs locket (from Peggy Skemp)! Do you guys remember me blogging fanatically about anatomical jewellery back in this post? I think I might have to borrow it off her... I'm wearing a a brand new pinafore from AX Paris, which I just got in the mail this morning (fastest shipping EVER, it was sent 6 days ago and may I remind you that I live in Australia??) - and it's so very pretty. Not only is it a pinafore but it is paisley printed - I want to do a proper photo shoot with it very soon!  blouse - c/o Oasap pinafore - c/o AX Paris socks - Cotton On shoes - c/o Yes Walker necklace - c/o Merrin & Gussy blouse - Thrifted necklace - Peggy Skemp skirt - Thrifted tights - Marks and Spencer shoes - Kmart hair clips - Drugstore A really quick science fact about lungs tonight (because I want to go to bed) - it seems intuitive that when your body forces you to take a breath in, it's all about oxygen. If you don't have enough oxygen, you breathe, right? However, what actually has the most influence over the action of your lungs is the levels of carbon dioxide in your blood, rather than oxygen levels. A waste-product of cellular respiration, carbon dioxide needs to be removed from your blood, and so that's what your lungs are most concerned with doing - because if too much carbon dioxide builds up in your blood, your blood turns acidic. Hope you're all having/had a great day, Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Red Head, Daisy Dress / Alien Life in the Solar System (part 4)

So, I'm pretty excited guys. Why? Because I have a housemate who can take photos! And, even better, he is someone that I don't even have to bribe or coerce into taking blog photos for me! (I'm sure any other bloggers reading this will be very familiar with that kind of frustration, if you aren't already lucky enough to know heaps of professional photographers.) So thank you Josh for taking these lovely photos for me. This dress is a hand-me-down from my mum, who rocked it in the early 1990s. The simple shift shape is perfect for a lazy warm afternoon, and it doesn't really need any dressing-up either because of it's cute little daisies appliqués on the bodice. Just add a cute animal bag and you're good to go! I see simple shift dresses like this in thrift stores all the time, and it would be pretty easy, if you were so inclined, to add a couple of daisy appliqués to said dresses ;)  dress - Hand-me-down from my mum bag - Ebay socks - Cotton On hat - Japan (not sure where) shoes - Chicory The last (maybe) alien world I'll be talking about in this little life-in-the-solar-system series is Io! I mentioned Io back in my post about Europa. Io has some unique characteristics for a moon. The closest moon to Jupiter, Io has at least 400 active volcanoes on its surface, which makes it the most geologically active object in the entire solar system. It's got lava running all over the surface. It's not at all icy, either, being mostly made up of silicate rock coated with sulfur dioxide frost. Like Europa, it also keeps warm via "tidal-heating", caused by Jupiter's gravitational pull (which is also responsible for the crazy amount of volcanoes). So I guess right now you are probably thinking that Io doesn't sound very friendly to life. But just because conditions on Io are so extreme, it doesn't mean that life couldn't exist - it would just be very different to the kind we are used to. It's been suggested that organic molecules could exist underground, inside lava tubes, which could both provide insulation and trap moisture and nutrients. Microbes could be able to "breathe" sulfur the way that we breathe oxygen. The Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE) that is going to do fly-bys of many Jovian moons won't be exploring Io, but it has been stressed by some astrobiologists that Io shouldn't be overlooked as a potential place for life - because, if life were found on Io, then it would make the possibilities of life existing on other moons and planets in the the galaxy far more likely. Not the prettiest moon ever... Image credit Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr