The Pineneedle Collective

Friday, 14 March 2014

5-Minute Retro Hair Bow & Hairstyle Tutorial

The other morning I had a bit of spare time and decided that i wanted to do my hair up in a beehive with a gingham bow for University! And so I decided that I might as well film what I did (especially for the people who have asked me to do a hair-styling tutorial.) Enjoy!

p.s. If you *just* want to see the hair-styling bit, go straight to 1:34!

Thursday, 13 March 2014

Little Sailor / Why Can't You Tickle Yourself?

Dress c/o Romwe (old) | cardigan is my friends | cherries c/o Sarsparilly | socks and shoes are thrifted

I am very, very fond of nautical themes and 50s-inspired styles at the moment! This is especially because my good friend Clare, who just came back from Japan, bought me a Zipper magazine - basically my fashion bible, and impossible to get a copy of in Australia - and gingham, cherries, nautical stripes and pin-up style are all what's very much on trend. Outfits like this are inspiring me so much:

Images are all from March 2014's Zipper magazine

Also, thank you for your thoughtful responses on my last post. It was really helpful... but I'm still so undecided! Who knows what will happen!

But forget that - here's a really interesting video for you to watch! Discovery News gets into the neurologics & biologics of why you can't tickle yourself. Check it out:

So much love to all of you!

Monday, 10 March 2014

Nautical Cherries / The Pin & Needle Collective

Dress is Glitters for Dinner | shoes are Golden Ponies | bloomers are wholesale (super old) | hair clip is c/o Sarsparilly

This was the outfit I wore to the International Women's Day March in Sydney on the weekend! For some reason, Saturday was a day where many strangers were just really confused about my outfit. Three times I was asked if I was dressed up for a party or special event. "No..." I replied, "I just wanted to dress like a sailor today," which seemed to confuse people even more. What's weird about wanting to dress up like a sailor? Have I really moved that far away from "mainstream" fashion? Is Sydney just really boring, fashion-wise? Or do people just not get "nautical"??

So I'm about 80% sure that I'm going to be changing my blog name. In fact, this came about because it was miss-spelt in this (wonderful) zine that I contributed to the other day as "Pin and Needle Collective", and I went "hey. Hey now. Pin and needle. Like sewing! Oh my glob! That's way better than Pineneedle Collective!" I have also never really liked Pineneedle Collective (and never thought anyone would end up reading this, so I didn't bother choosing a good name...), and this small name-change would also let me keep the same domain name, which was one of the major issues preventing me changing my blog's name in the past! So, what do you guys think of Pin & Needle Collective? It can even be thought of as "Pin e Needle Collective", and I can pretend that I'm being fancy and Italian (because "e" is "and" in Italian). There's a very tenuous connection there, don't worry, because my boyfriend is Italian and I totally visited Italy last year...

But I don't know. There's still 20% of me that's grown quite attached to Pineneedle Collective. So let me know what you guys think. I want to hear from both people who've been reading along for a while, as well as people who've only just discovered my blog! You will definitely help me to make up my mind.

I hope that you're all having a wonderful week thus far,

Thursday, 6 March 2014

DIY: Turn a Jumpsuit into a Dress

I have a new video on my youtube channel today, showing you all how I turned a full-length jumpsuit into a cute lil' dress! You can see the outfit post featuring this dress here.

From the looks of the tag, my jumpsuit was originally from the late 70s/early 80s, and it had some fantastic shoulder-pads to boot (I may have removed these). However, I really liked the fabric, the pleats and the overall fit of the jumpsuit – everything, really, apart from the whole… jumpsuit-thing. So I turned it into a cute floral dress.

p.s. please excuse the bad hair in the video - I made this while I was letting my hair dry!

I hope that you're all having a great day!

Wednesday, 5 March 2014

Back to School! & Printed Houses

I am finally back at university this week! I'm really excited about the subjects that I'm doing - computer programming, genomics and protein biochemistry. I think that I'm most excited about genomics - being able to make transgenic organisms for various medical/industrial applications is way too cool - although I also think that programming is also going to be really interesting! I've only ever done a very small amount of computer programming before, and I'm not totally sure what I'm going to use it for just yet (although if my blog suddenly gets all super flashy and pro-looking, you'll know why).

Related science factoid for the day (to go with my house bag)? The University of Southern California has built a monster-sized 3D-printing machine that can print a whole house in only 24 hours.

Image from Inhabitat.com

You can see some amazing video of such a machine in action, printing out hollow walls with fiber reinforced concrete here. How cool is that??

As a side note, I saw 3D printers for sale at my local stationery supplies store for $1500 the other day. Gosh I was tempted to blow my savings right then and there. But then I remembered that the average price for 3D printers was $4000 when I first wrote about them, only one year ago! So going off that, in one more year's time, the price should have dramatically decreased yet again. And as an update to that post, it's good to see that things like 3D fashion are much better than they were one year ago (see Thingyverse, and yes, that's MUCH better than the state of the designs last year!)

I hope that you're all having a lovely day,

Sunday, 2 March 2014

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Dress is DIY | bow is DIY | tights from Daiso | shoes are Naot Kedma's | lipstick is MAC (Ruby Woo)

Ever since I made this caterpillar dress, and was made aware of the existence of real hungry caterpillar fabric by some lovely blog readers, I have been trying to get my hands on some to make another dress with! I eventually tracked down a few different hungry caterpillar prints at fabric.com. I'm really happy with how the back of the dress turned out (I basically tried to copy the back of this dress without the scallops) BUT I feel like something is missing, and so I'm not completely happy with it yet.
I think that I probably need to add a waistband to break up the middle section, but I'm not sure what fabric I should use for it. The top or the bottom fabric? A different colour? Or is it missing someting else? Throw your ideas at me, I'd really appreciate your input! (And I'll totally mail the person/people with my favourite ideas a hungry caterpillar hair bow, too. Incentive! Yeah!)

I learnt something which I never knew about caterpillars the other day! I was actually listening to the Radiolab episode "Black Box" when I learnt this (which was a really, really good episode - you should listen to it if you have the time.)

Image from Radiolab

When caterpillars become butterflies, they undergo a period of metamorphosis in which they shed their skin and wrap themselves up into a chrysalis, which I knew. But what I didn't know was that during the process of metamorphosis, the caterpillar itself literally turns to mush inside it's chrysalis. Enzymes digest the body of the caterpillar into a "soup" of fluids and cells, and from there, it reforms into a butterfly.

This in an excerpt from How Stuff Works on the process:

Much of the body breaks itself down into imaginal cells, which are undifferentiated -- like stem cells, they can become any type of cell. The imaginal cells put themselves back together into a new shape.

In the 16th Century, after observing this process, naturalists believed that caterpillars were actually dying and then a completely new life form - the butterfly - was arising from the goo, so degraded did the original caterpillar appear. We now know that the butterfly is, genetically, the same animal that went into the chrysalis, and that even though the majority of the body turns into goo, it can even retain its memories of its life as a caterpillar.

The story on radiolab about the metamorphosis of caterpillars is amaaazing and I recommend that you listen, right now (click here if you can't view the embedded player below). It gets all metaphysical and less science-y in the last four minutes, but it's definitely still worth a listen.

(Go to ~0:20 to skip the ads)

I hope that you're all having a woooonderful day!

p.s. The winner of the $200 Sarsparilly giveaway is Nancy W.! Thank you so much for everyone who entered. I so look forward to bringing you more giveaways just like this, with amazing handmade and smaller online stores such as Sarsparilly, in the future! Thank you for supporting them!

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