My Life in Pictures #9

As you can see, basically the last 2 weeks revolved around food. It was really nice spending a lot of time catching up with friends, and it especially made up for the cold weather! The next few weeks will be a little quieter, spent inside job hunting. Hopefully I'll manage to fit in a day to the snow to do a bit of skiing though. The last few weeks I found a photo app that lets me upload portrait photos to instagram, which is a huge help as my new Sony Xperia phone has a really short lens compared to the iphone.

The photo a day project I was involved in this month is coming to again, and I'm really considering going for another month. Some days it's tough to come up with something, but most of the time I'm super proud of my photos, and end up taking a photo of something I would have photographed anyway. I'm also less afraid of taking photos in public now, no fear of taking photos of pretty flowers in peoples front yards, or of a particularly good looking meal.

1. Having tea at Adore tea with friends. The cup said "One may forgive a murder - but a blunder in tea making, never". Also the tea was creme brule flavour, delicious!

2. After my job interview a few weeks ago, I decided to treat myself to some froyo. It was excellent. Chocolate, red velvet and raspberry tart ice cream, with cookie dough, cheesecake, mango, lychee and blueberry bursts, coulis, coconut and milo.

3. Trying out Lime Crime Mint to Be. I'm surprised how much I love this green shade, I think it's going to be amazing for summer.

4. While walking the dog I came across some daffodils! It's quite early to see daffodils about, but I'm not complaining, they're my favourite!

5. While my mum was gardening last weekend she found a frog hiding underneath a pot plant! Crazy!

6. For my birthday I made a pumpkin pie, and oh my it was delicious! You can also see the flowers the boy got me in the background... daffodils and roses.

7. I took this picture of Sadie while walking the dogs, for the #fmsphotoaday challenge. The prompt was sunflare. 

8. My friend and I went out to dinner to the restaurant where the boy works. needless to say I got the plate with the love heart on it :) It was a baileys creme brule with caramelised fig ice cream and berry coulis. So delicious!

You can follow my instagram here, otherwise my username is @Klerr.

Food Friday: Pumpkin and Ricotta Ravioli

One of my favourite foods in Autumn and Winter is pumpkin. I love when your garden gets overgrown with a huge pumpkin plant (unfortunately mine never has, but the boy's backyard did a few years ago and it was fantastic!). I find plain roast pumpkin to be pretty boring, I like to spice it up a bit! As well as making a pie from this pumpkin, I wanted to try making some pasta. Just having it in the sauce wasn't enough, so I gave ravioli a go for the first time. Not only was it my first time making ravioli, I've never made pasta without the help of someone else before, and it turned out perfect! Yay! This is a long recipe, but it's really delicious!

Battle of the Budget Liquid Liner, ft. Rimmel, Essence and Australis!

Essence I Love Punk jumbo eyeliner pen ($4.50), Rimmel Scandaleyes Precision Micro eyeliner ($10.76),  Australis Tiny Tip eyeliner ($12.95)

I'm a big fan of liquid liner. For me, it's the easiest way to get a good winged liner look.  I would prefer gel, as it always seems to last longer, but it's easier for me to use a pen. I had a good thing going with the Covergirl Line Exact liquid liner, but it ran out while I was in England. And they don't sell Covergirl there. So I decided to try something new, and I ended up walking out of Boots with the Rimmel Scandaleyes precision Micro Liner after testing just about every single pen eyeliner in the shop. Since then decided I needed a thicker one and ended up at the Essence stand, and I managed to win an Australis liquid eyeliner in a twitter comp.

What I wore: Winter Daisies

I wore this last week when I had a job interview in a clothing store (didn't work out by the way, boo!). I bought this dress back when it was warm, just after I got home from England. I only got a few wears out of it in the warmer weather, it shrunk a little in the wash so it was a little too short for me to wear without tights. But now it's winter, I can chuck a pair of tights on underneath and a cardigan on and it's perfect. Because this dress is very neutral, I can really go out there with colours for everything else, and I love coloured cardigans and tights. Kmart have a bunch of pink and purple tights at the moment for only $3. I may have gone a little crazy and bought at least one pair of each colour. So far no holes, so I'm pretty happy! You can also see my tattoos through them, which I love. As for the cardigan, both Cotton On and SES had a bunch of coloured cardigans last Autum/Winter, but I haven't seen them this year. Modcloth have a bunch of rad coloured cardigans, but are a little more expensive.

Wish list: Birthday!

This was going to be a wish list for winter, but then I remembered something special that was coming up soon.. My birthday!! I turn big ol' 23 on Tuesday, so can no longer sing 'I'm feeling 22. Poo. It's a bit of a meh birthday to be honest. I'm not doing anything exciting, just going out to dinner with friends, family and the boy. I mean, last year I spent my birthday in Paris (well, traveling to Paris, we didn't get there until late afternoon), so you can't really top that. So here's a bunch of things I'd love for/to wear for my birthday. Even though there's only 1 thing I could actually get by my birthday, haha.

Redwood Black Therapy Shoes c/o FSW $45.99  //  MAC Bloody Brillant Eyeshadow $44US 

MAC Pure Heroine $36  //  Benefit They're Real Push-Up liner $24US

Lime Crime Babette $18US  //  Asos Faux Pearl Triangle Swing Earrings $9.80
All Bands on Deck dress $54.99

It's almost the end of June and I still don't have a good pair of winter boots! I guess it's because it hasn't actually been all that cold. I've have started having a look at boots, and I kinda like these! I've always hated boots with an elastic side like this, they remind me of the boots I had to wear horse riding as a kid which I thought were butt ugly. I haven't been able to fork out money for a new pair of boots yet, but hopefully I can get these soon, especially because they're not pricey at all.
Of course I've managed to find myself wanting items that we can't get in Australia yet. I saw this eyeshadow palette in a pixiwoo video the other day and loved it! I've heard mostly bad things about MAC eyeshadow quads, that they're shadows aren't as good as the single shadows. I don't care. It's pretty! As for Pure Heroine, I'm all about purples! After getting Lime Crime Airborne Unicorn, and then Poisonberry, I'm still after more purples! The darker the better.
I've heard about a thousand good things about this Benefit eyeliner! I have a few eyeliner pens, and a couple of gel liners, but I'm still not satisfied (My Shiseido one is great, but I lack a decent brush to apply it with!). I'm going to have to go to Myer to check this one out though. The last lipstick on my Lime Crime wish list is Babette. It's out of stock everywhere. I won't give up though!
These earrings are super cute! I usually can't wear earrings like this, but these are studs! I love striped dresses, and this dress has a lovely fit too. It would look so cute with a cardigan, stockings, and the boots and earrings shown here.

Food Friday: Not your average smoothies

It's been a while since I bought my blender, and I've been using it quite a lot. It's so easy to get stuck in a little bit of a rut with smoothies and to keep adding the same ingredients all the time. Then it gets boring and you loose the motivation to keep making them. My old blender has recently broken, but soon after I found a Cuisinart SmartPower Blender for $60 less than the RRP, score! It's shiny and new, and has given me the motivation to start getting more creative with my smoothies! Plus, it's way better at blending things more smoothly than my old blender. Coming up with recipes is hard when you're not keen on a lot of fruits - I hate banana and oranges. But, these are 4 recipes that are a bit more different to the usual berry, spinach, cucumber and water smoothies I've been stuck with.

Lime Crime: Geradium, My Beautiful Rocket and Airborne Unicorn!

I've had my eye on getting some Lime Crime lipsticks for a long, long time. It seems like every blogger raves about them, which doesn't help me forget about them. Thanks to Jasmine from Sweetaholic Beauty's epic Lime Crime Collection post and a little bit of time, I finally took the plunge and made an order. Choosing was not easy, there are so many beautiful, bold shades. I wanted to get Poisonberry, but it was out of stock, and ended up picking 3 equally gorgeous shades.

W7 Glitter Polish: Multi Dazzle and Pink Shard

I went to Chemist Warehouse recently to check out their 50% off sale. I've never actually been to a Chemist Warehouse before, I don't live near one. There wasn't anything I had in mind to buy, so I just had a look. I ended up getting a foundation to leave at the boys house (Revlon Colorstay, so much better with the pump!) I didn't want to walk out with just that, and these glitters caught my eye. W7 is a budget brand from the UK. I never paid much attention to it when I was over there (think BOE from Big W and LOL from Kmart) except to have a quick look at their mascaras. Well, turns out they sell it at Chemist Warehouse and their nail polish are $3! There was quite a lot to chose from, but I went with some glitters.

top-bottom: 3 coats Multi Dazzle, 3 coats Pink Shard, 1 coat multi dazzle over Australis Peek-a-Boo, 1 coat Pink Shard over OPI Italian Love Affair.

Pink Shard is a clear based glitter with medium pink hexagons, and white medium hexagons, small circles and thin strips. It also has some medium and small blue glitters in it, not very many but enough to make it seem like it's on purpose. They don't really show up on the nails. Pink Shard has pretty good coverage with 1 coat, with 3 coats being enough to cover the nail.

Multi Dazzle is clear based, full of pink, red, blue, green and silver medium and small glitters. I bought it as a replacement for OPI rainbow connection which has started getting lumpy and gross. I probably would have preferred to pick up the Ulta3 rainbow glitter, but I haven't found it yet. Multi Dazzle's coverage is pretty appalling. One coat gets very sparse coverage, and 3 coats is not much better! This is one of those polishes that you have to dig for glitters.

Both polishes take a while to dry, and can be pretty gloopy already. For $3, I wasn't expecting anything great though. Pink Shard seems to have way more white glitters in it than purple, so would probably benefit from being put over a pink base if you were after a pink manicure. Their bottles are very similar to OPI, as is their brush which is very thick and great to get good coverage. I would like to try their coloured polishes though, to see if they preformed better.

Have you tried a W7 polish? What's your favourite glitter polish?

My Life in Pictures #8

It's been a while since I've done an instagram update. I've been a bit boring on instagram, but this month I've started Fatmumslim's photo a day challenge. I've done a few of her challenges before, but I've only managed to get through the month once, and I was pretty boring with half of those photos. This month I'm challenging myself to take more photos when I'm out and about, to stop caring what people might think when I whip my camera out, because taking a really cool photo makes me super happy.

1. My fringe was getting too long so I chopped it off myself. I'm forever going between having a side fringe and a full front fringe, I can't decide which I like better.

2. Having a chimmichunga from Beach Burrito Co. (amazing, by the way!!) with some good friends.

3. Having dinner at Smoque (if you're ever in Canberra, definitely hit that up!) with Dad. Always a good feed there. Their blue cheese aioli is the best thing I've ever eaten.

4. I've been taking the pups for way more walks now. Dad used to take them every morning, but now I have so much free time I take them on a walk every afternoon. They always manage to get their leads tangled up.

5. The boy had a Mexican party last weekend, and we ended up having the most intense game of Jenga ever. We played elimination. I came second.

6. One of the photo a day challenges this month was 'where we live'. So I decided to drive up Mount Ainslie after work, which overlooks the city. It had been raining all day and was super pretty.

7. Our friends got together to go to Flip Out, a place with lots of trampolines. It was super fun, and we spent half our time there doing backflips into the foam pit.

8. So I finally bought the Too Faced Chocolate Bar palette, after months of wanting it! Yay! It's already my go to palette, .and it smells so good!

Food Friday: Veggie Stir Fry

Stir fries are such a quick, easy and delicious way to get a load of vegetables into your diet. And you can really use whatever vegetables you want to. The most time consuming part of a stir fry is chopping all your vegetables. I find chopping everything into bowls before you start cooking the best way to keep organised when cooking. I like to use the huge amount of metal bowls we've got, but you can use whatever bowls you've got.

Rimmel Stay Matte Mousse Foundation

While I was in England, I became pale. I didn't spend much time outside due to working 6 days a week, the sun going down early, and the whole 2 months of rain we had in December and January. I needed a new foundation, and I got a sample of this in a magazine and liked it (although it was too dark). I took a plunge with the colour, I didn't really match it, but just guessed it would be ok, based on looking at other foundations I had.

May Favourites

It's been a while since I've done a monthly favourites post! So here you go!