Body shop party

Last weekend I went to a Body Shop party at my boyfriends house that his sister was holding. It was manicure themed so we did our nails while we shopped. We soaked our hands in this amazing milky bath powder stuff (I wish I could remember what it was!) and painted them. The consultant bought her own nail polish and I used OPI Tropical punch, which I loved and then found out it was discontinued :(
Anyway, on to what I bought.

Mango body scrub. This stuff is ah-may-zing!! It smells so good and it makes my skin feel lovely. I have dry skin, and I've only just started using scrubs but I can tell this is a great one.

Born lippy in lychee. This smells great and feels good. I thought it would be a light pink, but it's actually clear. It does have a bit of a sparkle in it so I'm not really disappointed with it.

Lily Cole lip + cheek dome in pinch me pink (which I managed to get for free because the BF's sister hosted and she is super lovely!). I've never used creme blush before so that might be why I can't get this right. It's quite sheer, but I guess that's good so you can build it. It is a great colour though.

Lily Cole cheek tint on my cheek.

Organic cotton moisture gloves. I get dry hands from washing them a lot at work, so I hope this helps.

I'm going to another body shop party at the end of the month (hopefully) and there's a few things I'm really keen to get my hands on then! They've got christmas things now and 2 scents are cranberry and gingerbread. YEP! I'm going to have to work hard to restrain myself from buying all of those products!

1. Cranberry body polish. Not too sure what body polish is, but it sounds nice. And Cranberry is my favourite.
2. Ginger sparkle body butter. This would smell too amazing not to get!
3. Extra virgin mineral foundation. I had a look at this at the party, and it looked like it would be really good. It's also SPF 25 which is a plus. I have already bought some Nude by Nature powder (almost a month ago and I still haven't got it! Worst online shopping experience ever!), but if I don't like the NBN, I'll give this a try.
4. Born lippy in pomegranate. This one has more colour to it so it might give more of a tint on the lips.
5. Shimmer waves in blush+bronze. The consultant used the bronzer on a few girls at the party and it looked great, so I'd like to give this a go! You can also use is at eyeshadow which is good. And I'd love some more blush.

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What I won!

This week I won Priceline's friday competition! This was a bunch of Covergirl products. I found out on  Wednesday afternoon that I won, and got it in the mail today!
This is what I got:

Lash blast volume mascara in very black, lipstick in spellbound, liquiline blast eyeliner in blue boom, eyeshadow quad in tropical fusion, and blush in soft sable.

Pretty excited to use everything here. Not sure about the eyeshadow palette though.

Excuse my horrible pictures.

The blush is a nice browny-pink shade. I'll be using this a lot!

Here is the liner (smudged + not). It comes with a smudger on the end. And the shadows... they're not very pigmented and need a bit of work to get a good colour going on. They've also got a bit of glitter in them, which you can't see here, nor when they're in the pan.

The lipstick (on the left) is really similar to a rimmel one I also won in a facebook competition. I'm still unsure about how to wear pink lipsticks (I'm yet to wear the rimmel one), so I'm not sure how much I'll use this one.

My face today, with my new blush + lippy. (That necklace is my favourite bit of jewelry at the moment.) I also applied for some christmas casual jobs today. One of them I am reeeeealy excited about and hope I get. After all I've heard, I really don't know why I am so excited to move into retail work, but I am. I'm getting over stinking of coffee after work and having coffee grinds and chocolates under my nails constantly.

Floriade

Yesterday I went to floriade with the boy. Really the only reason we went was to get a kransky because we knew it was going to be super busy being a public holiday and a really really nice day. I did manage to get a few photos of the flowers while we were there (and some sunburn).

The pink flowers are my favourites.

I love daffodils. It's a bit late for daffodils so most of them were dead :(

These were one of my favourite flowers. 

We saw this guy stealing bread off the ducks when we were leaving.

Addiction: Nail Polish

A few months ago I hardly ever painted my nails and I only had a handful of polishes. Now, I paint them at least once a week and my collection of polishes has grown exponentially!
I've got a few different brands, some OPI and essie, but really my favourite is the $2 Ulta3 you get from the chemists. This stuff rivals the best of them, and you can get 10 bottles for the price of one OPI.

This is my latest haul. I was originally not going to buy more nail polish till I'd used all the ones I already have at least once, but I needed a little pick me up on my work break. Why not spend not much money on lots of polish eh? I actually have a list of colours I'm allowed to buy (yes really) but these polishes are in bins, so it's a bit hard to be picky about what you're after. Turns out only one of the colours was on my list. Whoops. But I am happy with them all.

These photos really don't show the colours (and I am far too lazy to do swatches). Twilight fever is a sparkly purple with grey tones, and wild berry is grey with blue tones. Watermelon and party shoes are just nice pinks. 

L-R: Rimmel Pop!, OPI Rainbow Connection, The one that got away, Stranger Tides, Italian Love Affair, and Ulta3 Earl Grey.

I think I'll be trying wild berry with either watermelon or Essie's fear or desire next time I do my nails. I also bought some Thin Lizzy 6 in 1 while I was at the chemist. I was with my friend paying for the polish when she spotted it (she's a kiwi) and because you got 2 powders, 2 eyeliners (half black+half brown), 2 lipglosses and 2 brushes for $50, we thought we may as well try it. The colour seems too dark for me but I really don't know if I'm doing it right, haha. The lipgloss is super sticky (I haven't used gloss in years though so I have nothing to compare it too), but the eyeliner and brush are decent.

Hello again.

So I've decided to start blogging again, mostly after reading through a million beauty blogs lately and baking 1 million cupcakes. And, you know, I have a huge amount of assessment due so I need another thing to help me procrastinate. It seems like the more urgent an assessment is, the more I procrastinate. How did I get this far in uni?

Uni is almost over for me, I only have a handful of weeks left now. And in those weeks are too many reports and presentations. 

So, for my birthday the boy (and fam) got me a Kitchenaid!! It's actually amazing and made making 5 lots of cupcakes a breeze. Also it's pink, which makes it infinitely better. Making all these cupcakes was pretty fun, even if I was on a pretty tight time frame (thanks to my mixer!). I don't have much experience with icing, but I think these turned out pretty good looking. The first batch were for a friend from uni who needed them for a friends baby shower. The second I baked for mum for her work morning tea. They're vanilla, and i piped some raspberry coulis in the middle. They taste pretty great.

Here are some flowers too... it's spring now and I like all the flowers.

pintrest

So, after looking at photos on pintrest for a friend who wanted ideas for an engagement party, I thought it was about time I join. I think it's a pretty cool place to keep your collection of photos you find on the internet that you like, and the boards make it easy to look back on pictures. It's giving me heaps of ideas of what do to for decorations for my 21st in June. Here's a bunch of pretty pictures from my first day :)

dessert table

floating candles

This print

These drinks in jars. Cute!

Find me here: http://pinterest.com/klerr/

pumpkin cupcakes!

Wow, it's been quite a while since I've posted! But really, I haven't been up to much.

A while ago a pumpkin plant grew out of Toby's chook run. It grew quite a few pumpkins so I got to take one. We've had it a few weeks now and I've been too lazy to do anything with it, but I knew I wanted to try making cupcakes with it. I had today off work so I decided to finally give it a go (mainly because mum had cut into it for a dinner and we didn't want it to go off).
For the cupcakes I had to make a pumpkin puree. Which involved roasting the pumpkin first. I've never roasted anything before because I'm not a huge fan of roasts, so it was a challenge. Mum was out so I couldn't ask her so I consulted the old internet. Which wasn't actually that helpful and I ended up roasting it on what I now know is a chicken roasting rack. It did kind of work but it would have been easier just to chuck it in. It also didn't cook through evenly which didn't really matter because of the next few steps. When it was all cooked I scooped the flesh out and put it in a food processor which worked ok. Then i had to strain it through a sieve, which was tough work! But it was a nice puree after that.
Then I could make cupcakes!
I used this recipe but I halved it because I didn't want to make that many. I also didn't stick with the exact measurements for the spices because I didn't have ground nutmeg so I added a bit of spicemix to it on top of all the other spices.
Instead of using the cream cheese icing the recipe calls for, I decided to use the marshmallow cream (cheap Fluff) I bought from the reject shop instead! Which was amazing! That stuff works SO well as icing that I'm going to have to go back sometime this week and see if they have anymore left, and then buy it ALL.  It makes these cupcakes even more delicious.
And after making these, it makes me a little jealous of America! With their canned pumpkin puree and their Fluff. And speaking of America, I went to tea with some friends this afternoon (gave them a cupcake each and they thought they were great! Yes!!) and went to the yankee candle shop. I ended up buying an autumn fruits votive which smells incredible and got my friend hooked on them. Enough blabbling, here's some pictures of the cooking!

pureeing pumpin

creaming the butter

This is all that's left now...