Judy's affordable vintage fair

hey ladies, last saturday me and my flatmate rhianna went to Judy's affordable vintage fair which was being held in york hall at bethnal green.

i've never been to an event like this and it was a lot of fun, though i felt a bit out of place in my jeans and crew jumper, most people there looked like they'd walked straight out of the 40's!

i was after some jewlery, mainly a vintage ring, a scarf that i could tie around my head or onto my bag, and a big chunky knit jumper.

sadly, i didn't find many rings at all, and those that i did find tended to be modern, but it did find a pair of very pretty earrings.

a lot fo the clothes seemed to be quite expensive, especially given that they were second hand. i feel this about a lot of places that sell clothes with the 'vintage' tag attached. some of the stuff we found was dinfintely NOT vintage, like a dress from last year from primark! i've wanted for ages a chunky fair isle or cable knit jumper to wear with leggings, and this one that i fell in love with had a starting price of £20! thats a lot for a second hand jumper...

i didnt buy a jumper owning to the prices, but there were lots of lovely denim shorts on offer too, but i didnt find any that fitted.

what i DID get was a pair of lovely vintage scarves, which i love as headscarves at the moment.

here are a couple of shots of them on....

these actually were pretty good value, and most stalls were offereing one for £3 or 2 for £5, whish is what i got mine for.

towards the back of the fair were a couple of stalls selling vintage items that werent clothes, and i snapped up some lovely antique photographs, and some interesting old keys, which i want to hang from my celing at home (dont judge me, it looks cool!) and which also look nice on a long ribbon or chain as a pendant. i did get one other thing which i was excited to show you guys but i cant because it's a christmas present for someone in my family, and i know they have been looking at my blog recently, so i cant show you!

the keys and one of the photographs i bought.

i would reccomend going to a Judy's event if there is one near you, its fun even if you don't buy anything, and there are definitely some bargains to be found! you can find details of their upcoming events here

what do you think of vintage clothes?

Love, Lucy xxx

DIY leopard print nails

hey ladies, today i'm coming to you with a tutorial, to create these awsome leopard print style nails!

once you've decided on your colour scheme, (im using pink and blue but mot colour combinations would work!) the first step is to paint your base coat and base colour. i didn't actually do a base coat because i've got acrylics at the moment, but if you're doing this look on your natural nails, a base coat will help it last longer and be smoother. i'm using Barry M's Blue Moon as my base colour.

after you've got your base colour down, you need to get a contrasting colour (i'm using Barry M's Pink flamingo) and get your splodge on! try not to dab straight down as this will leave little drops and bumps, its better to do a little stroke of the brush. don't worry about being neat, different sizes and shapes are good!

having done your contrasting splodges, you need to get your hands on a back liquid eyeliner. i'm using liquid eyeliner rather than black polish for a few reasons; 1, its much easier to fix if you make a mistake and you don't have to start again with polish remover. 2, i find it's much more opaque than the black polish i have and 3, the fine brush makes it easier to apply than a polish brush.

the eyeliner i'm using is Sleek's dip it eyeliner in black. it has a 'felt tip' style brush, which i much prefer to the floppier bristle brush ones. you need to draw broken lines around each dot, two or three for each one. if you have any bare patches on your nail, you can also draw on some little 'c' shapes to fill them in.

lastly you need to seal in your design with a topcoat. i'm using Seche vite fast dry topcoat.

it helps to look at a picture of a leopard to see how the 'rosettes' look (which is what we're trying to recreate). i'm lucky enough to have a little leopard living at my parents house, so i took my inspiration from him :)

hope you liked this tutorial lovelies!

let me know your ideas for other colour combinations, i want to try them out!

Love, Lucy xxx

Thinking of getting gel nails?

hey lovlies, today i come to you with something of a rant.

a few weeks ago now, while i was off blogging because i was settling into uni, one of my first wednesday adventrues with my flatmate danni was to go and get our nails done before going shopping at the new westfield stratford city.

we found a nail bar near to westfield (not naming any names here)and went in to look at their treatment list. i had already decided i wanted to get gels, bacause i'd had acrylics in the past and they had ruined my nails. gels have a reputation for being less damaging and slightly more versatile.

when i entered the salon it seemed fine, offering mainly nail treatments but also waxing and massage in a slightly dodgy looking back room. as i was there for my nails though, i wasn't too bothered. i asked for gels (which were listed in their treatments, and were about £7 more than acrylics) and she whipped out a pot of powder. straight away i smelled a rat, gels should surely be a GEL right? i said 'isnt that acrylic?' and she replied in her limited english that it was a new thing, 'powdered gel'. i have never had gels before so i went along with it. how was i to know that it wasnt a new thing? she also got out a glass dappen dish and filled it with familliar looking purple liquid. after some drilling (!) she stuck on some nail tips and then she applied the substance (as i will be calling it from now) with apparent expertise, and when she had finished she instructed me to hold my hand in front of a mini fan mounted on the desk to dry it. this is when i started to get more suspicious. i texted danni who was sitting next to me that i was SURE she was applying acrylics to my nails, but i really wasn't sure what i could do about it now that i was in the chair with the stuff already on me!

the reason i was so suspicious was because there was no UV light used to cure the 'gel', and it smelled exactly like the acrylics i have had in the past. when she had finished i paid my money and left, unsure what else i could do. when i got home i did some googling, and found out that lots of people have been conned by this sort of thing, and i did indeed get acrylics. i was and am so angry about this, and it has put me off ever getting treatments done again.

the fact that she used a nail drill which will have done untold damage to my natural nails and was pysically painful at the time; she wasnt very carful with where she was putting it, and caught my skin several times. and also that i'm not going to have to go to another salon to get them removed ( i would do it myself but she told me they were file off; i dont believe her but i dont want to damage my nails any further by soaking in acetone unnescesarily).

i dont really know what the purpose of this rant was other than to warn people. if you go to get gels, make sure you look up the salon beforehand and if you think it's not what ou asked for, get up and leave!!

the offending talons (re-shaped and re-painted by me with 17 Magnetized nail polish, 'the green one')

Current Things i'm lusting over...

With christmas coming up, i wanted to do a little post talking about what i'm currently lusting over, and somethings that i'm hoping might appear in my stocking!!

• The first thing I would really love to recieve this christmas is a subscription to Glossybox. i have seen so many posts on them recently and while at first i thought that it was a lot of money for samples you could usually get for free, having read reviews i'm desperate to get my hot and stickies on one!!

• A ticket to London IMATS. ive never been, and this is the number one thing i want to do next year, even before going to India.
• M.A.C. i dont actually own anything from MAC, despite an attempt to purchase one of their foundations (post here) and i particularly want to try some of their brushes and lipsticks. an essential brush that is missing from my kit is a fluffy round brush, so i'll be asking for one of those!

• A brush kit. while i have quite a selection of brushes, i don't have any high quality brushes and i would sell my granny for this set from sigma. (not literally, granny, but i do REALLY want them!)
• an oversized locket. a beautiful antique one would be amazing, but this particular one is lovely too and is actually from Argos.
• the Let it Snow! collection from China Glaze. specifically blue years eve, glittering garland, ring in the red, snow globe and tinsel town. over on Scrangie there are some brilliant swatches which really showcase how beautiful these shades are.

• i'm running out of my beyonce Heat perfume, so i'm after a new bottle of that, and i got a sample of her new scent, Pulse, and i'm in love with it, so i would love to recieve one of those too!
• my benefit Something about Sofia (along with beyonce heat) is my signature scent but because the bottle is opaque, i don't know if it's running out! i think it is though, so this is on my list of stuff to buy as soon as i have money!



a non-beauty related thing on my lust list is a macro len for my camera. i have the Sony Alpha A500 (can't reccomend it enough!) which i love, but the lenses i have don't allow me to get very close up, which is the style of photography i enjoy the most. as a bonus, this is one of the cheapest lenses made my sony i have seen!

the last (and slightly wierd) thing on my list is a pizza tray! when i was living at home i cooked a lot but i was used to having a very well stocked kitchen with lots of gadgets, 2 ovens and 7 hob plates! since moving to uni i have had to adjust to having little equipment, an electric hob (nightmare!!) and a small crappy oven. one of the things i didnt think of when i was buying my kitchen stuff was a pizza tray and i have to regularly borrow my flatmates one, which he is starting to get fed up with! 

what's on YOUR lust list at the moment? was there anything you forgot to bring to uni?

xxxx

an unusual fashion piece!

hey ladies, i'm so sorry that i messed up on my schedule before i even started it, but i ended up having to rush off to liverpool to see a family member at short notice. i hope you guys dont mind!

basically, i want to talk to you guys today about all in ones. they quite often get called onesies, but i really hate that word! they have become increasingly popular recently, with high street brands such as primark selling them, and higher end brands like jack wills and Onepiece selling them too.

Onepiece is a dedicated brand which sells only these garments, and i'm lucky enough to own one of them. i feel as if a onesie is something you might quietly admit that you own, but onepiece are really a different brand, making items which are designed to be worn outside the comfort of your own bedroom.

when i first saw them, i thought they were incredibly cool, which is an odd thing to think about what is basically an oversized babygro. onepieces are quite expensive but i absolutely love mine, though i didn't pay for it, i recieved it as a gift from my aunt!

the Onepiece has recently been spotted on tooons of celebs such as:

Justin Bieber

Ellie Goulding

Henry Holland (who appears to have several!)

and One Directions Naill Horen, though all of the boys from One Direction have them!

that is just a small sample of celebs who have them taken from the Onepiece website. basically i want to know what side of the fence people are on. are they acceptable for popping out to buy your milk and bread? or walking your dog (as sadie frost was papped doing in a purple one?)

here is a horrendous snap of me in mine, just to show what it looks like.

what side of the fence are YOU on?? would you be seen dead in one of these?

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Lucy on a schedule?! (and NOTD)

hey ladies!! i'm so sorry i've been so scatty recently, but i am back on the straight and narrow now and will be blogging on a scedule! i don't have lectures on mondays, wednesdays or fridays, so basically, i will be posting at least twice a week on two of those days.

i was going to designate it to mondays and fridays as wednesday is when me and my flatmate danni are both off uni and go on a wednesday adventure, into the streets of london. thing is, i thought i might actually want to blog about that! and seeing as our wednesday adventures quite often end up as days out shopping, they could make a good feature!

i was also going to say i would do one particular type of post on a particular day, eg a makeup tutorial on a monday but i thought that could end up a bit clinical. what do you think?

as this post is a little un-beauty related, i thought i'd leave you with a snap of my futuristic nails!

these were done using boots 17 magnetized nail polish (£5.99, but currently on promotion at £4.99) in the green shade. as far as i can tell they dont have shade names (dont they realise we hate that?!), so its just 'the green one'

hope y'all liked! have you tried magnetic nails??

Love, Lucy xx