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September is a month I always seem to look forward to, and not for any particular reason… it’s just that the weather is nice, friends have lovely social gatherings, people sing songs about September and it’s all just rather agreeable, really!

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Yesterday Sonya and I hit the op shops up and down the road I live on in our (never ending) quest to find fabulous dresses. Unfortunately, the fashions had been rather picked through everywhere we went – and there weren’t any decent plus size sections in any of the three shops we went through! What’s the deal? I have a suspicion that the people who organise the shops and warehouses claim all the good stuff first! Maybe I should start volunteering at a Vinnies

I did find a few great crafty things and items for my house though! I have never really gone to an op shop to find household items before, but I think I’m a convert after finding:
⇒ A set of three embroidery hoops (Watch out for some embroidered paisley in the future! Pow!)
⇒ Doilies of all sizes, shapes and colours. (I have previously bought all my doilies from ebay in bulk.)
⇒ A brick red table cloth that I’ll use for my coffee table – with doilies on top
⇒ 10 ties of varying thicknesses and fabrics for crafty repurposing.
⇒ The best thing ever: TEA CUP CURTAINS.

For a few months I’ve been wanting to start making jewellery out of reclaimed items, like the doily necklace (above) I made a few weeks ago! I got so much inspiration out of going op shopping – even if there weren’t any fashion finds. Highly recommended, A+ would do again!

Speaking of recycling… Nick and I did a duet of Knowing Me, Knowing You by Abba the other night and posted it to Twitter. If you haven’t heard it yet, you really ought to listen. Nick’s falsetto is his secret power!

I have been thinking about animals a lot this week, and how much I would love to be able to adopt one. We rent, and our landlords are decidedly against fanciness, aesthetics, safety (remember the exploding fuse incident?!) and of course, the keeping of any kind of animal. Despite their reluctance to chill out and trust us (we’re long term residents!) I adopted an elderly rat last year and kept him secretly, but he passed away about 7 months after we took him in. Since then I have been too distraught to think about taking in another animal because every time I think about Willis my eye twitches, and my lip wobbles, and I’m reminded that pets die. So I think that this Fanciful Friday I will celebrate being able to think about adopting another animal again!

⇒ I don’t mind if you think I’m making up the definition of “fancy” on the fly, but THIS IS FANCY, because I think “fancy” should cover a hearty helping of WTF and lunacy. This image came from a Photoshop contest on Freaking News.

⇒ Melody Seal’s fancy animal illustrations are adorable! I was trying to find this as a print in her etsy shop but I think they’re all gone. She has plenty of other cute stuff too… Lucky!

⇒ Nicole J. Georges draws portraits of animals and makes sure they look their fanciest. You can buy Nicole’s original art and prints on etsy, or you can get a custom portrait of your own fancy animal!

⇒ I NAME THEE… FANCY PEACOODLE. Go check out the other crazy poodle hair styles… I love the panda one too!

⇒ Larry the Chaise Longue Lizard. I wish I could give you a source for this but I just stumbled across it!!

⇒ Seriously, now I have discovered the delights of lizards sitting on miniature furniture, my life is so much better.

⇒ I discovered Unicorn Vs Dolphin by basehead a few years ago but it ALWAYS makes me happy. Even though it’s kind of sinister, the rainbow makes it all better.

⇒ Infographics are awesome, but infographics about mythical creatures are even better. This was created by preshaa on flickr, who I can only assume is either Unwin and/ or Crane. Genius!

I swear I have even more fancy animal photos I could share, but this post is definitely long enough for now!!

I’ve just opened up a shop on ArtFire.com to sell my original art works. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, but I kept putting it off because I have assumed that no one will want to buy anything! I don’t want to believe that any longer! Prove me wrong and bolster my self esteem

I have listed eight pieces right now, but I have another three framed pieces to add as well as a bunch of drawings. All of these pieces are just taking up room in my office and I’d love to see them adopted by people who will hang them up and love them.

The other reason why I am motivated to sell my originals is because I want to start working in different media and experimenting with new things but I simply can’t afford it. If you adopt one of my drawings or paintings, you will be encouraging and prolonging my career as an artist and patronising me – in a good way, hahaha!

Go forth! Purchase some of my original art and fancy up your walls.

My #twitterbreak lasted approximately two days, and I had to break my “fast” because I simply couldn’t remain mute any longer. People who aren’t Twitter-savvy yammer on about how it’s just a bunch of self absorbed people blagging on about what they ate for breakfast, and a recently released study completely pooh-poohed the social media tool for consisting of about 40% pointless babble. They’re wrong. And not just because I’m biased.

That “pointless babble” study undertaken by Pear Analytics was revealed by Stephen Dann to be a hugely flawed report with questionable methodologies, plus it was some kind of PR exercise for another “babble-free” marketing tool. (I won’t be linking to it, but if you read Stephen’s blog post and the comments you’ll find it for yourself with bonus whinging from one of Pear’s staffers.) The whole exercise inflamed my tendinitis because I was shaking my fist so hard at all these lazy journalists who picked up the fluff and ran with it – in Australia I even saw it on the prime time news. Can I get a WHAT THE?

Further more, Twitter isn’t just people reporting in on the minutiae of their lives. It’s sharing information, chatting, keeping up-to-date, and… being human. I’ve had job opportunities thanks to Twitter, and I’ve met some fantastic people too. The people in my Twitter timeline keep me company all day, even if I don’t say anything at all.

The piece of paper I’ve scanned shows you my analogue twitter. Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t have the capability to record doodles (that’s what TwitPic is for!) but that doesn’t mean I’ll be dumping it as my social media of choice. You can see where I’ve replied to friends, commented about tv shows, ranted about things happening in my life (albeit rather cryptically) and even retweeted things that resonated strongly with me. These are the things that some people might label as “pointless babble” but I feel it’s the stuff that draws us together.

And that’s why I love Twitter, and will continue to use it exactly the way I was using it before. You’ll get the best and the worst of me: the times when I’m completely ridiculous and hyperactive, as well as the times when I’m feeling low and needing validation. Those are the things I absolutely adore and cherish in my friends, and I would be cheating myself out of a perfectly functional and productive support network if I simply put on a front and pretended I was just some kind of facade of Natalie.

I’ve been slaving away over cupcakes which turned out to be complete duds after I left out the eggs, so I have baking on the brain. Today’s Fanciful Friday is going to be a baking edition!

• A hootie cake! This gorgeous owl cake was made by lady_lala “for a nice boy”. Awww man! I really want to make cupcake owls!

• Superhero groom’s cupcakes! I’m not quite sure what the tradition is with groom’s cakes because I’ve never heard of it before, but these look amazing! There are heaps more if you go over to lookcupcake’s flickr!

• I love how these cupcakes by Sugar & Meringue are all decorated differently… it makes me think that not all cupcakes need to be uniform and precisely like each other, especially when they could all have cute designs like these!

• Bakerella always deserves a mention when it comes to baking… and these apple cake pops look fantastic! I’ve never even seen coloured candy melts in Australia, but I want to try these one day. I wonder if you can make the cake balls out of an apple sponge cake? I think I’d really crave the apple flavour if I tried to make these.

• Panda cakes! These were made by Coco Cake Cupcakes.

• I’ll leave you with the emo slice I made for my brother. I’ve realised that the red velvet recipe I posted here a few months ago is missing something crucial… the bit where you add eggs! I’ll amend the recipe eventually – I hope I haven’t completely ruined anyone’s cupcake snacking plans! Basically what I did to salvage this is mix a bunch of cream cheese into the crumbled cupcakes, spread it over a slice pan and then ice it. The “Emo Bigotry” design is an in-joke

Don’t forget! If you like baking stuff, you can follow our Eat, Sleep, Cupcake tumblr blog.

I am a huge advocate of Twitter, I admit it without shame. At first I didn’t really get it because I thought it was just a standalone status broadcaster, kind of like facebook but without the risk of friends and family members tagging awful photos of you. After finding Plurk I even declared that Twitter was dead to me and that I was going to have babies that resembled chubby Gantt charts (ok I didn’t say that, but I may have thought it at the time).

So, cough, that was a bit premature. I found out that the strength of Twitter is in the people you follow and interact with. You could probably say that about all social media, but Twitter is different in that you’re not bound by the interface on twitter.com because they’ve released the API – which can be used in so many different and amazing ways. The most significant being desktop and phone apps like Twhirl, TweetDeck, Tweetie, Twitterrific and my favourite, DestroyTwitter.

Through these clients you can take Twitter everywhere, and as a result you can take your followers everywhere too. I’m never alone on the bus, because I can sign in to m.slandr.net and tell people about the songs the bus driver is singing, or I can muffle giggles as my friends have ridiculous conversations. I think that Twitter clients have really encouraged people to use Twitter as a platform for life casting, and instead of being a site you visit once a day to catch up on activity… you find yourself running your Twitter client in the background all day and night just so you don’t miss out on anything. It’s really not a medium that lends itself to “catching up” on because of the sheer volume of tweets, as well as the reluctance of the site and client designers to institute any real threading for tracking conversations. I like it that way – it’s like a conversation you have with your IRL friends, and if you enter the conversation late you’ve already missed the momentum and excitement of the moment.

Photo by Nic Suzor

Of course, if you live in Brisbane you get the opportunity to turn your URL friends (that’d be your online friends) to IRL friends through BTUB meetups. Brisbane’s Twitter community is very active and very friendly, and meetups in the vein of Sydney’s STUBs and Melbourne’s MTUBs were adopted last year and very quickly became a date claimed every month on most Brisbane Twitter users’ calendars. I never expected to meet so many fantastic people, or to become so close to them!

This is where Twitter gets really interesting. Instead of having that distance between the URL and the IRL, strong relationships and affiliations start to come together quickly. Where I would have had no problem mouthing off at someone for saying something ignorant or whateverphobic and walking away, I found I really needed to start considering the impact of my reprimands and how it could affect the tight knit social group. The people on the other end aren’t faceless anymore, they’re friends and acquaintances. I also have started wondering if I see the networking platform as strictly professional, social, casual or a curious and awkward mixture of all of the above.

So, I’ve decided to take a few days break to see how I can reflect on this. Whether I like it or not, I am developing a persona online. You are too – whether you put your name on your interactions or if you use a nom de plume. Like most people, I have flaws and foibles but on platforms like this blog… I tend to gloss over them a bit. It’s not that I want to appear as if perfect or completely palatable by any means, but opening up your personality and life to complete strangers and new acquaintances is a big deal and I feel like I’m opening myself up to things that both scare and enthrall me. It’s not just “the internet” anymore, Toto!

Do I need a personal branding strategy, or should I just fly by the seat of my pants? Will I be able to make it until the end of the week without broadcasting the minutiae of my days? Can I stand not being able to commiserate with and/or congratulate the people I have come to care about as they talk about the things they encounter in their lives?

I’ll keep you posted.

I think everyone picks themselves to pieces – even the most seemingly confident of people. Sometimes I think that my low self-esteem exists so that I don’t get too full of myself, and other times it really gets me down. I’m very guilty of comparing myself against other people (in terms of fashion, looks, professional skills, etc!) and it’s only this year that I’ve decided to become conscious of myself when I do it, and try to turn it around. It’s rather hard! I was stoked to see that Georgie Love, Frocks & Frou Frou and No More Mumus have started a mini-meme in the Australian blogging sphere, and they’ve answered the $64 million question, “What do you love about yourself?” So now I’m going to do it!

What I love about myself:

• I seem to be able to pull off nearly every hair colour.
• My sense of humour and general irreverence.
• My lips, which I used to be teased for!
• My height.
• I’m willing to give anything a go.
• I love that my hands create things.
• My drive to keep learning.
• My problem solving and resourcefulness.
• How one of my eyes is half brown.
• I’m nice.
• My eyebrows (over tweezing when I was 15 lead to low maintenance brows!)
• I’m willing to go out on a limb to make people feel comfortable or happy.
• My passion.
• Last of all! I love that I am a billboard for myself. I love that I don’t take myself too seriously. I am not afraid to express myself through my body, clothes, art, blog etc etc etc!

You are now under strict orders to blog about how much you love yourself! If you don’t have a blog, leave a comment

• I’m not sure how I came across The Chintz of Darkness but they post some incredible photographs and illustrations, and have a very funny blog name. If you like ye olde home decor and curious knick knacks and whatsits, you’ll love this blog.

• I really like the hair styling on Zac Posen’s fall collection. It’d be quite easy to DIY too!

• When I was younger I read my mother’s Vogues and pretended I knew what was going on. In one of them they did a huge profile on Anna Piaggi, and I thought she was just the most amazing looking person I’d ever come across. She is one of my fancy lady icons!

• I love shoulder ruffles like this one, made by OutsaPop Trashion. The OutsaPop blog is amazing for inspiration and ideas!

• Jeremy Clarkson ~~be still my beating heart~~ fancies up a Mercedes S Class and calls it “Anne Hathaway’s Cottage”. I think he is totes secretly fancy, to the point that he’d completely stuff up an awesome car in the name of fanciness.

Post links to your fancy things!!! (Or blog about them and link in the comments, if you like!)

I’ve been wanting to start experimenting with using wood as a support, and I bought a big piece of plywood from Bunnings weeks ago but hadn’t had the time to cut it up or paint any of my ideas for personal work. This week I’ve decided is my week; on Monday I got electrocuted by our crappy circuit reset button (and the power died too) then I went over to use Kate’s powertools to cut up the plywood! Horah! Last night I sanded back and stained a couple of the boards and recovered from my day (no, really I was totally ok – minor shock). Yesterday I painted up one drawing I had in my sketchbook for a month or so and took a little video and did awesomely scintillating live-action updates with my mobile phone.

I like to document the process, just so I can go back later and revise what I’ve done so I know better for next time. A few people say they actually enjoy the updates too!

Here’s the video! The music is really cute, it’s by Julandrew and it’s called “Get Back In Line“. I was introduced by Melissa to Creative Commons music and I’m really impressed by some of the things I’ve found! Also, it’s nice being able to use music in a video without worrying that anyone will sue you.