The spokes inside the Wheel of Brisbane against the twilight sky.
[Warning: this post contains an animated gif.]
The Wheel of Brisbane is pretty much a huge laughing stock situated at South Bank, a somewhat scaled down version of the London Eye. Normally it costs a ridiculous amount just for the pleasure of seeing exactly what you might if you were on a balcony somewhere on the banks of the Brisbane River, but Nick got a special coupon deal and we got to ride the wheel for a considerable discount on Saturday night to “celebrate” my birthday (which is actually on Tuesday). The wheel is actually kind of terrifying on the first orbit, I let out a shriek when I realised I was dangling in the air!
Sonya, myself and Zoe walking away from the camera to find a prime ootd position in front of the North Quay vistas.
Me awkwardly walking away from the fanced up Sonya and Zoe.
I thought I’d just approach my 31st birthday in a super casual manner, and that was conveniently assisted by my being pretty unwell for the past week. Gratefully I have friends who are not only ready for whatever mild mannered adventure is proposed, but also get fanced up for the occasion too! I wish I’d felt more in the mood for fance, but ehh what can you do? Sonya and Zoe ably carried the banner for the team!
Sonya wearing an animal print caftan with a black belt and black sandals.
Zoe wearing a cherry print dress and rocking an amazing lilac bouffant.
Zoe spinning around in her cherry dress as the full skirt flies around her.
Nick wearing a green polo shirt with navy slacks and tan slip on sneakers.
Me wearing a lace dress over a black slip with dark blue jeggings and carrying my new green satchel.
Remember all that hemming and hawing over satchels? I decided I couldn’t afford to buy a Cambridge satchel any time soon, even if I really really wanted to and even just to spite a particularly nasty bit of hate mail, so I found a cheap green and blue satchel on ebay. It does the job! (PS xoxo lover anons!) I’ve also been stripping my hair of the red I so errantly dumped on my head, forgive the gingerness at this point in time.
An animated gif of Sonya, her caftan moving slightly in the wind.
I couldn’t resist making a gif out of this!
Me closing my eyes and cheesing for the camera, the city behind me looking rather golden.
After the wheel we met up with a couple more friends and had burgers and wine; I almost wish I’d thought to take more photos but we were too busy talking and eating and drinking, which I think is entirely valid!
My outfit details:
Lace dress: Asos Curve
Slip: from an Evans dress
Jeggings: Best & Less
Shoes: Shoebuy
Bag: Shanghai Magicbox on ebay
I’ve been seeing kale chips all over the internet for the last year or so but because kale is oddly hard to find where we live I never tried them until today. If you’re already a kale chip convert feel free to nod knowingly and scroll on, this post is for the newbies.
My mother-in-law is the president of our local community veggie garden, so until we moved in with her I’d never had the chance to get close to kale. One of her lovely friends has been letting us “borrow” kale from her patch now and then, and we’ve made a few different things with it (it’s good in veggie spaghetti bolognaise) but today I thought I’d seize the day and raid the kale for chip making purposes.
Collage of kale pre-destalking and then kale after rinsing and seasoning.
You will need:
Kale (grab just a handful for your first time!)
Oil (I used rice bran oil spray)
Salt or any other seasoning (I used Masterfoods Tuscan Seasoning and parmesan)
What to do:
- Preheat the oven to 180˚.
- With a sharp knife cut the leaves from the stem of the kale and rip those leaves into mouth sized bits.
- Rinse the leaves in a colander and dry with a tea towel (or use a salad spinner.)
- Get out a cooking tray and put some baking paper over it.
- Lay the dry, ripped up kale pieces on the paper and drizzle/ spray oil over leaves, then add the seasoning of your choice.
- Cook for about 10 minutes in the oven until every bit is crispy. You might need to turn the pieces, or reduce or lengthen the cooking time depending on your oven.
- Grab the long ends of the baking paper and transport your chips to a bowl, or pour directly into your mouth.
A bowl of green crispy kale chips fresh out of the oven.
The chips aren’t even really hot fresh out of the oven! It’s a super quick tasty snack that you can do all kinds of things with. I’m going to try garlic seasoning next!
A photo of Sonya, Zoe and myself in a playground, sitting in a spinning cup which is out of shot.
My friends Sonya and Zoe came down the coast on Saturday and we headed out to Burleigh for coffee, food and muggy day playground times. I have been struggling with the muslin for this dress for weeks; even though it’s based on this dress, adding sleeves was a complicated task especially because I have such lofty expectations of a dress such as being able to lift my arms, reach forward, etc. I’d picked the sleeves out for the third and final time and inserted a newly drafted sleeve and managed to make the dress wearable, horah, so I thought I’d take it out for a spin.
Sonya, Zoe and I sitting in a spinning egg cup in a playground. I'm hanging on for dear life.
Literally. This egg cup spun around so fast and made me want to throw up!
Zoe, Sonya and I standing together for a group outfit shot in front of the beachfront at Burleigh.
An outfit photo of Zoe wearing a tree branch print maxi dress with a purple cardigan.
An outfit photo of Sonya wearing a yellow tank top with an animal print maxi skirt which matches her animal print sunglasses.
An outfit photo of me wearing a knee length dress in a white/ blue/ red print.
I need to further tweak this muslin and my pattern because it’s too narrow across the back and needs some darts down the front because it’s too big around my waist. Don’t let anyone tell you sewing your own clothing is easier than buying them off the rack. Argh! This fabric came from a doona cover I bought at an op shop, and since buying it so many people have told me they’ve got this doona cover. I even saw a dress made out of it at the Village Markets the other week.
Badges Zoe gave me on my dress: one from Cupcakes and Cuddlebunny and the other from Re/Dress.
A photo of the cut out heart on my back which shows off my falling fairy tattoo.
I really love the heart cut out!
Dress: made by me
Scarf: clothes swap
Shoes: Evans
Doctor Who used to scare me when I was little so I went for a long time without ever really watching it. Just the theme song intro would be enough to freak me out, so I always changed the channel! It wasn’t until this last year that I started actually watching the most recent series with the Eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith, and I really quite enjoyed it. I haven’t watched the series back past this current doctor, but I’ll get around to it one day.
A photo of me in the back yard wearing a blue pin striped shirt over jeggings with a black cardigan and a dapper bow of my own making. I also carry a navy umbrella with cats all over it.
At any rate, I’ve been sewing these bows and this olive and blue madras fabric really reminded me of Doctor Who for some reason, so I decided to put on one of Nick’s shirts and pretend I was the Twelfth Doctor. Why not, eh?
An outfit photo of me carrying a navy umbrella with cats all over it, wearing a white/ blue pinstriped shirt over jeggings with brown shoes, black cardigan and a dapper bow.
Another outfit photo, this time I'm looking down.
Me, smiling in a doctorly way, under the cover of the navy cat umbrella.
A photo of Cheryl the foam head wearing an olive/ blue checked madras bow tie.
And in a seamless segue, let me whisk you over to Fancy Lady Industries where you can buy a dapper bow of your own! Currently there are five different fabric choices, but I hope to expand that very soon. All of these ties are made especially for bigger necks too! Horah. (I may or may not make smaller sized ties, I want to keep my focus on making accessories for fat people.)
Shirt: Nick’s
Jeggings: Best & Less
Shoes: Grasshoppers via Shoebuy.com
Cardigan: Asos Curve
Tie: Fancy Lady Industries
Umbrella: My mother-in-law’s.
I was hoping to draw the Fancy Bonanza prize today so I went to look through the hashtag on Twitter and discovered… I couldn’t see tweets older than 6 days old! Argh! I thought I had 30 days of the hashtag archive to play with! This meant that I couldn’t draw the prize in good faith because two days of entries had been wiped from Twitter’s history and a bunch of people would miss out on the giveaway even though they’d entered. BAD TWITTER.
After having a minor panic attack, Nick’s helped me think through the solution. We’ll be re-running the giveaway and this time we are tracking the hashtag entries in a number of RSS readers (yay backups!) The #fancybonanza redux will now close December 14th at 12pm AEST (+10GMT), and I’m going to be giving away TWO more necklaces (blue and green) to two runners up.
It really blows that everyone has to re-enter the draw and I’m so sorry we weren’t aware of this Twitter limitation before we ran it. I’m so bummed out because I wanted to ensure that the winner would receive their necklace and brooch by Christmas!
Let’s do this again!
The grand prize!
• an ivory No Diet Talk brooch,
• purple hologram fat necklace and
• a custom digital portrait of you.
One of two runners up prizes
• a blue or green fat necklace.
How?
Follow: @fancyladyind on Twitter
Tweet: I REALLY want to win the #fancybonanza!
(Just once is all it takes!)
15% off Fat necklaces
Use FAT15 on checkout
Giveaway closes Dec 14 at 12pm AEST (+10GMT)
15% off Fat necklaces until Dec 31
If you have a private account, @fancyladyind will request to follow you. If we can’t follow you, we won’t be able to view and include your entry in the draw :(
I was finally able to make my first order with Shiro Cosmetics after hearing so many good things about this indie cosmetics brand with awesomely geeky products. Caitlin, the founder, has a wicked sense of humour and a talent for creating vibrant, vegan and quality lip glosses and eye shadows; each product is named after an internet or gaming meme, and while I’m not a big gamer I can certainly get behind the femme gamer vibe! Now that I think about it, it’d be awesome if Shiro did a Minecraft themed collection because that’s the one game I have played a lot of lately. Glowstone, redstone, lapis, creepers… they’d look fabulous on me.
Top: My make up order all wrapped up with bonus lollies; Bottom: My Intertubes, eyeshadows and samples.
Swatches of Forty Cakes, Yo Dawg, Shoop Da Whoop, Sad Keanu, Still Alive, Vileplume, For Science and Rattata on the back of my hand.
I took just a few photos of the lip glosses and shadows I got, but please don’t expect make up blogger levels of perfection! I’m just a regular lady blogger! In fact, to demonstrate my ineptitude, I decided to just put a little concealer and BB cream on as a base and managed to discover my eyes DO NOT like the new Maybelline concealer I bought recently. They were watering and stinging all afternoon after I took all the make up off. If I could find an indie make up company that does concealer with super effective coverage I would be all over that (anyone have recs?)
A kind of blurry photo of light green (Still Alive) and mauve (Vileplume) eyeshadow on my eyelid.
Purple (Rattata), mauve (Vileplume) and gold/ peach (For Science) eyeshadow on my eyelid.
I bought Rattata and For Science and got samples of Still Alive and Vileplume, and in these two photos I applied the pigments over Hi-Fi Cosmetics High Impact Shadow Fix. If you’ve never used mineral pigments I highly recommend getting something like this so that the shadow fixes to your skin. Rattata is brilliant, I’ve been looking for a highly pigmented bright purple eyeshadow for a long time and Rattata is my holy grail! In the photo above I’ve blended it into the Vileplume and haven’t used a lot, but you can see from the swatch on my hand that it’s pretty intensely purple. Still Alive was a wonderful surprise, I might buy some when I order next. I can’t wait to play more with these pigments.
Wearing a light pink lip gloss (Forty Cakes).
Wearing a strawberry coloured lip gloss (Yo Dawg).
Wearing a red orange lip gloss (Shoop Da Whoop).
Wearing dark purple lip gloss (Sad Keanu).
The Intertubes lip glosses are basically amazing. I can’t rave enough about the ones I got, and my stand out favourite is Sad Keanu. I know dark purple/ black lips are terribly “Blogger Trendy” right now, but I had to find out what Sad Keanu looked like on me. And I love it! It’s also the most pigmented of the lot. I’m really happy with the colours I chose and I was surprised that the formula is so creamy; I avoid lipstick because many feel too drying so finding such pigmented glosses is perfect for me.
In conclusion: Shiro Cosmetics are awesome and affordable paints for your face and I am pleased to count myself a fan and proselyte! The only negative thing I can say (with great reluctance) is that there are no swatches on the website, so you’ll need to employ Google when looking for swatches of Shiro colours. Shiro do have a tumblr with photos of eye make up created with their product, so that’s handy too.
My lips perfect the femme sneer while wearing Sad Keanu.
A photo of people walking past lots of crafty market stalls.
With the runaway success of markets like Finders Keepers I’m so pleased to see smaller weekly and fortnightly markets popping up. When we moved down here I wasn’t sure what kind of arts and crafts scene was going on, but after visiting the weekly Village Markets at Burleigh Heads State School today I’m pretty stoked to find that there’s a bit of a crafty culture happening on the Gold Coast after all!
We took a look at the markets today mostly because our new GC pals Heiko and Lilly were holding a stall for Heiko’s work, but also because I feel like I’ve been getting a bit too insular! It was so nice to go and see what local artisans are making and selling, and now Nick thinks it’d be cool if I sold my work at the market too! I don’t know how receptive most people would be to my more activisty products, but it seems the punters love knick knacks and whatnots so I’ll have to have a think about the kind of things I can make and sell for a market audience.
A photo of cut out illustrations, a mysterious black figure with a H and a kind of scary/ zombie koala beneath it.
Six prints of Heiko's illustrations.
Bunting with Heiko's illustrations on each flag strung across his stall.
A bowl of Heiko's tiny badges sitting on calendars.
Heiko said he’ll be at the markets next fortnight too, so if you are local and want to buy some awesome art stuff for people you must go!
A stuffed owl toy by Sisterhood Sewing in pink fabrics sitting inside a pink ring with vines wrapped around it.
A screenprinted wall hanging by Beneath The Sun with a fat merman surrounded by seaweed.
This merman looked SO SO much like Nick that I had to buy it for him!! MerNick!
Nick and Miffy standing in front of a huge Burleigh Heads State School emblem painted on a brick wall.
The markets are held in the primary school Nick attended, so we went for a walk around and he pointed out all the places he knew as kid Nick.
An outfit photo of Miffy and I standing amongst trees; I wear my crochet top over a green singlet with a diagonally stripy maxi skirt and a big black hat.
Yellow flowers and peach flower buds on a tree.
My school had wattle, jacaranda and poinciana trees around it and they all remind me of the rather nice time I had when I was in primary school. I don’t know what this tree is but I thought it was pretty.
A photo of Miffy and I standing in front of a colourful beach mural with a rainbow and hearts with nice values in them.
Crochet top: Yours Clothing
Singlet: Autograph
Skirt: Yours Clothing
Shoes: Evans
Hat: Seafolly (I think)
I bought this dress on sale about a year ago from Myer, it was reasonably priced and comfortable and at that stage I was desperate to get some casual dresses into my wardrobe. The problem with this dress is that while it’s comfortable, it’s also incredibly hard to wear without making me feel really frumpy. It has a lot of gathered stitching in odd places, from the front shoulder to the bust line and across the back, and below the bust line it just falls away. Not under the bust, the bust line, and while I try VERY HARD to practice anti-flattering dressing, it’s just not as easy to carry it out when your body is not a conventional hour glass shape.
An outfit photo of me, fat and pale skinned, wearing a dress with a mauve/ purple/ cream/ olive dot pattern, a lot of brown bead necklaces, and a thin belt with black sandals. I'm standing with Miffy, who wants her outfit photo taken too.
This morning we decided to go out for lunch and I had a dressing dilemma. Summer is a terrible sartorial period in my life because it’s so damn hot and for some reason I don’t have a very cohesive summer wardrobe. I have made a few patterned skirts but none of them go with the tops that I have! I pulled out the dreaded dress and decided to give it another go. Without anything to around my waist/ under boob area (the two are basically the same place when you have a short waist) it just made me feel very frumpy and un-finished. I pulled a studded belt out of the top of the wardrobe and put on as many beaded necklaces as I could find, and found it infinitely more wearable and less frumpy in my head. I hate wearing belts that just float around, and I really resent the designer for making this dress loose fitting from the bust line, but this is basically the best way I feel I can wear this dress.
My dress struggles reminded me that even though I (or you or anyone) can fully reject something (like the principle of flattering clothes) in theory, in practice it’s a far harder thing to carry out especially when we’ve had acceptable body shapes and sizes drilled into our heads. In some ways I feel like a hypocrite, but being gentler and more tender with myself is probably a more productive and workable approach. No fat or body acceptance activist is perfect, we all make mistakes, and sometimes we practice things that fall outside what we preach. How can I expect myself to be a perfectly radical activist in every way when I’ve grown up in the very culture I am questioning? I am not objective, I am subjective; we shouldn’t give the objective viewpoints more weight in most circumstances, we should be giving voice to the lived experience of hardship, struggle and oppression. I am feeling these shitty feelings we’ve been taught to feel. The most powerful thing is stopping for a second to listen to my self talk, then questioning why I feel the need to comply. Talking about it with other people helps a great deal, and it’s one of the reasons why I write about being fat and wearing clothes on this blog.
An outfit photo of me picking up my necklaces with one hand and the skirt of my dress with another, in a very carefree sort of "I'm a blogger lalalala" kind of way.
So I chose the option that made me feel less shit about myself in this case. It’s not perfect, but it’s one of the things I have to do in order to wear clothes as per my societal contract as a human being living in a city in Australia. I chose the option that made me feel like I’d be less of a target. As a fat person who is deathfat and can not hide it, my body is hyper-visible; I felt like I’d be less of a target for people to stare at and yell things at. I also chose the option that made me feel much better about a purchase I made, because I don’t have access to a diverse range of options in a size 24-26.
A photo of Miffy reaching up to give me a high five (with both paws because her front legs are adorably tiny).
A photo of my face, smiling in a kind of very forced way.
A photo of my legs and feet standing on grass sprinkled with red poinciana flowers. I'm wearing black studded sandals.
I get lots of feedback and questions about being fat and trying to be a “good activist” all the time, and honestly, I have no idea what a “good activist” is. The best human being I can be is a transparent, tender, forgiving, accountable being; and when it comes to an area of activism like body image that is so personal and emotional, the best activist thing is kind of a false aspiration. Seek to question, critique and be accountable but also be super loving and forgiving and remember that nuance is incredibly important. If you struggle with hating your body or participating in hurtful practices but love the idea of fat and body acceptance, you are not alone. There’s lots of us standing in front of mirrors every day battling this stuff, wondering if a belt will compromise everything. But it doesn’t.
Dress: Piper Woman
Shoes: Annie (via Shoebuy.com)
Belt: From a Yours Clothing dress
Necklaces: from a variety of forgotten places
Bangles: City Chic
A graphic with an illustration of afrotitty and photos of an ivory No Diet Talk brooch and purple hologram Fat necklace. Text follows:
Win fancy stuff
#fancybonanza!
Win
• an ivory No Diet Talk brooch,
• purple hologram fat necklace and
• a custom digital portrait of you.
How?
Follow: @fancyladyind on Twitter
Tweet: I want to win the #fancybonanza!
(Just once is all it takes!)
15% off Fat necklaces
Use FAT15 on checkout
Giveaway closes Dec 8
15% off Fat necklaces until Dec 31
A photo of two No Diet Talk brooches in black and ivory pinned to my green singlet.
First you could declare your site a No Diet Talk zone, and now you can set boundaries around your body with a No Diet Talk brooch! Horah! I’ve probably timed this super well with the party season coming up, but it was just a happy and fortuitous accident.
A photo of corn flour that has been sifted over the No Diet Talk brooch and left behind a lovely powdery stencil.
You can wear the brooch on your person or you can sift powder over the acrylic to create political baked goods and hot beverages too! Try it with icing sugar, coloured coconut or cocoa and create a fabulous diet talk free zone over the next month, a serene bubble away from the party goers who like to shame themselves and others for eating delicious holiday food.
No Diet Talk brooches are available to buy right now on
fancyladyindustries.com
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