Archive for the 'Style' Category
February 10 2010: Extravagant Wedding Expenses
Filed under Style with 18 Comments
A local radio station here are holding a wedding dress party, to give women a chance to wear their wedding dress more than once. Fantastic idea when you think about it – why have a dress you can only wear once? Each day, they have different ways of giving listeners a chance to win tickets to the party – whether it be getting people to call in if they have the most expensive wedding dress, the strangest themed wedding, etc.
A woman called into the show yesterday, telling of her $25,000AUD wedding dress which was made in Italy. That is just obscene! $25,000AUD could be a third of a deposit on a house! It could buy a new car with change left over! There’s extravagant, then there’s pointless expenditure – $25,000AUD for a dress to be worn once? Ridiculous. I wouldn’t even spend $25,000AUD on a whole wedding.
Personally, I already have a plan for my own wedding dress. Because the style I want is so specific, there’s no way I can buy off a rack – the dress will have to be custom-made. So the idea is to:
- Purchase luxury bridal silk and lace fabrics at Clegs, which is a luxury fabric store in Melbourne.
- Take base pattern ($30AUD for a strapless dress pattern from Spotlight) to Shanghai when I’m on a family visit home
- Get a local Chinese made-to-measure dressmaker to create my dream dress for a fraction of the price
So, rather than forking out $8,000AUD-$10,000AUD for a dressmaker to make a dress for me here in Australia, I’d fork out about $700AUD for materials purchased in Australia, and a dressmaker in China to create a dress perfectly fitted to my body, with an extra $2,000AUD in a holiday back home to see family before I get married (as they’re unlikely to be able to come to the wedding). That’s less than a quarter of the price of getting a custom-made dress in Australia, and less than a tenth of the cost of this woman’s $25,000AUD dress!
January 18 2010: Use Packing Tape To Prevent Blisters
Filed under Body & Style with 17 Comments
You know how there’s a myriad of frugal beauty tips and tricks out there?
- Use toothpaste to dry out pimples.
- Use olive oil as a hair styling product.
- Use lemon juice to naturally lighten your hair.
- Use Vaseline for pretty much anything.
Well I’ve just come up with another one. Use packing tape to prevent blisters.
The above photo obviously isn’t the best example, but imagine it with clear packing tape (about 6cm wide) instead of brown packing tape. The back of the shoe simply rubs up against the plastic instead of your skin – there’s no discomfort, and once you’re at home, you can just peel off the tape without any pain at all!
At about $2AUD for twenty metres worth (enough to last you a year, or even longer!), it’s a million times cheaper than using bandaids, or even buying those gel cushions you can stick inside shoes ($8AUD last time I saw them – ripoff!).
December 29 2009: The Obligatory Post-Festive Season Entry
Filed under Family & Life & Money & Relationships/Men & Style & Uni/Work with 4 Comments
Despite the whole not-very-festive environment I’ve been brought up in, I think it’s almost obligatory for personal bloggers to have a post-festive season entry summarising everything they’ve eaten, received, and done? Far be it for me to flout this unwritten rule of the blog community – prepare yourself for long-windedness.
Christmas Eve
I actually worked for most of Christmas Eve, packing up boxes for an impending office move (as previously mentioned). This was about half of the total amount of boxes – it was a long, sweaty and dusty day. I did manage to get home by 5pm to clean myself up before heading over to my aunt’s for an Asian-style Christmas Eve dinner though. This essentially means that all the ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’ bring a dish (Asian cuisine of course!), and we all stuff our faces with food. Chicken wings, lamb chops, potato salad, curry and vermicelli noodles with pickled veggies? That’s our version of Christmas fare.
Then of course, the adults start playing endless rounds of mahjong and drinking endless cups of tea as soon as dinner is over, while the children are relegated to a back bedroom to entertain ourselves the best we can. We might be in our twenties and late teens, but my cousins and I (and the children of other family friends) are still considered to be the ‘children’. Admittedly we fit into our designated roles remarkably well – we played Taboo and Pictionary with a few glasses of wine each, well into the early hours of the morning.
As a side note, I am vaguely communicating with my parents again, in that we can be in the same room without screaming at each other. Polite conversation with my mother is a good start though, as well as the fact that my father deigned to speak a sentence to me: “Refill my cup of tea”.
Christmas
I woke up on Christmas Day at Dylan’s house with presents to open! As a joke gift, he bought me a Hello Kitty candy set – as an Asian female, I’m obviously supposed to love Hello Kitty. (Which I do, secretly, but don’t tell him that because it’ll only reinforce the stereotype.) My real gift though, was a body board – and to celebrate Christmas, we drove two hours down the coast and spent the day at Cape Paterson together so that I could have my first ever body-boarding experience. We could have gone to a more local beach, but as Melbourne is situated within a bay, he decided it would be more exciting to drive further out past the peninsula so that we could surf in the actual ocean with real waves, rather than within a calmer bay.
I had a blast – absolutely an overall awesome day. We’re now contemplating getting into snorkeling as a hobby, as the coastline around Cape Paterson is absolutely littered with rock pools and marine life. I’m considering buying snorkeling sets for his birthday in February, though I guess ideally we should have the equipment by mid-January when the weather will be calmer and it’ll be easier to snorkel in the open ocean.
Oh, and I made him a type of mini-hamper gift with things he likes – a selection of different nuts from the market (walnuts, almonds, macadamias), a bottle of our favourite wine (Brown Brothers Moscato), a new coffee percolator and some organic coffee beans (he’s sick of drinking instant coffee at my place, so now he can have actual coffee), and some home-made dark chocolate with ginger. Nothing remarkable, just a few things I threw together into a basket, but he seemed to like it, so all is good.
Boxing Day
Boxing Day is a big day for my cousin and I. It’s traditionally one of the biggest retail days of the year with enormous post-Christmas discounts, and we have gotten into the habit of taking full advantage of the sales. We ended up shopping from eight in the morning to eight at night, across two different shopping centres. I ended up buying:
- A woollen underlay for my mattress – $89.95 from $299
- Leopard print micro shorts – $9.95 from $69.95
- A print top – $14.95 from $79.95
- Earrings – $5 from $14.95
- A headband – $5 from $29.95
I was remarkably controlled this year in my spending – the woollen underlay was my biggest purchase by far, but as I had been needing one since I moved out, and managed to pick up a trans-seasonal one (works in both winter and summer) for a third of the original price, I think it was a justified purchase. The top and shorts were a bit of a splurge as they’re really too casual and ‘fun’ for work, but I really think it’s about time I start dressing my age. The accessories were just cute cute cute, and cheap enough for me.
Overall, it was a fairly chilled couple of days. There was no blatant displays of consumerism (sure I went sale shopping, but didn’t go overboard!), and I only stuffed myself with food for one meal, so it was probably a million times more controlled and less indulgent than most people’s Christmases!