MOVING~

Hi there, long time no see! 

It's been a while...

(okay, perhaps more than a while... 3/4 of a year actually, how time flies!)

and because I'm still getting views on this blog

(no idea why anyone would want to read what I've ever written o_O)

I just wanted to let any lingerers know that I've moved blogs! That would explain my absence.

Feel free to check out my new blog, Bubblepandas, (which I co-write with one of my best friends) here.

Also, I wouldn't mind if you follow us on Bloglovin' too.

That's all! This will probably be my last post here... in forever... :(

Perhaps one day I'll revisit here and begin to post random knick knacks. 

Toodle pip! :)

Lena ♡ xx

australia day at the beach

yum :3

sprinkle soft serve from the ice cream truck, yummy ♡ 

Hope you're all having a wonderful day! :D

(I started a new blog with one of my best friends, check it out?)

haul

Hello everybody! I know it's been ages since I last posted (3 months to be exact) but I am back and decided to be bothered to take a few photos and write this.

Yesterday I went out shopping with a couple of my friends and I got several things which I thought I'd share with y'all :)

So firstly I went to a dollar store which was having a sale and bought these little dust plugs for my phone! If you don't know what they are, they're simply little cute accessories which you can insert into the earphone slot on a phone, which not only look super cute and a fun way to customize, but they also keep out dust and dirt. I bought 3 for 30c each (AUD). My favourite colour is purple so when I saw the tiny purple bow, I had to get it! And on the right is a tiny Rilakkuma holding an ice cream.

The last one I purchased was another bow, this time in the colour pink, and is the one I'm currently using on my phone.

Here's a view of it with my phone case, which is strawberry patterned! I love how it looks.

Next I bought a Sentimental Circus themed cardboard box. If you don't know, Sentimental Circus is a series of adorable little characters by the Japanese company San-x and I love it so much! This is it all folded up. It was only $2. I was very surprised when I found it and adore the little drawings on it~

(Excuse the messy table) Here I folded it up and as you can see, it's quite a small box. This is the back of it~ I don't really have much use for it so I might use it to put in my pens and pencils because I'm quite a hoarder when it comes to stationary, and my current holder is overflowing! ><;

Next, I visited a cute little Korean cosmetics store called The Face Shop. Because I consider myself waaaaay too young to wear make-up, I only went there to look at the nail polish, and I got 2! They were $3 each and they had a large variety of colours.The first looks pink, but it's actually a base coat to protect my natural nails when I choose to wear nail polish. The second one is a girly and sparkly one which is clear, but has lots of silver glitter and pink heart confetti in it.

It's like a pretty little snow storm inside! (not that I've ever seen one...)

Then I went to the supermarket and found another nail polish colour that I loved. It's this pastel purple which is just perfect to me and by the brand Covergirl and was only $1 which I thought was a bargain!

Also from the supermarket I bought these Babylips lipbalms by Maybelline in 3 flavours. The cherry and mango ones are moisturising while the berry, silver coloured one is for colour. They were $3 each.

Pawpaw lip balm is a really nice way to heal dry lips! I really love these two little bottles of them. They're by different brands and the orange one contains rosehip and manuka.

To save the best till last, I found a Rilakkuma toast squishy! I was speechless when I found this in my local kawaii store as I've never it in real life before. There were many other designs but I thought this chef hat one was the cutest. If you don't know, squishies are collectible accessories and are made of some kind of foamy material, and normally come in adorable designs. This one, unfortunately, has Japanese writing all over the back so I can't read it, and I also can't find a licensing on it... but it's still super duper cute anyway! :D This was $3.50 and I had to resist the urge to just buy all of them~

So that's it for my haul... I hope this rather long post makes up for my hiatus. :) Please comment below if you want, I don't bite! xD

Byeeee xx
Lena

crafting and diy weekends

Today is Sunday where I live and I've spent the day doing a DIY project and more charms I wanted to show you all.

This DIY bag is inspired by a tutorial on Pinterest I found a while ago. After a lot of procrastinating, I found this calico bag and ironed it, before painting this pretty gradient heart effect with only the back of a pencil! It's a very easy and nice project to do.

Here's a close up of it. Towards the top, I started getting impatient and running out of paint so it get's rather messy, but from far away you can't tell :)

I also made these adorable little éclair charms out of polymer clay and dimensional paint for the 'chocolate icing' on top. I like to make these as they're fairly straightforward to make and they look cute! The only problem is that they're quite time consuming for such little pieces. I'll be selling these at school for a charity fair (non-profit). I hope they sell!

 Here's another shot of them. I know the sprinkles are completely out of proportion, but I like the colours for them!

Oh the magic of Photoshop! I was practising taking photos of my charms and turned a dark, unfocused photograph from my phone to this presentable picture. Here you can also see the size of the cookie and I love how the camera captured all the detail, from the crumbly texture of the cookie to the faint skin lines on my fingers!

Hope you all have a nice day and stay strong! xox

decorating photos

Recently I've taken to playing around with photo filters and enhancing my photos using Photoshop and various other websites I've found. It's been very fun and I'm happy with the results. I have a lot to learn, but hey, doesn't everyone?

Adding a nice bokeh effect, a softer pastel tone to it and writing text onto this cat I snapped a photo of in the pet shop, I'm pretty happy with how it looks.

To add the bokeh and text, I simply used a website called PicMonkey and used Photoshop Elements 9 for the text bubble and lighting.

Here are a few more examples:






If you can't tell already, I am an animal lover! It's quite sad how I don't own one myself though, but I guess going to the pet shop is always more fun that way.

I didn't edit this one very much, just adjusted the lighting brighter and added the lines in front of it's face, and overall I quite like the simplicity of the final photograph, although I do feel it's missing something ...

And I mustn't forget the frozen yoghurt I had! I believe this particular one was the first one I've ever had at the self-serve shops... it's delicious! However I don't recommend going crazy and adding too many toppings onto it otherwise it gets quite pricey. Also, I suggest you refrain from heavier toppings such as fat biscuits and what not.

This shop is an international branch named Yogurberry (as you can see on the bowl) and I think that it's not the cheapest brand but it has by far the most variety of both flavours and toppings I've seen.

I hope you all have a lovely and happy day (:

macaron miniature tutorial

EDIT: I've made an updated version of this tutorial. The steps are the same, but the photos are slightly clearer (I hope). Check it out!

Polymer clay has been a hobby of mine since late last year, and over the months I've come to get the right tools, skills, colours and practice for it. One particular type of using it is to make miniatures, especially food. I tend to make simple pieces rather than complex, as I'm not very good at it yet. Here I'll show you step by step instructions on how to make a miniature macaron! Here are some of my examples using this technique.

Firstly, you can make these out of any clay you want (air dry, cold porcelain, polymer). They can be any size and colours you want, which is probably why I love them so much; for their variety!

Start off with two equal amounts polymer clay. To achieve more realistic results, I prefer to mix a tiny bit of the colour with translucent. As you can see, I've mixed red with translucent. It doesn't matter if you make them different colours; remember to be creative!

Next up, form a small flat circular (or any shape you want) with one of the portions of clay. Be sure to try and minimize your fingerprints on it and keep dust out! Using the same colour, roll out a snake.

Wrap the snake around the macaron shell once and cut off any excess.

 Using a needle tool (or just a needle) or a sharp tipped tool, texture the snake you just wrapped around by moving the pointed end in a circular motion around it, creative a rough 'breadcrumb' texture. Here I used the tip of a crafting blade/knife.

Repeat the process with the second blob of clay, creating two.

 Now just simply join them together and you're done! You can put glue or 'bake and bond' in between the two macaron shells to secure them, but I find just patting them together works as well.

And you're done! Make as many as you like in all sorts of colours and sizes. Mine are about 1 cm in diameter each (I'm not sure what scale it is though).

Happy crafting everyone! Let me know in the comments about my first blog post. :)