New Office Setup

I am super excited today because I managed to set up my little office space about 3 weeks earlier than I initially anticipated. 

Two years ago my little sister bought this little summer house for the back garden and I've been allowed to use it as an office space after the capacity of my bedroom was seriously pushed to its limits by the amount of sewing equipment in it.

My mother is a total DIY expert so the inside is all insulated and complete with electricity, electric fireplace, table etc. You name it, I've now got it.

Sadly, because it's Christmas I'm sharing the space with a bunch of sports equipment and a dolls house we wanted out of the livingroom to make room for the tree and decoartions but right now I have enough room to set up a desk and have a heater whilst I work away watching 'When in Rome' (I had a serious craving for Olsen Twin.)

In the long term I want to use this space as a place to really focus more on blogging, I'm giving myself office hours and everything to ensure I really keep on top of posting stuff in the coming year. I'm also hoping to create a collection in the coming year, just a small one that I can try and sell off online to raise some money and get some experience of working alone to produce collections. I just feel like I have had no space in the last 6 months to really focus on design and now that I have that I want to have a good go at creating something I can be proud of, with the luxury of Youtube and movies being with me at the same time!

Decoration-wise I'm pretty happy to leave the London themed pictures up because that is very much my favourite city and once I have all of the equipment and such removed from inside here I'll be able to get the sewing machine in and all my books in and then I will do a little tour but for now here are a few photos of the little blue summer house and the office space I have set up for myself:

 

1. The little blue office space as seen from outside

2. A view of the desk area I've managed to set up

3. All of my pen/felt tip/pencil storage (all plastic containers come from Ikea)

4. A view of the office space behind me that is yet to be sorted and won't be until after Christmas, I'm sharing with some lovely mannequins and bird cages I managed to salvage from my work!  

Goodbye 2014

Hello everyone!
Well it is now December and my absolute favourite time of the year. I've always had a thing for layering knitwear, hot chocolate, sitting in the livingroom with just the Christmas tree lights on and everything else that comes with the festive season.

I've not blogged since August which is insane but I decided to spend the latter half of the year focussing on other parts of my life. The good news is that as of new year I'm gettjng myself a little office space where I want to focus on blogging and sewing etc so that's something really exciting for me to look forward to and should also bring with it a few welcome changes.

2014 has been an amazing year! With graduation and my new job it's definitely been a growing period for me plus I was lucky enough to have an absolutely amazing holiday away to Tenerife with my best friend.

The end of my year is set to be just as amazing. Christmas day and New Year is spent with all the family and is a relatively quiet but deeply enjoyed period of time for us all, our best memories are created at this time and overall it's just a very family orientated period of the year.

After the New Year I'll be sharing some of the beauty products etc I get this year, there's also a lot of fashion design orientated books I'd like to share with people on here who are interested in that field.

The office/workroom that I'm also going to set up will get shown on here as well because I'm hoping that'll be a little hub for me starting next year. That is right now the one thing I'm like...constantly planning for, I'm on pinterest trying to get ideas and everything and I'm just stoked to have my own little area. I can see me spending a LOT of time in it and it's gonna be fun to show you what it is!

I have no immediate plans for what I want to achieve next year apart from continue to improve at my job and travel with my friend again. The only goal I've 100% set myself is to save up £1200 by the end of 2015 and in 2016 I'll hopefully make my parents wishes come true and move out! Also blogging more is a top priority!

If there is one regret it's that my sewing has really slipped since I graduated but that was expected after the trauma of my final year collection. If there's one thing I have realised it's that working independently without the stress of rediculous deadlines or really strict guidelines is that i really do enjoy sewing clothes, something that I really despised come the end of university and that's probably why I took my career in the totally opposite direction.

Sewing more is definitely on the cards in 2015.

So that's all I wanted to say to sum up the year. Thanks to thepeople who have commented and such over the year, next year I hope that'll continue as I update everything and get back into blogging more. 2014 has been incredible and hopefully next year is just as enriching and full of memories.

I'll finish off this post with a few of my favourite photos of the year, it's been a crazy one! (A lot of these are shameless screen shotts off my phone so I apologise!)

Broony.

Nyx Macaron Lippies Review and Swatches

Hello again! Day 2 of what I'm hoping will be a 7 day period of make up product reviews for you all whilst I'm off recovering.

Today I want to share with you all my Nyx Macaron Lippies that I got imported over from America and for this review I want to follow criteria that I would usually look for when buying lipstick.

As you will all know my love of lipstick is extreme and there isn't really a brand I wouldn't be willing to at least try. So, when Shaaanxo put up a blog post about these Nyx Macaron Lippies and all the crazy colours they come in I couldn't help myself, I had to have them!

In order to get the lipsticks I had to order from the Nyx website and have them sent to a warehouse ran by an international shipping campany in Florida called MyUS and then get them shipped over here to Scotland and I have to say the service was really fast and relatively stress free. I would recommend MyUS to anyone and again, I found out about it through Shannon. 

So onto the review!

Urban Decay Revolution Lipstick

Hey everyone! I hope you're all having a fantastic Summer Holidays, the weather here in Scotland has turned on us and been replaced by constant cloud and rain at the moment which has meant that we've retreated indoors these last few days.

I've done a very similar post to this before where I compared these Urban Decay lipsticks to my YSL ones but I had surgery 3 days ago to remove 3 impacted wisdom teeth and have since been in bed all day so I really want to do another swatch and review post of the lipsticks just so I'm actively spending time putting into this blog whilst I'm recovering. I would ideally like to do a post a day for you all!

So these are definitely my favourite lipsticks of all time after the YSL rouge volupte. I would say I prefer the texture of these lipsticks more because it doesn't feel as slidey and feels like it will stay put all day.

The packaging on these is just beautiful as well, when it comes to lipsticks I'm a magpie for the shiny packaging and these look so sleek, the only thing I hate is that there is no indication on the packaging what the colour inside is so I need to store them upside down to read the name off the bottom.

 

So the 4 lipsticks I have are Venom, Shame, Bang and Native, a pretty diverse bunch of colours...

 

Native is by far one of my favourite nude lipsticks, I like the YSL number 1 in nude beige and I also love MAC Myth but the texture of this is just perfect. The YSL is very creamy and the Mac feels extremely heavy on the lips and this is the perfect medium. 

 

Infact, Urban Decay lipsticks as a whole have an amazing texture. Bang is one of my favourite orange/red shades and when I want a dark autumnal lip shame and venom are my favourites to wear. What I love about these lipsticks as well is that they aren't glittery which is a pet peeve of mine when it comes to lipstick,  these aren't exactly matte lipsticks but they're glossy without being too sticky. 

 

I've had to swatch these on my hands and not my lips because my face is so swolen but I think you can get a good idea how the shades appear in both natural light and under the flash. 

 

I can't mention the lipsticks without also talking about the Urban Decay 24/7 lip pencils which are in my opinion some of the best lip liners out there, they are extremely creamy and I feel they glide onto my lips with absolutely no problem.

The beige colour you see swatched at the very bottom of my hand has been a favourite of mine for the last few weeks whilst at work and I haven't had to top it up once because they are so durable.I definitely want to invest in a red lipliner for myself because I feel it's the only one I really need to get a hold of, the good thing about these lip liners is that they are general colours that can be used with many different coloured lipsticks.

 

So those are my 4 Urban Decay lipsticks, today I got my 5 NYX macaron lippies in the post so I'll take pictures of those tomorrow and do a post on them and I also want to review and do a few looks with my electric palette.

Hopefully if my face has shrank down a bit tomorrow I'll be able to swatch some on my lips, if not I'll try and put it off a few days.

 

The Brownlies embrace Summer

Hey everyone! So the weather in the central belt in Scotland has been absolutely stunning for the best part of the past month and as I am currently enjoying a 10 day holiday of work me and my family have been trying to make the most of the weather.

Today was actually pretty horrible for the most part but from 4pm we had glorious sunshine that spurred the family to have a picnic dinner in our local nature reserve, a place we used to frequent when me and Lisa were little kids. 

It's actually a pretty day, the family have been talking a lot lately about spending more time visiting places for leisure, especially now that all 4 of us have full time jobs and can put money away for days out together. I dunno if any of you do similar things where you make time to visit places with family?

So anyway today was a lovely change for us all and I am totally looking forwardto doing similar things again as a family. I feel like we don't get nearly enough time to have days out and explore new places and noone likes to be stuck in the same places for long periods of time. 

So here are a few photos from our day out!

 

So as you guys can see it really was such a pretty place to have a picnic and a walk about.

Today I also managed to finally film a make up tutorial on how i wear my make up for work so that's all been edited and is ready for the voice over tomorrow so I'll hopefully have that uploaded tomorrow night or Thursday!

Graduation!

Hey you guys! This week I have some photos of my graduation to share with you. Graduation was about 3 weeks ago and it is still a bit of a shock to the system that I am no longer in any type of education. I keep going to work and thinking "damnit this is life now!"

Graduation was an intensely crazy day that started at half 5 for myself and my family (something they really were not too thrilled about) and involved a 2 hour round trip in the car, a lunch date, a dinner and i dunno how many alcoholic beverages and photos. 

I have to admit that dawning my graduation gown after what feels like the quickest 4 years of my life was totally surreal. When I arrived at the church I was on my own as well so I had already kinda entered into freak out mode over how to make my hood sit flat, how to stop my hair sitting flat and when on earth my family were going to haul ass away from their Wetherspoons breakfast and come join me!

The ceremony itself flew in and if I'm honest I think my university kind of rushed through the handing out of the degrees, my campus in total only comprises of 150 or so students, much less than other universities so they could have maybe given us a second or so on stage so our family got a chance to take a photo or something. One second I was about to get my degree, the next I was back in my seat wondering where the hell my graduation programme had escaped to amongst the chaos of my row standing up and sitting down again.

After graduation my entire graduating class had refreshments in Gala House which had stunning grounds which made for some fantastic photos of us all with our degrees, we were lucky to have absolutely stunning weather by Scotlands standards and by this point the parents of the class were well into celebration mode. 

So all that's really left for me to do is share with you some of the photos of my day and hopefully the video of my degree will upload on here as well for you all to see. 

All in all graduation is a totally surreal and yet enjoyable day for you and your class, we definitely had a crazy day and made of with some even crazier photos to comemorate it! 

 

 

 

 

 The above is my absolute fave photo of the day hahaha!!

So there you have it!