by Carla Louise | Feb 13, 2015 | Alter Ego, carlalouise, Crafting, Creating, Life Magic, Photography, Projects & Challenges, Unfurling Your Wings |
Couldn’t choose just one for this week – too much good stuff! Rainbow shoes, My Little Pony hair, glittery Doc Martens and a sign I’m on the right track…
First up, rainbow decopatched heels – these were a much loved pair of black leather Mary Janes from Schuh, which I own in black, red and magenta. But all three pairs have been so worn over the last 7 or 8 years that no amount of polish was going to make them acceptable. So I turned the black pair into rainbow shoes.
Then I went to get my hair re-bleached for some more and brighter blue on Saturday. But liked the brown-to-blonde-to-mint-green look so much I haven’t actually put any extra dye in yet! 
If I don’t find any cowboy boots I adore on this trip to the States, I shall be buying these glittery babies the moment I return…
And a sign that I’m on the right path with Unfurling Your Wings – I’ve never bought Illamasqua, though my friend Wendy has designed bags for their launches, but I have just discovered that their tagline is “make up for your alter ego”. Perfect. 
As ever, the other contenders are on my Flickr stream.
by Carla Louise | Apr 24, 2014 | carlalouise, Gratitude and goals, Life Magic, Personal Development, Unfurling Your Wings |
It’s been a long journey of wanting, wishing and waiting, but in February this year, just after my 28th birthday, I finally booked an appointment to have my hair dyed blue.
Several hours of bleaching, foils, and inadvertently making both of my hairdressers look like they’d been busy murdering Smurfs, it was done. Eeek!
But because my hair doesn’t hold anything (colour, curls, shape), I found myself having to re-apply the dye twice in the first week. At £9.50 per tube for the (admittedly pretty) Fudge blue colour, this quickly became unworkable. So I did what I always do when I have a problem, and asked the internet for help.
This pretty much summed up everyone’s advice from all over the internet – try Directions. It’s also, as far as I can tell, vegan, which means the lovely Annastasia at Not The Vegan Police will approve!
So I trooped into town, bought a pot each of Atlantic Blue, Midnight Blue and Lagoon Blue, and proceeded to re-dye my hair.
The results:
Atlantic Blue is by far my favourite, and caused more than one colleague to exclaim “Carla! Your hair! It’s SO BLUE today!” which I think can only be a good thing.
Lagoon Blue, while much lighter in colour, has actually lasted almost three weeks and has faded to a bright turquoise, which is absolutely acceptable and will probably be my summer colour of choice.
Midnight Blue I’ve not yet been brave enough to try, as I’m scared it’ll be too dark – but I’ll give it a go soon.
I’m yet to master decent lighting for photos, but here are a few:
I’m over the moon with my new hair – and it was summed up best by two of my friends. Josh told me it was “mermaid hair”, and Naomi’s is still my favourite comment – “it’s the hair you were always meant to have”. That’s definitely what it feels like!
by Carla Louise | Nov 4, 2011 | Uncategorized |
I feel like I should copy this post across to Project Pin Up, it was so very vintage and pin up-esque! (edit – collage pic is over there with a link back here and to Mimi’s post!)
Last Saturday, the lovely Lou from Contrariety Rose came to stay, and after a morning of revamping her website and eating chocolate, we met Mimi for our first workshop at Make Do and Mend in Chelmsford. Mimi’s lovely husband Carl drove us there, and when we arrived some of the other ladies were already there, drinking tea and chatting.
Set up so that we were all around the same table, with an individual mirror and shared bottles of setting lotion and water spray, we started with pin curls and victory rolls. Hannah (who owns Make Do and Mend) showed us how to reserve a section of hair for the victory roll, and then to pin curl the rest. Once this was done (Mimi’s was most successful, Lou’s hair is very short at the moment and mine is incredibly long, thick and unruly) we wrapped our hair in scarves and let it dry. Hannah explained that usually this would be done before sleeping. Clearly, as it was mid-afternoon, sleeping was off the agenda, and more tea and biscuits while swapping stories and tips with the other girls was definitely on!
Here we are putting our pin curls in.
We then set to work on the victory roll section. Those with very short hair or a fringe had a helping hand from some of Hannah’s vintage roll-safety-pin contraptions (sadly you can’t buy these any more new) and the rest of us rolled and pinned and unrolled and rolled and pinned… and repeated. I eventually discovered, after several attempts, that I was trying to roll far too much hair at once. Ditching some of it (extra pin curl, anyone?) meant I finally got a roll/quiff type structure, which I promptly drenched in hairspray!
We then moved on to makeup, with Hannah showing us how to do a 1940s eyeliner flick. This is a brilliant concept which I really struggled with, was fine on my right eye but rubbish on my left – without my glasses I can’t see much at all out of my right eye so have always struggled (and with my day to day makeup, pretty much do it by feel). However, practise makes perfect and I at least now have the technique to work on!
Winged eyeliner, red lips and sweeps of blusher done, we were ready to unpin our pin curls. These had varying degrees of success, depending on the type of hair, the tightness of the curl and whether or not we’d actually let it dry properly (if you unwrap a damp pin curl, it will just go straight instead of springy and bouncy).
To no one’s surprise, the majority of my hair refused to curl, so I put it up in a fifties style ponytail which looked pretty good with my roll/quiff contraption. Mimi’s hair fell in soft waves, and Lou’s curled around her head in a surprisingly ruly fashion (her hair is so short in places we weren’t sure it would work at all!)
We met the lovely Karen of Essex Vintage Weddings, and lots of other ladies too – I hope to go back and do another workshop now I’ve had my hair cut and it’s a bit more manageable. Invested in some setting lotion at the weekend too so I could practise… quite when I’m going to fit this in to my ridiculous schedule I don’t know, but I’d love to be able to do vintagey hair more often 🙂
by Carla Louise | Oct 27, 2011 | Adventures, Thrifting |
A double dose today, as I don’t think I was organised enough to do a post last week…
Last week:
Unexpectedly meeting Val for lunch at Nandos
Corsets – hehe, see my posts on Project Pin Up
Tentatively enquiring whether our drunken ‘yeah, let’s do a rally round Ireland’ could become reality and getting a very enthusiastic response from the other teams. Hey, plans made at 3am in an obscure part of Europe under the influence of alcohol are clearly the best ones!
Spending an entire evening talking boys and horses with Lizzy
Type-writing a letter to Dan (another one – I’m improving!!)
Treasure hunting with Mum
Awesome numberplate on a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream van
Deciding we should drink the last bottle of Romanian rum and toast Rusty sometime
Starting my Vivien of Holloway dress fund.
This week:
Lunch with some of the girls from work last Friday, which was fab, as I got to speak to some of the ones I never see during work time
Going through the R2R photos again and reliving the whole thing
Mum coming round and making me soup after a truly hideous migraine on Tuesday
The sense of achievement that comes from having almost built a whole website for a dear friend
Vintage hair and makeup workshop (I really need to blog about this separately too) at Make Do and Mend in Chelmsford with the lovely Mimi and Lou, led by the equally lovely Hannah
Spotting a hedgehog under a tree on the way home from work one evening
An unexpected, glorious, sunshine-filled, warm roof-down blast round the Suffolk countryside on Sunday afternoon
Extended phone and text conversations – I have wonderful people in my life
Finally booking a haircut – I don’t want to lose any of the length but it’s long overdue, it’s lost its swish!
Lights near Bishopsgate in the evening
The general soaring happy feeling I’ve had most of this week 🙂
Fully aware I should have photos in this post but I’m absolutely shattered so may have to add them tomorrow. But really can’t go two Thursdays in a row without posting or next week’s will be utterly ridiculous!
by Carla Louise | Aug 27, 2011 | Acquired |
I’m completely broke and shouldn’t be buying anything but essentials. Yet somehow, I found myself in Superdrug this morning eyeing up the Sleek Pout Paint, which I’ve heard rave reviews about. Unsurprisingly, three came home with me (they had a 3 for 2 promotion)
I’m stupidly excited to try them out, especially the blue, and to do some mixing 🙂
Next (well actually bought earlier in the week) were two No. 7 blue nail polishes (with the £5 off voucher Boots are so kindly doing at the moment) in Betty Blues (the dark sparkly one) and Poolside Blue (which matches my Pout Paint gorgeously, doesn’t it?!). I also indulged in a hideously expensive but (I’m told) well worth it OPI Start to Finish, which will keep my manicure chip-free for a good week, even if I wash up. And I may have accidentally bought a Barry M black crackle polish too, just to see the effect 🙂 Photographed with my Marie Claire Ciate in Wait Until Dark, which I know has been reviewed on a fair few beauty blogs already.
My apologies for the ridiculously bad photos, incidentally – but really wanted to get a blog up at some stage this weekend and I think this is going to be my only opportunity!
Also indulged in four bottles of Aussie haircare – two shampoos, a three minute miracle conditioner and some Luscious Long leave-in conditioner which smells amazing… so hopefully my poor mistreated hair will soon be in the peak of health.
I actually had a weird craving to dye it dark red again earlier, but I’m not sure I’d get away with it for work… maybe I should do it for the rally and then it’d have time to fade before we get back?!
I promise to try and blog properly soon – no idea what’s happened to my life in last few weeks!
by Carla Louise | Jul 4, 2011 | Uncategorized |
Wigs. They seem to have popped up in conversation a lot recently… people wearing them, buying them, talking about buying them, talking about wearing them.
I have been in love with the idea of blue hair (electric blue, not halfhearted blue) for years now, but have never been brave enough to attempt bleaching my very dark brown hair light enough to cope with electric blue. Then I got my current job, in which blue hair probably equals no job quite quickly!
So after asking around I had a look at Lulu’s wigs on ebay. They were very reasonable and had some fantastic colours, so I ordered one. I originally went for this one:
When it arrived,it was lovely, but I realised I should have gone for one which was the same length as my own hair, otherwise it’d be super-obvious. So I went for the longer blue – they have a fantastic policy of exchanging your wig as long as it hasn’t been worn. And I fell utterly in love as soon as the longer one arrived!
And here is me, wearing it…
Please excuse the shocking self-portrait – I’m planning a proper shoot with it soon but am short on time till mid-September 🙁
A hairdresser now working at MAC in Reading recognised it as a wig, but did ask if it was colour or a wig and said he loved it *grin* and I’ve worn it out a couple of times and think it’s realistic enough… obviously people who see me regularly realise I don’t have bangs all the time lol! But it’s fantastic fun and it’s a great way of boosting my confidence on those days where you just aren’t quite in the mood to be the life and soul of the party… 🙂
If any of you guys wear wigs… I’d love to see the results!
