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Monday, March 31, 2014

Great Singapore Sale with Zalora Singapore

There seems to be no other word like ‘SALE’ which can capture a woman’s attention quite as well. For me, another word that could capture my attention is "food" but that would be another story.




The Great Singapore Sale (GSS) 2014 will be held from 30 May to 27 July 2014. However at Zalora Singapore, the Great Singapore Sale has already begun with sale of up to 80% discount!




I like sites which indulge in a little jest and I was rather tickled by their pop-up banner to save $10.




Upon clicking Zalora's GSS page, I was brought to a page where I could choose to shop either for women or for men. Of course, I clicked "women" (Duh... who needs to shop for the hubby) and that instantly narrowed down the range of products. It was really easy to navigate around as I could shop by colour, brand, price and discount. Being a bird that goes "cheap cheap cheap" during the GSS, I would usually shop by the amount of discount. This time, I went straight for "brand" as I was eyeing some Steve Madden shoes on their dot com page and was wondering if I could get them at Zalora for a discount.


These are some shoes which I like. Some are new, while some are from the older range.


~*SWINVISION Metal Embellished Sandals*~
One of gal pals has this and it is really beautiful.





~*SWTESSY Strappy Heels with Buckle*~
Love the pop of colour!




~*SWSPYCEE Gladiator Heels*~
Something to hit the clubs with.




~*SWHEADLNE Slip On Boots*~
Oh yes... Winter is officially over in the Northern Hemisphere and it is time to ditch those boots. Not these slip ons. These are really comfortable and suitable for Singapore's tropical weather. They look great when paired with short skirts.




~*SWTWYNKLE Studded Sneakers in pink*~
Their mint green one is really lovely too! For the first time, I think I would choose the mint green over the pink. Alas, I can't find a proper image of the mint green one anywhere to feature here except on Zalora's page.




~*SVP-BESSY Flip Flops*~
I lurve the fuchsia floral detail with the leopard print base. This pair of flip flops would definitely stand out on casual days. However, from SGD150 to SGD59, it is still too expensive for casual flip flops. I would strike this off my list. Moreover, this pair doesn't come in my size.




Of course there are other brands on discount too. Anne Klein, Converse, G-Star, Mango, Nine West. to name a few. There’s no better time than now get some special deals on your favourite items - all at a special price at Zalora's Great Singapore Sale. You’re guaranteed to be spoilt for choice with their impressive range of collection, so take your pick from the incredible plethora of footwear, apparel and accessories available. Be it the girl-next-door, corporate woman or the beach loving’ babe, you can definitely find something that suits your style with their vast selection of apparels.


[This is a scheduled post.]

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

How to Get By The GFC Glitch

How many of us out there were annoyed by the GFC glitch recently?

I know I was. I found a couple of lovely people with awesome blogs recently and I was so upset that I could not follow them via GFC. Yup, most of them had bloglovin so I added their blogs there but I would usually like to show my support by following on both mediums. Imagine how upset I was when I kept getting an error message that said:

"We're sorry...  We were unable to handle your request. Please try again or return a bit later"






Other than that, the glitch was affecting my 2nd blog giveaway especially when people informed me that they were unable to follow via GFC.


  



And then along came my lovely blog friend, Vanessa of citron and guavaberry. She is a genius. G-E-N-I-U-S in caps! She found out a way to continue following via GFC despite the glitch and it works! It could be common sense to her but it is definitely a whole new revelation to me and boy am I so excited that I started following some lovely blogs I found a while back.





So here's how to continue following via GFC:


  1. Go to your blogger homepage.
  2. Click on the "Add" button under "Reading List".
  3. Enter the blog's link in the pop up window and click "follow". 
  4. Optional to do a happy dance after that. 




This method works as recently blogger also seems to have brought back the reading list. I'm so thankful for that as ever since blogger removed the reading list a year ago, I've stopped visiting many blogs. I don't like the whole Google-Blogger thing but I guess I've got to learn to keep up with changes.

You could apply this method to follow blogs that you want to follow. As for following my blog, you could hit the GFC button at the top of my blog under the header or simply click the link I've provided on the right sidebar under the GFC portion. Do let me know if you've followed me. I will definitely follow back if I find our interaction constant and meaningful.


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Ongoing Giveaway





I'm having my 2nd blog giveaway and I invite all of you to check it out. It is opened internationally and ends 1 May 2014 midnight Singapore time. Feel free to participate if you're interested. Boys and men are welcome to participate to try your hand at winning something for your significant other, sister or female friends!

For standardization and to enter this giveaway, please follow the instructions and "template" so as to make the counting of your points easier. Thank you to all those who followed the template for it really made my job of counting your points more easily!

For those who have enetered via Rafflecopter, I'm so sorry that you have to re-enter as I'm not able to retrieve any detail of the entries. Please re-enter by commenting under your comment, following the "template" I've included. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.


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Photobucket

Thank you to my blog friends and loyal readers who have been constantly visiting back and leaving me lovely notes. I always smile reading your comments from my email inbox. All of you are the best! I'm slowly getting down to replying your comments and visiting your blogs. Also, welcome to all my new blog friends too. I'm glad we found each other's blogs and I hope we continue to stay in touch.

Here's a notti little kitty shaking butt butt as a gesture of thanx. Ok, not really a gesture of thanx, I just happen to like cute little butt-shaking animals can?




Saturday, March 22, 2014

A Tribute to Mandy Faith

Mandy Faith is a Malaysian student who was studying in the United Kingdom. Sadly, she passed away in February 2014 from a virus and another angel was added in heaven.




I stumbled onto Mandy's blog when I was searching for tips on photos filters. 99% of the time, her photos have the exact colour tones and hues that I like a lot be it pastel, dreamy, whimsical, vintage, natural light... I fell in love with many of her photos and started reading her tutorials on Photoshop. Even though I do not have Photoshop, I applied similar techniques of adjusting the colour curves on Photoscape and I was really pleased with how many of my photos had turned out.

I'm also particularly fond of having pinkish orangey sunset tones in my outdoor photos. She has a tutorial just for that too! I really love how the photos on my blog of Venice, Florence and London look after applying her techniques. My friends often look at my travel photos and comment that I take really good pictures despite not using a DSLR and I would always inform them that photo editing plays a huge part too.

I commented on her blog post once or twice. From the way she replied to people's comments on her blog, you could tell that she is such a sweet and generous girl. She was also giving away free editing tools for her readers and was always sharing her knowledge on photography and photo editing on her blog.

Mandy had an Instagram account too and needless to say, I'm a faithful follower of hers. I would talk more about her Instagram account at the end of my post.


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Check out some of her pastel tone photos. She once admitted that she was quite the collector and would buy lots of decorative pieces, trinkets and ornaments which were great objects for her to photograph.




She had before and after comparison for the photos on her tutorial and if you hadn't looked at the before shots, you might not even notice the slight sunset pinkish hues to many of her photos.










I personally love fade vintage photos when they are as a stand-alone picture or a set of pictures. I once tried this effect to some of my photos and felt it was an overload of vintage. Nonetheless, I was happy to just be equipped with the knowledge of how to edit a vintage feel to photos.




Mandy also did amazing outdoor photoshoots and from all the sweet words she wrote about her models/friends/friends of friends, you could just tell how lovely this girl is. She always had a kind word for everyone amidst the beautiful photos.




She took many cute shots of her friends too as they toured various European cities together.





She was really artistically-inclined in any form of the word "art".






I was practically walking through her lenses as I've also visited some of the cities she visited before:


London




Paris




Florence




Venice






I also love how she always seized every drop of sun ray to take beautiful shots like this.




Disclaimer:
All photos in this post are taken by Mandy Faith. I do not know how to request for permission to use her photos and I hope that since this is for a good cause, her family and friends would not take offence.


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Hacking of Mandy Faith's Instagram Account

I only got to know of Mandy's passing just two days ago and the news took me by utter shock.

It so happened that I was scrolling through my Instagram newsfeed and saw a photo of a style that I did not quite like. It was a picture of a lady soldier carrying a toddler with the caption:

Do you love your mum?
Like = Yes    Ignore = No

Now, I really DETEST photos like this. Same goes for those heart-wrenching photos shared on Facebook that have captions like:

Like = 1 prayer   Share = 10 prayers   Ignore = You don't have a heart

No matter what good cause it is, I would never ever like or share such photos. I can pray in my heart all I want, what exactly does it mean by like and share equating to prayers??? In the case of that photo on my Instagram newsfeed, it works in a similar logic. I love my mum and not liking that photo certainly wouldn't demean any love for my mum.

At that point of time, I was wondering "Hey, since when did I follow such an account?"

I saw a few people asking the same question too and there would be different people replying about how they believe this was Mandy Faith's Instagram account which got hacked. Some people also mentioned that it was hacked after her death.

I was utterly shocked when I saw that comment about her passing. I started consulting my best friend aka Google and realised to my horror that it is indeed true that Mandy had passed away last month due to a winter virus. I also stumbled upon some pages demanding for people to help Mandy's family get her Instagram account back.

Have I already mentioned that this account is now called "myflawlessjournal"?

From myflawlessjournal's profile introduction:
Journal of faith love and inspiration We all have a journey to adventure Friends and places to discover But 1 thing's for sure.. Love keeps us pure

The only comment about Mandy Faith that remained (which has since been deleted when I'm typing this) was somebody asking:
"Is this Mandy's Faith account?"

To which myflawlessjournal replied:
"This is my old quotes account. I've changed theme."

It was exactly this comment which sparked me to do something more.

Each time I refreshed the page, all comments related to Mandy Faith and those puzzled/annoyed people's comments about not remembering following such an account were deleted. Only all the nice and good comments and comments tagging people to the photos remained.

I acknowledge the fact that myflawlessjournal's account seems to have kind intentions but that doesn't change the fact that he/she had hacked Mandy's Instagram account, changed her account name, deleted all her photos and replaced with photos that asked people to comment, share or tag their friends to them. I HATE, DETEST, ABHOR advertising style like this. The hacker is clearly making use of Mandy's legion of 300,000 followers (I can't remember the number but I thought I saw 300k) as an existing fan base that have most of the people clueless that they are no longer following the real Mandy. Worst of the worst, the hacker lied that it was an account with a changed theme.

Even though Mandy isn't a personal friend or even a blogger friend of mine, I felt like I have to do something for this amazing girl and wrote this comment on all the 3 photos myflawlessjournal had uploaded so far:

Dear myflawlessjournal, 
Your intention may have been good but whatever good intention you have about providing inspirational photos and quotes to people seems negligible to your intentional hacking and lying. 
It isn't nice that you have hacked an account of somebody who had passed away, deleted all her beautiful photos and even pretended that this is an old quotes account of ours that changed theme. I notice that you have also been deleting comments explaining to people that this used to be Mandy Faith's account and that her account was hacked. 
Any decent person with respect for those who passed on would leave their legacy untouched. You have completely marred Mandy Faith's legacy on Instagram.

Seconds after I posted that comment and unfollowed that account, I realised that myflawlessjournal had blocked me. I'm not able to search for this account on the Instagram app at all. Fortunately the url is still searchable.

I have provided myflawlessjournal's webpage as a hyperlink for all of your knowledge on this hacker and I do hope and none of you would follow or like his/her photos.

There is no platform for any of us third party to report this to Instagram.For a start, the follower count has definitely dropped drastically and I hope more people know of this fact and continue to unfollow. I do not know how we could help Mandy Faith's family get her account back but I hope that with more people being aware of this, maybe somehow somebody would know what to do.

Links related to Mandy Faith:
Blog
Facebook
Instagram (managed by her family)

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

GFC Stopped Working?

A quick question to all of you using GFC (Google Friend Connect)...

Has GFC stopped working?

I tried following a few blogs via GFC the past few days by clicking on "Join this site". However, I kept getting an error message that said:

"We're sorry...  We were unable to handle your request. Please try again or return a bit later"

I tried logging in and out of blogger and gmail, and also logged out of all other sites with concurrent logged in status, cleared my cache but to no avail. I also tried IE, Firefox and Safari.

Is it only me or are all of you experiencing the same problem?

In the meantime, it is mid week so stay amazing all of you! Will get down to replying your comments and visiting your blogs soon!



Monday, March 17, 2014

Craft Daft -- Sock Monster Edition

The picture below was once my Whatsapp profile picture for quite some time. It often invited lots of questions like:
"What's that you're holding?"
"Why are you holding socks to your face?"
"Are those socks?"
"What are you up to this time?"

So guess what I was doing with these socks a while back?




After my last arty farty session of acrylic painting at my bimbo sister Gera's place, I was itching for another arty farty weekend. It so happened that bimbo Zanne and Gera had planned to do some sock craft one Saturday and invited me along. I had wanted to paint but seeing how enthusiastic they were about sock craft, I started googling "sock craft" which got me excited too!

"I can't sew for nuts!" said I.
"I can't sew too," quipped Zanne, "but we have Gera!"

Gera is my most artistic and creative friend ever and since she was able to guide a total noob in acrylic painting, I felt very safe to be guided by her in sock craft. I am but a craft daft.


I saw so many cute sock animal that I wondered if I should make a puppy dog, an innocent bunny, a funky monkey or a chubby owl. I even thought of making a cat but felt that the ears could be too much work. I'm after all, a very lazy person and wanted something simple to make.


[Image Source: dog ; bunny ; monkey ; owl]


Perhaps if I were that skilled, I could make a Totoro! The ears seemed easy peasy to form from socks. However when I thought of the extra felt material I needed for the features, I decided to forgo that. I wanted something really simple from just socks and thread.


[Image Source: Totoro]


Well, if my craft really turned our ugly, I would tell everyone I was making a monster. They seemed hard to go wrong.


[Image source]


Monsters of all shapes and sizes and varying degree of monstrosity...


[Image source]


Animal-like monsters in hybrid and mutated animals...


[Image source]


We started our day with a trip to Daiso to get our craft materials.
[Aside: I should have worn my glasses too!]




The materials we used for our sock toy:
- a pair of socks (we would need both for 1 toy)
- special stuffing for soft toys (cotton wool would do too)
- buttons, felt cloth, yarn and any other material for the features
- needle and thread to sew
- a pair of scissors




Bimbos being bimbos, we had to pose with our soft furry little socks before we transformed them into something amazing!




To make the legs, we cut the bottom of the sock into 2.




Like this...




After that, we sewed the inner part of the legs to close the opening, one leg at a time.




The socks that we bought from Daiso were really soft and fluffy that no matter what colour thread we used, the stitches were not visible at all. Really good for craft daft like me.




Zanne was appalled at my slow speed.




After sewing, we got cute legs like this.




After stuffing the legs and body with enough stuffing, we sewed the opening at the top to close it up. While sewing the opening, we sewed the shape of the ears too.

Making the ears was a little tricky for all of us as we still did not know what creature we were making at that time. I had wanted to sew pointy cat ears but no matter how I stitched, I ended up with rounded edges.




After stitching the head close, we started to sew or glue the facial features. Being very random people, we were still clueless about the creature we were making. However as we worked around with the materials we bought, we slowly came up with our creatures. With the rounded ears, I decided that I would make a hybrid monster mouse. Gera and Zanne made long pointy ears and decided theirs would be monsters.




After sewing the facial features, we used the other pair of socks to make the arms. The arms were done in a similar fashion as the legs, only that we had to cut those cloth out, stuff them and sew them onto the body.




This other sock could also be used as spare materials for the ear parts or any other parts. It all depended on how we wanted our toy to look like.




Presenting Brunnie the monster (by Gera), Prinkie the monster (by Zanne) and Dinkie the Mousasaurus (by Jo). Gera helped to christened my monster "Mousasaurus" for she felt that it looked like a monster mouse-- a lab experiment gone wrong resulting in a mutated lab rat.




Our monster sock toys are branded with our initials on their butts and leg.




Presenting Dinkie with his hat on and off.




Presenting Prinkie also with hat on and off. The reason why Zanne and my monsters had hats was because we could not bear to see the extra bits of socks go to waste.




Zanne was really glad that she made Prinkie with such long arms. It was fun to swing him around with arms like that.




Darn... I should have made long arms for Dinkie too. There was nothing I could do except to hug him.




Gera with Brunnie. It is a he. It is a she. Well, we were all confused by that ribbon too.




You could tell how happy we were with our finished products!






Gera's mum was so cute to help us snap a picture of this. She preferred our paintings to these sock toys. Hahaha... Only quirky people like us would appreciate quirky ugly toys like the ones we made.




When the humans weren't around, our monsters enjoyed chilling on the sofa.




After a whole day of craft, we had Roti Prata for dinner.




Dinkie the Mousasaurus was squeaking and talking to Mickey Mouse during dinner.




Dinkie had been sitting on the side of my bed and sometimes hidden in my wardrobe. Soon, I realised that I was treating him too unkindly. Dinkie badly needed a new home. I thought of gifting one of my pal pal's daughter with Dinkie as she is the quirky kind who would appreciate such quirky toy. However, I was worried that upon presenting her with the toy, there would be awkward silence followed by the cawing of crows flying across. Hence, I decided to sound her out first. I was ecstatic when she graciously accepted my gift over Whatsapp. Dinkie would have a new home!










Disclaimer: All photos that day were taken using mine and Gera's handphone camera and hence the vertical grains, dimness and sometimes overly edited blurry effect which looked better on our phones than when blown up onto the computer.


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Ongoing Giveaway





I'm having a 2nd blog giveaway and I invite all of you to check it out. It is opened internationally so feel free to participate if you're interested. Boys and men are welcome to participate to try your hand at winning something for your significant other, sister or female friends!

For standardization and to enter this giveaway, please follow the instructions and "template" so as to make the counting of your points easier. Thank you to all those who followed the template for it really made my job of counting your points more easily!

For those who have enetered via Rafflecopter, I'm so sorry that you have to re-enter as I'm not able to retrieve any detail of the entries. Please re-enter by commenting under your comment, following the "template" I've included. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.
。◕‿◕。

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