OOTD: Rockabilly Rocker

 

Outfit Details:

Shirt - Stonefield band shirt

Skirt - Dotti

Shoes - Dr Martens

Scarf - Op-shopped

Yesterday was my first exam for this session, and because I am a mega procrastinator, instead of cramming in my final hours, I decided to do my hair and make up so I'd feel good going in there. I've always really loved the rockabilly scene, but struggled to get up the self-confidence to really try anything too out there. The closest I've ever gotten is buying a couple of seldom-worn 50s style dresses and wearing a cat eye and a red lip, but yesterday was the day I finally tried something rockabilly with my hair. 

I've been wearing this skirt/shirt combo to death since the weather started warming up, swapping out the Docs for thongs on particularly warm days. It's very casual and comfortable, but I feel really confident in it, and confidence is sexy, so what better time to pop on some vintage inspired make up and try out a bold new hairstyle? I think the combination of the 50's style make up, bumper bangs and head scarf with the 90s vibe band shirt, a-line skirt and Doc Martens is really cute and interesting. It adds a bit of flair to an otherwise casual outfit and I felt a lot more dressed up than I actually was all day.

Even though its far from perfect, I'm proud of the way my hair turned out. I certainly gleaned a lot of compliments all day, and think I'll definitely be popping to the op shop for some more cute scarves to make this hairstyle a part of my regular rotation.

I've been really stuck in a rut in the last few years trying to figure out what "my style" is. My sister has a set style, and many of my friends seem to have a set style, but I've always seemed to float between vague semblances of different styles - vintage, kitschy, punk rock, boho. I think I've finally come to a point where I feel confident enough to say "fuck it!" and just follow my gut and wear what I want, when I want. My style is clearly fluid and depends on the weather, what mood I'm in, where I'm going and what's inspiring me at a given time, and I'm okay with that. I'm also a lot more confident to mix styles like I did here, and maybe I'll get up the confidence to go out in full rockabilly regalia when my new petticoat arrives off ebay in the next couple of weeks. 

Look out for more rockabilly hairstyles on the blog soon!

 

 

 This was an outtake but I actually really love it!

 

 

Make up details 

Foundation - Too Faced Born This Way

Bronzer - Arbonne

Lipstick - Arbonne in Runaway Rouge (discontinued)

Eyeshadow - Revolution palette from  Boots in the UK

Eyeshadow - Arbonne in Smoke (discontinued)

Eyeliner - Maybelline Hypersharp Wing Liner

Mascara - Arbonne It's A Long Story

Brows - Natio Brow Kit

 

OOTD: It's Warming Up!

 

 Outfit details 

Shirt: Valleygirl

Skirt: Mint Vanilla

Shoes: Billabong

It's exam time for me right now, which has prompted a keen interest in restarting this little blog! It's been on my mind ever since I got back from Europe in January, but the year has flown and I haven't had the time. Now, the summer months stretch before me and I'm hoping I'll be able to keep it up. 

The past few weeks, the weather has really started to warm up and blue skies have beckoned me outside. Last weekend, I popped on this outfit to head out for the morning with Jake. We started the day off with a beautiful breakfast at my favourite local cafe, then headed down the river for some stand up paddle boarding. It was my first time trying it, and I was a little worried I'd be too un-co to get the hang of it, but I actually feel like I did really well! It was so nice cruising up and down the river, spotting turtles, bream and jellyfish as we went. Now I just need to convince Jake to buy me my own board for my birthday. I can see the two of us spending lots of summer days exploring the river this way.

Bikini: Rip Curl

From Student to Midwife Part 6: A Taste of the Work Place

 Grainy photo of me all excited to be in my new uniform!

Hello lovelies! I am so happy to finally be catching you all up on my journey through midwifery. It's been an insane semester and I have taken on a bit of extra stuff at uni, as well as having some pretty tough stuff in my personal life to deal with over the past couple of months, so excuse my absence! I never said I would be anything other than sporadic with updating the blog while doing midwifery, and I'm trying, I swear!

So, there are two incredibly exciting things that have happened this semester and they go something like this:

1. Myself and one of my uni friends have started a Midwifery Society at uni

and...

2. I started antenatal placement at a local hospital!!!

So, let's start with the Midwifery Society, shall we? Basically it's a student association specific to midwifery students and funded by our overarching student services association. It's exciting because it's enabled us to do a heap of really cool and fun things for our fellow students, such as movie nights, group study sessions, subsidising attendance at conferences, charity work and we have even linked in with the local beauty school to offer Midwifery Society members $10 treatments as a part of our self care philosophy. We are also having an information session on placenta encapsulation in a couple of weeks' time, which I'm super excited about! Would you consider consuming your placenta in the form of hormone and iron rich tablets after birth? We have one really big project in the pipeline, too - a full-day conference for International Day of the Midwife 2016 on May 5th next year. We have some incredible, world-class speakers lined up and although I feel like it's incredibly hard work at times, it's so validating when fellow students and staff tell you how excited they are for the conference and even the smaller events we put on! Makes all the time and effort so worthwhile!

So, on to placement! You guys have no idea how exciting it was fr me walking into antenatal clinic on my first day there! It was a crazy, busy day and I honestly felt like crying at the end of the day - mixed tears of joy and tears of being completely overwhelmed and upset at the fragmented care system we have in Australia. I wanted so badly to give the women the time and the holistic care they deserved, like we are taught at uni, but it's so hard to do that in the 20 minute time slot the hospital allocates each woman! I was also frustrated that due to being in a complex care clinic, I didn't get to do anything hands-on. The midwife said it would have been inappropriate for an inexperienced first year to practice skills on a complex care woman. My second day in the clinic was about ten thousand times better than my first. It was a breezy day of three booking-in visits and a little bit of time in the antenatal assessment clinic. I was on with a different midwife this time and she had so much confidence in me as a student! It was the best day of my life so far! I basically did all of the hands-on stuff in the first two appointments, while the midwife double checked me and filled out the miles of paperwork involved, then she let me run the third appointment myself! She was a great teacher - eager to pass on her knowledge, approachable, friendly and she made me and the couples we saw feel really at home with her, which is so important in midwifery! She was so confident in my abilities and she was full of praise for me throughout the day, which was really great! She gave me honest, constructive criticism when I needed it and I left on a total high, feeling like my career path had been validated by the experience. It was great! Now I just have my two continuity partnerships to get me through until birth suite at the end of October. Can you believe that in less than two months, I will be seeing a baby be born? It's so exciting! I feel so blessed to be on this path!

Precious Pieces and a Bohemian Twist

This month's brief for Graham & Brown's A Year in Design challenged me to think of how something precious in my home could be transformed by redecorating a room to showcase it in. Probably the most spectacular piece of furniture in my home is an antique, cedar dining table with turned legs thicker than my thigh. It's so stunning, and while it currently looks great among the oriental decor of our dining room, I can see it being a real star of an eclectic, bohemian dining room like those above. I would never paint this beautiful, antique table, but I can certainly see it with a bunch of mismatched chairs painted in bright, bohemian colours set around it. I also love the pink painted sideboard in the picture on the right up above. I would wallpaper in Exotica Blue from Graham & Brown and fill every chair with plush floral cushions, and lay a kilim rug beneath the table to provide a warm spot for feet to rest as I ate. The cozy vibe of the exotica print, the warm wood and the beautiful textiles would be completed by a pot belly fire burning in the corner of the room, and precious memories would be made as the family gathers around the precious antique dining table for meals, for tea and cake and for conversation.

Popsicle colours!

Being a brand ambassador for Graham & Brown is so much fun! This month's design challenge, The Popsicle Trend, has me thinking in all kinds of new and creative ways about how I inject colour into my life. When I think of popsicle colours, I think of the sherbet lollies I loved as a kid, of brights and pastels and ombre tones. With this month's challenge asking where I can see popsicle in my past, present and future, I had a lot of fun reminiscing, creating and day dreaming for this post.

Past

As soon as I thought of the popsicle trend, this amazing tea cup and saucer that was given to me by my friend, Darci came to mind! The ombre pink cup, and the tropical pink and orange saucer complete with toucans and pineapples is the perfect way to inject some summer warmth into your winter cup of tea.

Present

 

  

My little sewing corner is bathed with light in the afternoon,  making it incredibly hard to get a decent photo, but it is definitely the part of my room that fits the popsicle trend most perfectly. Graham & Brown sent me the paint to give my sewing chair an update to make it fit in better with the pastel colours of my room. The colour is Disney's Cinderella's Perfect Pastel. It reminds me of the colour of the frozen yoghurt popsicles I've loved since I was a kid and it's perfect for a subtle hint of colour that compliments the rest of my room. If you'd like to give painting a chair a go yourself, there is a fantastic how-to on Graham & Brown's blog. The mirror above my sewing table is one of my most favourite posessions. It was a gift from my parents for my 15th birthday and it definitely picks up on the popsicle trend with its bright, ombre flowers. The popsicle colour scheme is completed by the print by Autumn and the colourful crochet squares that are my current inspiration for my craft pursuits.

Future

Popsicle by sunae-reilly featuring replica furniture

I really love the mid century aesthetic and think it fits in amazingly with the popsicle theme. Taking inspiration from my toucan tea cup I've put together this beautiful mid century tropical themed living room, featuring Graham & Brown's Flamingo wallpaper. Grahamm & Brown have a super impressive array of wallpapaer, which is my new favourite obsession after watching this season's House Rules. Of course, I had to be a little bit literal in this design, including a retro popsicle poster, which I think would look great above the replica sideboard, with the flamingo wallpaper on the adjacent wall, behind the sofa. Most of the stuff in this image is from my new favourite furniture designer, Matt Blatt and it is definitely a "future" style because there is no way I can afford Matt Blatt furniture for a good few years yet!

What do you think of my past, present and future interpretations of popsicle? Where does popsicle fit into your style?

From Student to Midwife Part 5: One Year In

 How to unwind after a long day full of lessons in personal development and midwifery practice.

Ladies and gentlemen, can you believe I am already one full year in to my midwifery studies? I hope the next two and a half years go just as quickly, because I can't wait to not be a student anymore. As much as I love learning, I think I'd take like a duck to water to not being broke.

This semester has been an incredibly interesting one. It's reinforced my love for midwifery through my introduction to two midwifery units. It's challenged my perceptions of what midwifery is and opened my mind to different perspectives and career paths. It's been a journey of self-development, as I'm assured the rest of the degree is, and it's been exhausting and rewarding all at once. I've done well this semester, with two Distinctions and a Credit as my overall marks in the three units I've taken (if I've calculated correctly. Final grades aren't released yet!) and I've really enjoyed my learning. In Midwifery Foundations, I have learned what it is to be "with-woman" and started to discover the kind of practice I want to develop and in Primary Health Care Midwifery I've begun to develop the practical skills I will need next semester on prac. Right now, with exams far behind me, I am just really looking forward to the next semester's studies! I'm trying not to will my holidays away too much though, and hope to get some creative projects done and books read in the meantime. My head is so full with the lessons I've learned this semester, and yet I have nothing else to say! Complex weavings of thoughts on birth, and on midwifery practice will have to wait until next time. For now, I'm going to relax and binge watch some Netflix. Hope you all have a lovely day!

Mind, Body, Spirit - Finding a path back to fitness

 A time when I felt truly at peace with myself

Recently, I've come to a new understanding of how important it is to keep a healthy mind, body, spirit connection. I came to this understanding through my midwifery studies, when I realised how holistic most indigenous models of health are, and how we are missing crucial aspects of mental and spiritual health in western medicine. Excuse me for sounding like some yogic hippy, but honestly, it feels really good to find that connection between mind, body and spirit and work on maintaining it. This connection may be maintained in different ways for different people, and its about what works for you, but for me, this connection is nurtured through a mix of swimming, yoga and creative output, as well as the work that I so love - my midwifery studies.

The serenity of being under water feeds my soul

I've never been one for willful exercise, but lately, in a desperate effort to ease the pain of fibromyalgia and start feeling good about myself again, I took to swimming. In my early teen years, I used to swim a couple of kilometres a day in the local pool over summer, but then I became an angsty teen who liked her sleep too much for swimming training, and my one form of exercise stopped. It's been over 5 years since I last swam two kilometres without stopping, but last week I donned a pair of goggles and hopped back in the pool again. It was hard. I needed to stop every two laps and I only made it 300 metres all up, but the rush of endorphins it gave me convinced me that swimming was the missing link in my life. The busyness of last week (and the cold) kept me out of the pool, but yesterday I hopped back in again and managed 500 metres, stopping less than I needed to last week as well. Progress in just two sessions! I like doing things that give quick results, and I think working towards my goal of being able to swim two kilometres without stopping will be really good for me, physically as well as mentally.

Source

 

To compliment my swimming, I've decided to take up yoga again, and alternate the two forms of exercise each day. Yoga has really helped me in the past to ease my pain, and has also been really instrumental when I've been through bouts of depression, to help ease my mind and get me mentally healthy again. I'll be doing Yoga with Adriene's 30 Days of Yoga spread out over the next 60 days, alternated with swimming laps in the pool, and I'm hoping to reach my 2km without stopping goal by then. I did the first day's yoga today and am feeling really at peace afterward, as well as being grateful to have stretched out some of the tightness in my legs from swimming yesterday.

While I don't totally hate the way I look (I'm pretty genetically blessed, really) I certainly have been feeling a little frumpy lately, and I'm hoping that as well as keeping me healthy, swimming and yoga might just tighten up my loose tum and bottom a little bit, too. I'll be posting about my exercise journey sporadically over the next two months, as well as other pursuits that feed into my mind, body, spirit connection to keep myself accountable and document this journey as well, so keep your eye out for my next post on spiritual health and what that means to me, as someone who isn't religious.

What do you do to keep fit and healthy?
Does it feed into your mind, body, spirit connection?