Vote and win! Help send me to Kenya!

Greetings, it has been a LOOOONG time since I posted here. I am now posting for a completely unrelated reason! Recently, I entered a competition on a whim and crazily I made it to the shortlist. I'm one of 48 people (out of thousands!) who has a chance to win in The Voice Australia's kickstart competition. The prize is a 2 week trip to Kenya to work with the Masai doing volunteer work (mainly fence building to protect wildlife). I would LOVE if you could vote for me! If you have a spare minute then please go to the following website: http://www.thevoice.com.au/kickstart/finalists/?v=2 And click on my entry! I'm the fifth row down, 2nd from the left (Ke Chow) YOU can win too - an all expenses paid trip to Sydney (from any Australian capital city)! Help me pursue my passion of volunteer work with African wildlife. I will be happy to support your blog/competition or anything in return! Thank you so much!

Florals for all mankind

Imagine my surprise when these bright things popped up on my doorstep early one morning. The boy and I are currently separated by several timezones, eleven hours and a few expanses of ocean; while I had to rush back home to start a new job in Sydney, he is continuing his travels on the continent for another month...





I always love getting flowers. It doesn't matter where, when or from whom - they always lift my mood. He wasn't always the flower-giving type. I did drop plenty of hints early on in the relationship.



My favourite used to be lilies. He would often drop by our brilliant local florist on his way home from work and pick up a bunch of lilies wrapped in beautiful paper. It was always a welcome surprise - but we now no longer get lilies because they are so toxic to cats. I was always a bit blasé about this fact until a horrible few weeks in England where we worked around the clock trying to save 3 felines from the same family that had suffered lily poisoning. Two didn't survive and it was heartbreaking. Lilies are so toxic to cats that they can be fatally poisoned just from grooming some of the pollen out of their fur. Suffice to say beautiful lilies now exist only in my imagination, and never in my house.

What about you? What are your favourites? What colours are you most drawn to? When have you been surprised with unexpected flowers?

Right now I'm enjoying real-life flowers, flowers on my dress, and maybe even one day flowers in the hair.

Blog reader

I'm going to try and resurrect this blog. I've been really slack this year but have plenty of thrifting adventures to show and tell from my travels through Europe and New York. Recently I've been reading blogs like mad, trying to catch up with all the news, and settle back down into a kind of semi-routine now I'm back in Australia.





Though it is almost summer here, the past two days in Melbourne have been stormy, rainy and cold. Not that I'm complaining - flying low over the Victorian countryside in the plane before touchdown, it broke my heart to see how dry the landscape was. Six months of English countryside and European forest does a lot to make one forget about the drought-ridden, struggling Oz.

One good thing about rainy weather is it gives me a chance to rediscover some of my cold weather clothes before I move up to Sydney in 6 days, and end up stuck with summer for 6 months...

Dreaming colours

The last time I posted, it was in the midst of an English summer. Now it's autumn, and I am in Paris. In the interim, I have had very boring outfits, mainly because I have to wear the same thing over and over and over again! Even worse, I did actually manage to thrift some vintage (out of the way English charity stores, flea markets in Amsterdam, raiding the op shops in Norway) but having such limited space in my pack, had to post it all home straight away. So I've had very little to blog about. Heartbreaking too, having to part with newly acquired treasures.





This skirt is secondhand ASOS (and no, we don't own a travel iron!), picked up for a song in an English charity store. I've reached the stage where I'm desperate for some colour, but also have to only obtained things which are light enough (and plain enough) to fit in with what I already have. So the tangeriney colour fits the bill - and also the mood, what with the golden light of Oxford.

I'm not sure how long I'll keep posting to this blog. It seems a bit irrelevent now that I'm traveling (and really have no new outfits to blog about). Also, my year of only buying vintage is over - although it's interesting to note how last year's habits have persisted (I'm still mainly buying second-hand). I could post photos from our travels, but that's not really the point - plus then my embarrassing re-hashing of the same outfits would become even more obvious...

Make hay while the sun shines

We had some sunny days in England. We had some wild electrical storms in Norway. And we had some humidity in Amsterdam.



People here in the UK talk about the weather more than any other population group I know of.

I've done a bit of charity store shopping (only a few vintage treasures, but lots of H&M - op shops here are full of really new looking secondhand H&M!). I've decided that I'll only buy chain store stuff secondhand, hopefully I'll save enough pennies to actually afford some real vintage here...

I wonder if you can pick up my accent on the phone

I really didn't mean for 2 months to pass, really I didn't. It's just that life got in the way, that's really no excuse, but I have no other.

Am in London at the moment, in the past few months I've moved thrice, flown overseas, shifted time zones, jostled with locals on the tube, and taken a shining to English ale.

When we arrived in London, the air was full of tiny little floating bits of pollen, that looked a bit like snow drifts. I loved it. People who have hayfever, not so much perhaps...





One thing I don't like about London is that there is absolutely no decent priced vintage in any of the charity shops. I went to Portobello and it was fantastic, but having so much amazing stuff in one place takes away the thrill of the find.

There is only one vintage dress in my luggage, and it's this one (I didn't want to run the risk of ruining anything else in my pack!) I'm finding it so difficult... can anyone tell me how you survive for one year with only enough clothes to fit into a pack?!



I'll try my best to update when I can, although it is difficult when on the move. If you're reading this, thank you for staying with me! X

A whole lot of hoop-la

I can't believe it's been 3 weeks since my last post! So much has happened, I have been run off my feet. We've finally booked round-the-world tickets, and we leave on May the 3rd (eek so soon!) but not before heading up to Arnhemland, NT to do some volunteer work first...





From the country, I've now moved back to my parents' house. Living in my childhood room is strange - it's bursting full of memories, mementoes and old childhood toys. This hoop I unearthed from languishing beneath a pile of old tennis rackets. I used to spend hours on end with this thing, trying to perfect the hula-hoop. It was fun to pull it out again, but needless to say I'm just as bad as ever!