52 Goldenrod

Thanks to Luna Jubilee for this challenge:) Only two items came up for Goldenrod in my inventory and one had already been blogged so I decided to dig a bit further for "may be named 'yellow' but sure looks like goldenrod to me" options. I ended up in /artilleri/ as her "yellow" looks "goldenrod" to me;)


So I am wearing... /artilleri/'s Bowling shirt *Flames - Black/Color* and the skirt from Poodle Power! *yellow* . It feels as though it needs a belt, but any belt I added covered the obvious match between the two parts so got nixed. Anyway it's two powerful retro icons in a single shot!

I'm still wearing Kalnin's Promenade boots, PXL Creations Candy Bronze Lips in Natural and Elikatira's Details in Blonde 02.

From Copley Square

As many of you know I work for the Copley Square shopping sim. Normally I try to keep work and blogging apart, but when I found myself wearing and posing "a la CS" I decided to blog:)

The dress is from MIU, a new one called Astray. It comes with many more parts than I am wearing [leggings, armwarmers, cowl neckpiece etc...], but the basic dress plus shrug felt right for me.The design and textures are nicely done and the dress is a fun one to wear. I've paired it with the new Kanins Promenade boots, still at a promo price until Thursday I believe. Eleven colors in one slick, stylish boot. Not bad. My 3rd CS item are the poses from Gesticulate, a new store that is new to Copley too!

Otherwise I am wearing Eha hair, Violet Voltaire's "No Love Lost" in Iron, Blowpop fishnets (R) and my favorite PXL Creations skin Candy with cateyes and bronze lips. (R)

Elaine's monthly post: Foot for thought

Since they were released, I've been having mixed feelings about prim feet. The basic idea of getting rid of the ugly default toes seems good, but after the appearance of prim feet a new problem arose -- the phenomenon known as Frankenfeet -- which, in my opinion, is even uglier. My first shoes with prim feet were a freebie and a nightmare (I won't call names, though); the base colour of the prim was too dark and I never succeeded in matching the feet with the exact shade of my skin. But having seen increasingly acceptable feet around, I decided to go to the shoe expo, get some demos, and make the leap. Here are my results.

Top left are Tied Hunter in Bold, by Heart and Sole. They are not operated via HUD, but through blue popup menus. However, the out-of-the box skintone was quite close to mine and it was a pretty straightforward fix -- besides the RGB that I can't make much sense of, there is a "lighter" and a "darker" button, which worked well for me. The downside is that I couldn't find a way to remove the toe ring, as the shoes are no-mod. On the other hand, they are quite reasonably priced (around 400L) and look extremely sexy.

Top right are Kalnins' Conqueror. Being a Gold Card member and subscriber, I only paid about 225L for them with all the discounts, so I didn't even grab the demos before buying, as I am familiar with their usual level of quality. The shoes come with a HUD that is reasonably easy to operate -- it has three tabs: one for colour combinations, a second one for skin tones and the last one for resizing and extra options (foot light, sounds, and the like). The second and third tab worked great, but I must say I was a bit disappointed with the first one: happy as I am to be able to choose between thousands of colour combinations on the shoe, I missed having less flashy nail options. Also, I'm not too convinced with the build of the toes which, compared to others, look a bit too sausagey for my taste. Ah well.

Bottom left are Zara in Steel01 from Kitties Lair. A special pack was sold at the fair, at 490L for two pairs (pink and black) but I just loved this colour and decided to get it; after all, a single pack for 390L wasn't bad (at least not before I went broke). These also include a HUD; however, it was a nightmare for me to find a workaround. As you can see in the picture, in fact, I gave up before finding the exact skintone, because I got tired of adding and subtracting red, green and blue to the four basic skintones. Having said that, the nail options are really good, and both the shoes and feet are really well built, so I'll definitely give it another go sometime.

Bottom right are the Maitreya Gold Shanti, in Snow Leopard (an expo special colour). What can I say? Onyx LeShelle keeps outdoing herself. The HUD comes with several skin tone presets, which save you from the RGB nightmare (if you want to, you can go there, but the thing is you don't have to). Plus, the pack includes a notecard with the settings for the most popular skins, including my sunkissed Tuli, so I just followed the instructions, et voilà, fine-tuning done in all of 10 seconds. Also, the toes are completely different from all the others I've seen -- perfectly shaded, more realistic... my favourites so far. On the negative side is the price, over 900L, but seeing the results, I went back and bought Esprit too!

Finally, in the centre are the SLink Jolie Pied Achillia Gladiator in tan, the only footed-flats I found. SLink was the first store to offer standalone bare feet and I think their work is quite remarkable; from what I've heard, they've made serious developments since they started. The HUD was the first one I braved, so I wasn't too sure how to proceed -- it seemed easy, but it wasn't tremendously so. At 775L apiece, I'd say these shoes are worth their price, reasonably well-built and generally very wearable.

On all pictures I used a pose from the Foot Focus set (I think it was 09), from Long Awkward Pose, available at the expo.

Now, let me get back to unpacking the boots... in the meantime, you can check the full-sized pictures here.

Summer of Love

Warning: Yet another weather-driven post!
I've totally embraced summer clothes in RL by now, which translates into a turn towards hippie-ish styles in-world. After having a look around the feeds I realise I'm not the only one... would this just be an excuse to wear skimpy clothes without feeling embarrassed or slutty? Mayhaps. But this is not a psychoanalysis post, so let's talk about the clothes!

This ensemble was born with the Asian Tunic from Kurotsubaki, one of those charming (not so little) Japanese stores where you end up spending a whole lot of lindens before blinking. (I warned you!) The tunic comes in two different lengths, and although I can't remember 100% sure which one I used on the pictures (that's how long they've been waiting to be blogged!), but I'd say it's the short version, which looks more like a vest. Underneath it, to give some extra coverage and diminish skimpiness, I used a simple white tank, the Simple White Tank (teehee) by TorridWear, an old freebie that comes in very handy as a basic piece for anyone's wardrobe. The shorts, called Autumn, are from Twosome, another little store worth discovering (and raiding, since they have quite a few low-price, high-quality items).

I must apologise for repeating shoes (the Coquettes from Kalnins); this doesn't mean I've definitely stopped shoe-shopping (god forbid!), but that I'm still trying out the 14,641 different colour combinations... I'm hoping to be done soon. The bangles are from Yak & Yeti, a Nepalese-themed freebie store whose main store had to close down when the new Openspace policies were introduced. They might have their satellite stores still in operation, though... I'll do some in-world research and report back.

The other items shown are Maitreya's Apple hair, Tuli's exclusive Faith "The Deck" skin (drools), Miriel's Quiet Green eyes and Feather lashes. [Edit: Poses are from Imperial Elegance and Striking Poses.]

For the whereabouts of Yak & Yeti and the tunic version details, follow this link.

Birthday gift

A few days ago I was wandering around -ok, doing the WebQuest hunt- totally oblivious that I still wore my "Happy rezday to me!" tag, when something funny happened. I landed at a store called Spork, which was totally new to me. The store owner, GM Nikolaidis, was there and welcomed me singing "Happy rezday" off-key... we had a short conversation and I was pleasantly surprised by his sense of humour. To boot, he ended up sending me a gift voucher (despite me telling him it had been weeks ago), so I decided to take a look around anyway and pick a piece, just to see whether their clothing was any good.

My choice was the Flight dress, and I let GM pick a colour for me, so that it would be a surprise gift... and yay! he picked blue, which turns out to be my favourite colour. Textures, layers, originality... Spork is definitely on my list of places to get back to. In fact, after trying on the dress I decided to return in order to get one of the "expansion packs" of the dress, the Midi skirt - since I knew I'd feel more comfortable with a longer skirt length.

More stuff. Want to hear some good news? I had been drooling over Keris' shoes from Kalnins every time he bought a new pair, so when he told me they've started making women's shoes and forwarded me the notice, I nearly threw a party. It's not just that the sandals (Coquette) are awesomely well done, but that, instead of releasing a gazillion different colours and making you choose one, or charging a fortune for a fatpack, they only do one pair, with a colour change script, and sell it at a very reasonable price (500L if you're not a gold card member, half that if you are). Besides a ton of options (resizing, sounds, a footlight [!], etc.), the script lets you recolour 4 shoe parts separately, so all in all, for 500L you get... 4... 8... 12... umm... many! different shoe combinations. (Edit: Keris did the calculations, and fyi, there are 14641 variations) *faints*

*Gets up again* All right, time to finish. Other items shown above are: Alexis skin by Laqroki; Truth's new freebie hair, Jess; Miriel eyes and lashes (by the way: this is terribly sad), and the Shiny Things Glass Chunk necklace and double bracelet. Poses are from Reel Expression, if I recall correctly.

As usual, here's the full outfit credits.