Planned Work OOTD

A quick #ootd that I am thinking about wearing for work tomorrow, a little different to the combinations I usually go for. 

I like this outfit although I feel I might be pushing it slightly as being acceptable for the office, but hey, I’m making the most of the sunshine!

I have featured the dress on the blog before and is from Savoir at Very.  It is cool and comfortable to be able to wear with ease all day although for me, at 5ft 4, it is a tiny bit too short to wear without leggings.  You can't tell that in the photos, but if I bent over I would be in danger of flashing my underwear, not the look you want for work!

When i originally bought the dress I had the idea of bare legs and sat outside in a beer garden but due to the length, a little more propriety is required!

10 Day You Challenge–Day 6

Today’s theme is your top 5 food items. 

1.  I adore Italian food.  I recently to Jamie Oliver’s Italian in Manchester and had the best seafood pasta dish I have ever had.  Will definately be making a revisit. 

2.  Raw vegetables, I prefer them to cooked and could easily munch away on raw carrots by the bucket load.

3.  My mum’s cheese & onion pie.  I have never had a better one, anywhere.

4.  Fresh seafood is a big favourite of mine but especially crab.  Mix seafood and pasta and I am in seventh heaven.

5.  Peanuts.  Not particularly because I love peanuts but because they are a food memory of when I was a little girl and my dad used to buy a packet on a Saturday night and always leave out an eggcup full for me.  Miss you dad.

All a Bit of a Cock-tail

Hello!

Last week I did a post about a new dress that I had recently bought from +Simply Be  but couldn’t decide how to wear it.  After reading Choices, Choices the majority decided that the red cardigan was the way forward.

Last night I went for a catch up afternoon/evening with the girls and had great plans for taking photographs of me in the day out in the City, with better backdrops than my usual bedroom wall. 

However, what I was of course forgetting was the fact that I was out with the girls and we were having cocktails.  I managed one photograph of me, one of my hotel window view, and the rest of our various cocktails!

A room with a view

The chosen outfit!

You know you have had too many cocktails when you try to
(badly)  backlight your drink with a candle

A brilliant evening and a clear headed morning followed thanks to a humongous breakfast at the Premier Inn. 

What did you get up to this weekend?

10 Day You Challenge – Day 4!

Today’s challenge is 7 wants.  This should be a hard one, but only in the sense of limiting it to 7 haha!

1. Love.  The first want is always love.
2. Continued friendship.  I have friends in my life that I want to have until the day I die. 
3. A designer handbag.  Just one.  Yes, a frivolous want, but just once in my life I want to have something from a major designer. 
4. I want to travel much more extensively than I have.  There are so many places in the world that I want to see.  I’m not the backpacker type before you ask.  Girl needs her straightening irons and a hotel room.
5. A big want here.  I want more people to realise that animals have just as much a right to live on this earth as the rest of us.  A rat is not vermin, a mink is not a coat and a lion is not there to be caged and then hunted down and killed by rich idiots.
6. To write more.  In addition to writing my blog I would love to write elsewhere too and not just for free.  Who knows if that will happen.
7. To carry on believing that anything is possible.

Number 8 would have been a tall dark handsome stranger but damn, I ran out of numbers!

 

Searching for Sandals

Hi, my name is Vicky and I am a shoe addict.  Luckily for my bank balance although not so lucky for me, I have to take a few considerations into mind when I am purchasing shoes.

Any shoe higher than 3-3.5 inches is probably out for my due to my clumsiness and lack of general balance.  

In addition to that I have to factor in my limitations when it comes to stairs which I will inevitably encounter at some point in my day/night.  This  means that I need some flexibility in the soles and again, not too high a heel.

Due to my ridiculous idiosyncrasy that I have to be able to feel the next step in front of me with the front of my toes/shoe means that when it comes to Summer, many sandals are impossible for me to wear.

My quest for the perfect Summer sandal for me is never ending.  All I want is the perfect sandal, fitting with my limitations, in a colour that goes with everything, comfortable and if at all possible, can carry me from day to evening if necessary.  Yes, I want the world in other words.

Well a few weeks ago my search for the best sandals in the world ended when I found the Hush Puppies Faith T-Bar Leather Sandals in gold from +Very.co.uk . 

The sandals are are cushioned slightly which makes them ultra comfortable, they fit perfectly and one key feature for me, they didn’t need breaking in whatsoever and didn’t have that annoyingly slippery surface that new shoes sometimes have.  I’m in love!

Whilst at £45.00  they are a bit more than you would generally pay for a pair of sandals, for me the price is totally justified as I can wear them with anything, they work as well with jeans as they do with dresses and I can make it up a flight of stairs without looking like a complete fool.

Have you found your perfect Summer sandals?

Choices, Choices

I am going on a girl’s day/night out in Manchester on Friday. It is an event that a group of friends and I like to try and arrange every few months as we all live in different places and don’t get to catch up very often.

I have been looking for a dress that will take me from afternoon to evening and also something summery and bright. I refuse to think that it will be anything else other than glorious sunshine.

I recently found the Floral Border Print Dress from the Koko range at +Simply Be  and completely fell in love. I have never worn any of these colours before and certainly not in that combination. The print of the dress made me thinking of a Monet painting and I couldn’t resist buying it.

I confess that I am more than a little nervous to wear this dress as it is the most “look at me” item of clothing that I have ever owned. You certainly won’t be able to miss me in it and that in itself is terrifying me (shush, don’t tell anything I told you), so much so that I decided to have a test run of the whole outfit.

I’ve gone a few different ways with the styling of the outfit combining cardigans and shoes and can’t decide which way to go so decided to ask for your thoughts???

Look One

Red cardigan, nude and black shoes

Look Two

Black cardigan, black strappy shoes or alternatively.....

Look Three

Screw the cardigan & black shoes.

Answers on a postcard, or just in the comments box which might by easier ;)

10 Day You Challenge–Day 3!

Today is eight fears.

Fear I think is something much more personal to share than things you love.  You can have irrational fear, illogical fear, unfounded fear and secret fear, all as real as one another but we share them with others than the things we love.

1. Spiders.  Probably something on a lot of people’s lists.  But seriously, NOTHING needs that many legs.  The spiders that turn up in my house I swear have been down to the gym first.  They are always huge and can run like a mothertrucker.
2. Open stairs.  As I mentioned on day one, I have a problem with stairs, but when faced with a set of open stairs, I break out into a sweat and start to panic.  I would rather face a charging Rhino than open stairs.
3. The thought that I might never meet someone who gets my brand of crazy, and loves me still, scares the hell out of me.  I don’t want to walk through this life to the end on my own.
4. A secret fear, that no one knows about, is that for some reason I am getting increased scared to be a passenger in a car.  I gave my car up about 5 years ago (not for this reason) but always loved driving and being in a car, preferably fast down a motorway.  Now I am increasingly getting scared.  I will beat this fear. 
5. The dentist.  I’ve never had or needed more than a scrape and polish all my life until last year when I knocked a tooth loose and needed an extraction.  Combining 1 emergency dentist, 1 tooth out and anaesthetic which I’ve never had before numbing my entire throat equalled a panic attack outside of the dentist, unable to breath.  Since then I am a quivering wreck in the waiting room and in the chair.  Note to self, take someone with you.
6. Snow and ice.  I am terrified of falling over and slipping in snow and ice.  This just seems to get worse with age.  This winter though I invested in some ice cleats, finally, which helped enormously.  I could actually walk around with looking like a complete idiot.
7. Letting down the people I care about.  Self explanatory really!
8. Fear itself.  I don’t want to be afraid of anything. 

So there you go! 8 fears.  See, they are more personal than things you love aren’t they?

Writing Free

When I write these days it is usually for a specific post for the blog be it clothing related, a blogger challenge or an opinion piece.  What I can't remember is when I just wrote for the sake of it.

If you love to write then you know what I am talking about.  You just ramble away on a piece of paper or in this case on my laptop; not sure what you are writing but somehow it just flows out of you and eventually, starts to tie itself together and make sense.

I used to write like that quite a lot and a few pieces made it on to the blog.  I found it incredibly cathartic to use something that was rattling around in my head by putting it down on paper, seeing where my thoughts take me, never stopping typing, just letting it flow.

More than once I would stop typing, read back what I had written, and realised what I truly felt about something.  What Stephen King said is so completely true, I write to find out what I think.

Free Writing I think they call it.  It is something I would definitely recommend, whether you are just trying to find out what your opinion is on a particular subject, or you are dealing with an issue that you have been ignoring.

I call it my free counselling as whatever I am thinking about a lot, I write about it in one form or another and I am able to resolve the problem. 

There is no point in this post today, so sorry if you were expecting one ;) I just wanted to do a little of what I used to.  Ramble on, on this occasion it seems about how much I am missing writing, even though I am writing all the time.  Odd.  But then, I am.  That's me.

Maybe I need another blog in addition to this one.  Ramblings of a Crazy Lady or something.

Anyway. As you were.

Moving to Bloglovin' !

Firstly, I'm sorry, I know that you are seeing these posts everything at the moment but as Google Reader is shortly closing down, I thought I would join in with providing details of how you can still follow my blog.

You can follow me on Bloglovin' by clicking here

Bloglovin' has very helpfully come up with a way of moving all your contacts from Google Reader to them with a click of a button. Just hit http://www.bloglovin.com/import/reader

I hope to see you there!

 

Lovely Dresses from Bon Marche?

I’ll make a confession.   I have always associated Bon Marche as being somewhere for the older generation to shop in.  It isn’t somewhere I have ever bought anything in for about 20 years and I think that the last time I was in a Bon Marche shop was 15 years ago.

I recently saw Bon Marche on Twitter and out of curiosity I decided to have a look at what they were currently doing with their clothing ranges.  Now, whilst I think that a lot of their range is still edged towards the older category, no high heels for example, there are now mixed in a lot of items that I would buy myself.

Bon Marche feature a lot of colour and a large variety of prints, both of which are brilliant for the summer months.  With stripes, Aztec and floral prints to chose from, there are many dresses that are right on trend.

Given that I am a dress girl at heart I have decided to feature my four favourite dresses here as an example of what you can now buy.  The great thing is that with their reasonable pricing structure, I can probably afford to buy one or more sooner than I would with other more expensive brands.

I promise, this isn’t a sponsored post by the way, I was so pleasantly surprised with what they have available, I wanted to blog about it!

Scratch Stripe Skater Dress with Ribbon Belt

£20.00

Tribal Print Shirred Dress

£18.00

Crochet Trim Printed Maxi Dress

£25.00

Short Mock Tie Front Beach Dress

£15.00

 So those of my four favourite dresses from Bon Marche.  You can get 10% discount off your first order from Bon Marche through www.FashionPerks.co.uk using their Bon Marche Discount Code 

Have you rediscovered any brands lately?

10 Day You Challenge–Day 2

Nine loves in my life – this one should be easy!

1. My family but especially my mum who look amazing for her age and is just as daft as I am.  Sometimes we laugh until tears roll down our faces.  She is a friend as well as my mum.
2. My friend family.  My close friends I love just as much as family.  We are a jigsaw puzzle that you maybe think won’t work, but we fit together perfectly.
3. The people I work with, especially my friend Wendy.  If you are spending the majority of your week at work, getting along with the people you work with is a necessity.  I am lucky enough to have a boss who looks out for me and my colleague who is the perfect match to share a room with. 
4. Writing/blogging.  This has come to mean more to me than I ever thought it could.  Especially when I receive messages saying that something that I have wrote, or a picture of myself that I have shared, has given someone else confidence to do the same.
5. Formula One – on race day, my heart beats to the drum of a Formula One car. 
6. Red lipstick.  Red feels like confidence to me, and when I wear red lipstick, I feel that I have an extra spark about me.
7. I love films. especially action and sci fi movies.  Horrors rarely scare me although you do get the occasional one that will find me hiding under the bed clothes at the end of the night.
8. The path I have put myself on.  I have come a very long way from the girl I used to be, and I am really looking forward to what lies ahead of me.
9. My dogs, especially my little dog Ellie, whom I inexplicably have nicknamed Sausage Monkey.  I adore that dog.

So there you go! nine loves in my life!

Winner of the @LoveMisbehave Necklace is.....

Nikki Sumner!!

Contact me on thecurvedopinion@gmail.com  and I will post your necklace out to you!

 

Second Vlog

Two posts today!!  One blog and one vlog!

You can find the link to my Youtube video here Society v The Breast Issue

 

10 Day You Challenge–Day 1

I have previously been doing the 52 Lists, but somehow it wasn’t inspiring me.  I liked the fact that you could share more of yourself to the reader, but I wasn’t connecting with the challenge for some reason.

This week however I came across the 10 Day You Challenge on Natty Nikki's blog.  Neither of us know where the challenge originated and if you know, please tell me and I will credit appropriately.

Anyhow!  Day one of the challenge is ten secrets.  I try not to keep secrets if at all possible as it always leads to trouble, but here are 10 facts about me, some you may know, some you won’t.

1. I always care more than I will ever admit about people, issues and things close to my heart.  Admitting that you care isn’t weak.  Sometimes not admitting it is what gets you burned.


2. Stairs scare me.  I get dizzy and constantly feel like I will fall.


3. I once was driven in one of the Delorean cars from Back to the Future.  It kick started my love of fast cars, even though it was particularly fast looking back!


4. I am a huge fan of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series and could sing (badly) along to every word of “Once More with Feeling”.


5. I bit my nails until about two months ago.


6. I will never let someone treat me less than I deserve to be treated again.  I am worth more than a standby, or a secret behind closed doors.


7. I have eight tattoos, and am pining after number nine.


8. A little piece of my heart belongs to the Mary Jane style of shoes.


9. Another piece of my heart belongs to Formula One.  My spirits raise and my heart beats a little faster when I hear the “dum da da dum dadadadada dum” of The Chain.


10. If you are a tall man, you are already high in the positives on the “Vicky would like” list.

What do you think about sharing secrets?

The Most Comfortable Pants in all the Land!

You know when you look at an item of clothing and immediately think “No way!”.  That is what I thought when I first saw the current trend for floral trousers.  Not because I didn’t like them, because I loved them, I just didn’t myself in them in a million years.

I have seen several different variations of these trousers around and have seen lots of plus size bloggers wearing them, but I just couldn’t envisage my being able to pull them off.  Floral dress yes, floral trousers, running for the hills was the basic thought process.

Because I regularly check (for regularly, read every day but shush!)  but I knew that if I were to buy floral trousers, then the @So_Fab_Clothing trousers from +Very.co.uk were the ones I would choose.

As one of my newest quotes to live by is “If you don’t try, you don’t know”, finally this week I bit the bullet and ordered them, found here and currently on sale, the day after I purchased, typical!

It should be noted by the way that this is the first time I have worn anything but a dress for around three months!

P.S.  Don't forget to enter my blog giveaway for a necklace from LoveFromMisbehave.com !  Ends Wednesday and found here

What's in your Handbag?

Monkey Supermarket are currently running a competition in order to win a Mulberry handbag and for a chance to enter, they want to see inside our handbags!  

Their home insurance expert estimates that women carry around with them on average the sum of £850.00 worth of contents within our handbag and I must confess, I was very curious to see what my total would be.

When it comes to my week day handbag, I like to cover most eventualities.  The thing about having a large bag however is that things seem to disappear into it, never to resurface until you have a clear out.

I took the opportunity of this blog post to go through the contents of my handbag and remove the excesses, including more lipsticks and glosses than I would admit!  I have never really thought about the value of the items I carry around with me so this has been an interesting experiment.

My bag is from Fiorelli and cost me £60.00 about three years ago.  It it a classic shape and style and is perfect for my day to day use as it goes with practically everything.

I have divided the contents into sections, all of which help me in my daily life and are permanent fixtures in my handbag.

Every Day Essentials

Purse - £5.00 from Primark
Cash inside - £20.00

Blackberry - £200.00

Monthly bus pass - £39.00

Face powder – approx £6.00

Powder brush - £3.00

Lip tint from MUA - £3.00

Crystal cat keyring - £5.00

If I were forced to use a smaller handbag during the week, these would be my absolute essentials.  Yes, three items are makeup, but I fail to see the point in applying it at the start of the day only to end up with a shiny nose and dull lips by the end of it.  I am a woman after all!

To Wear Off Boredom

Book - £9.99

Notebook for blog ideas - £10.00

Pen – £1.00

Apple Earphones - £25.00

Blackberry – already listed

For my daily trip to work on the bus or when I am travelling in general I like to have a variety of options to entertain me.  I always have a book with me and a notebook for jotting down blog ideas.  In addition I like to listen to music on the way to work on my phone which also obviously offers the connection to the internet and my addiction that is Twitter.

Helpful Items

Umbrella - £10.00

Dorothy Perkins Sunglasses - £7.00

Spare Blackberry battery £15.00

Blackberry charger £15.00

The three things I detest are getting caught in the rain, being caught in bright sunshine for over an hour without sunglasses and my beloved Blackberry running out of charge (hence the two options on the battery front!). 

My Fix Me Up Kit

Marc Jacobs perfume - £20.00

Benefit They’re Real Mascara - £19.50
MUA Red lip tint – already listed
Pink lipstick from No 7 - £9.00
Little Pink Tin of Lip Moisturiser - £3.00
Soap & Glory body butter - £7.50
Two different hair slides - £8.00
No 7 Slanted Tweezers - £8.00
Two hair bobbles – 50p

I always like to have a little fix me up kit in my handbag.  This works twofold in that I have the everyday items that I use to touch myself up with and also some additions such as the earrings, the mascara and the hairslides/bobbles which I can use to change up my look if I am going straight from work to a catch up with the girls.

One of my pet hates is having to lug another bag to work if you intend on going out for the evening straight after, so I have whittled my kit down to the utmost essentials that can easily and quickly take me from a day to a night time look.

If I had to chose just one item out of everything in my handbag to carry around with me it would have to be my Blackberry.  My phone is the most multi-functional item in my handbag, it would get me most things at the touch of a button and it is what I would chose in a crisis.

Taking into account the cost of the handbag and the contents, this equates to a handbag total of £509.49.  Considering that the average is £850.00 I am quietly impressed with myself!

What do you carry in your handbag?