Feeling Stylish

For those of you that don’t know a Look Book is a collection of your latest looks these could be fashion, makeup or both. It is a good way to track your style and work on ways to improve, you can also use it to think about what new items you will need to go with a certain outfit.

Where to Keep it.

There are many ways of keeping your own Look Book, you can do it on community sites such as lookbook.nu where you can get feedback on your looks. This is strictly for fashion looks only and has an invite only system, however it is a valuable too for inspiration and feed back. You could use a private bookmarking service such as Evernote; this allows you to create multiple files where you could post your different looks. It is private but you have the option of sharing your folders should you want to.

Another good idea is to keep a blog, you can get a free blog with either WordPress or BlogSpot and can easily upload pictures, by default these are public but you can set posts to private if you want to. If you want a simple way of keeping you pictures in one place then create an album on Facebook and upload all of your looks into there.

The Photography

For a personal Look Book you need not take the most stunning pictures ever, just a nice full length shot of you in your outfit maybe with a few detail shots of shoes and accessories will suffice. If you are posting your looks to sites such as Lookbook.nu you will get a much better reception if you aim to take well composed, artsy shots. You don’t need to have a great camera for this just some basic composition knowledge, look through the looks on the site for loads of creative ideas.

The Looks

You may think it quite simple to work out which looks to put in your Look Book and it can be, your day to day looks are fine. However, once in a while just try dressing up in something quirky, clashy and vibrant and see what people think. Fashion is about pushing the limits so do this, even if it is in the comfort of your own home.

When it comes to makeup don’t just post the same ‘natural’ look everyday, trying something new, colours, different foundations, bronzers, bright lipsticks. Don’t feel scared to break the rules once in a while, you can get some great tips for improvement by doing this especially if you sign up to makeup forums such as Spektra.net and post your looks.

Other things

Using Adobe Photoshop or some other photo editing software you can crop, change and edit images to look better than the original. Maybe your outfit would look better in black and white or maybe you want to have one image that includes a picture of your full outfit and some detail shots. This is all easily done with the help of some photo editing software and there are thousands of tutorials out there that will show you how to do it all.

I haven’t really been losing the weight at the rate I intended. For those of you that followed the old blog you’ll know that I had some terribly heavy weekends which just equalled fail. So I’ve decided to update my goals and I intend to stick with them this time (yeah, right I hear you all say) I will update weekly with a goals post. But here we go for now…

Lose 7lbs by 1st October
Start – 224, Current – 223, Goal – 217
6lbs to go

Lose 1 stone by 2nd November (My Birthday)
Start – 224, Current – 223, Goal – 211
13lbs to go

Be a dress size 16 by November 2nd

Lose 70lbs by April 2010
Start – 239, Current – 223, Goal – 169
54lbs to go (That’s almost 4 stone!)

So I have four goals, I like goals, they make me happy. For my birthday, my 21st I am going out for Halloween for a meal with the family, I am uber excited and cannot bloody wait! For the halloween thing I’m thinking either 50s pinup which means buying some sort of awesome dress. Or going all burlesque. I’m not sure how I’d pull off the burlesque look, definitely a corset (obviously I’d have to buy a new one of these,) but I’m not walking around in stockings and suspenders. I must research ways of pulling off the burlesque look whilst wearing a skirt or trousers!