Graduation!

So I am a little bit late posting these, it was a week ago today, but we had used up our internet usage limit for the month, so here I am now.

This was a most excellent day and made me realise that, actually, Uni did have some brilliant times.

(this is also Shoper Challenge, number 11 – the polka dot shoes by Zara)  Unfortunately I don’t have a picture without the cap and gown but I was wearing the fabulous Dita dress by Fever, which I wouldn’t be surprised if it shows up on here a lot more! It’s beautiful and goes with everything. And now I really, really want the Dara. In all the colours. (It is also owned by the wonderful Roisin)

After graduation we went into town and had lunch, then went to Chew Valley Lake where I ruined another pair of Primark tights on the first wear – just a tip, don’t buy tights from Primark. They were pretty though, with bows on a seam down the back. But anyway, I finally got a photo of me wearing my go-to flats, so this is challenge 12 as well

#12 – shoes by F&F at Tesco, high-waisted shorts from Topshop and top and tights from Primark. I should probably mention these tights broke because I did this:

Yes that is an obstacle course made for children.

Overspend!

Well the last couple of weeks seem to have gone in a blur of spending for me. I haven managed to purchase all of this:

Yep, two dresses, 3 pairs of shoes, two nail varnishes, hair dye and nail wrap things. To be fair the dresses were £12 each, the purple sandals and the pink canvas shoes were £4 each, and the gold sandals are Primark and have already been worn enough to justify the £2.50. But it has to be said it’s a good job I had extra student loan this time!

The lilac nail varnish I absolutely love. It’s just so summery:

And this doesn’t even include my big purchase. I bought a pair of shoes a few weeks ago from Schuh, they were the polka dot Ginger shoes by Red or Dead. I do still think they are very nice, however they didn’t fit quite right and I had bought them when they were still £75, which just seemed like too much. So I took them back. The next day I went on internet and lo and behold Zara were having a sale. Which included the shoes I had lusted after in Rome and looked at every time I saw a Zara. And they were reduced from £59.99 to £19.99. I couldn’t resist. There were also another pair that were reduced to £15.99. So I ended up with two pairs for a lot less than I paid for one pair.

The shoes I loved in Rome. I just love that the polka dot fabric goes round on to the back.

(excuse the effect, it’s the only way I could get my phone to realise the shoes are red!) I love the floating platform of these. And they were the very last pair of them on the website!

I love both these pairs. But now I think about it I may have to re-purchase the Ginger’s when I get a job. They are very different styles. The blue pair I think will be my graduation shoes now. I think I might be slightly overdressed then, but who cares!

Cherries and Hills

It’s been absolutely beautiful weather the last few days, and in order to make the most of it Ian and I went up Cleeve Hill to have a picnic. I should point out here that Cleeve Hill is technically a mountain, as Ian tells me. Often.

The view from up there is amazing and it really was the perfect day for it. I love this photo so much! And you can just see that I’m wearing my Vivienne Westwood Lady Dragons that Ian bought me for Christmas which I also love. And this I’m using as Shoeperwoman‘s Shoe Challenge #10

(my phone likes to overexpose photos. But it’s all good, Ian will be getting his camera soon!) I’m just going to put lots of photos in because they’re pretty.

My Up-A-Mountain Heels!

Beautiful view.

(it’s not very obvious because they’re so small but the cherries are coloured. I love photoshop. Or Gimp as the case may be)

Anyway that was how I spent Sunday, the rest of the weekend was fairly lazy. The week coming I will hopefully be going to see Bridesmaids at some point. And I also just ordered two new pairs of shoes. This makes for a happy Alex. Now all I need is a job and then I can have the perfect flat which I just found.

Macaroons!

Yesterday I tried my hand  at baking macaroons for the first time. My mum had bought me the Irresistible Macaroons book a while before, and finally some were made.

There were difficulties in the process, particularly knowing how long to cook the sugar syrup for, and what the macaroons should look like on taking them out of the oven. We had another book to cross-reference with, but neither explained either of these things particularly well.

Still, the Irresistible Macaroons book has some lovely recipes, with all bright colours and flavours. But for the first time chose Double Chocolate. These are filled with a very rich chocolate ganache which works well with the sweetness of the macaroon.

Here they are after being piped:

(next time, more will be piped on each one. And a new piping bag will be bought. Very comical, especially with the filling. The stuff just comes out of the seam of the bag!)

And after baking:

Not at all bad for a first attempt I don’t think! They were delicious!

Next time I will be trying the Salted Caramel ones. Caramel/Toffee/Fudge flavours are my absolute favourites, I was just a bit scared to do the caramelisation this time!

Shoper Challenge #9!

So I finally got round to blogging again. Can’t believe it’s been a month. I haven’t tually done anything of interest since I went to Rome though. It’s been work central since then. How I miss Rome. It was so amazing and beautiful and I loved it.

And I can’t resist. So here’s more pictures of Rome:

This is Silvio Berlusconi’s house. Very grand. Outside of which we saw a military parade like a changing of the guards type thing. They do a funny little step when walking past officers

Then there is the Pantheon:

<img class=”aligncenter size-medium wp-image-346″ title=”

and an awesome elephant obelisk. I love elephants

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Anyway this post was meant to be about shoes, not how much I love elephants and Italy, and especially the two combined.

So, on Saturday I went out for a friend’s birthday and wore some of my favourite shoes! So, Shoeperwoman‘s Shoe Challenge #9:Dress: Lipsy, sometime last year, Necklace: hidden beneath my hair but my lovely souvenier from Rome, it’ll be in the next outfit shot I’m sure.Shoes: Irregular Choice Courtesan Snake. (the ring is actually a circle of elephants. Told you I love them.)

The shoes upclose:

Gorgeous box! And one of my other pairs of IC Courtesans next to them, the pair I wore for my Mum’s birthday.

And the back:

They shine green more when there’s no flash, but I love the way the are more than one colour, I just like the way they look with this dress.

and the cute sole which is nowhere near as cute anymore.

I really like those shoes, definitely happy to have saved them. And now I unfortunately have to get back to work. My last assignment for Uni, I’ll officially be unemployed come July 23rd, graduation day. I actually finish on Friday though when its dissertation hand in. That is printed off and ready to be bound tomorrow (if I can make the stupid printer do what I want it to with the cover). I just have this one last piece to do thats due in tomorrow. Oh well, only about 100 words left and I’m free of work! And my left gets to start being fun again. In fact I’m planning a shoe challenge on Saturday to celebrate if the weather is nice enough. Hopefully I’ll have a nice post about a lovely day out!

[I'm not pregnant - no idea why my dress evilly decided to make me look it, and I have no idea what's wrong with those images, if you click them they are there but I can't get them to show at the moment.]

I <3 Roma!

Well I got back from Rome on Thursday night/Friday morning. But I’ve only just felt awake enough to blog about it. It was amazing. I loved every minute of it. Even though the supposedly comfy sandals I bought for it were stupidly made and hurt my feet. The Colosseum and the Trevi Fountain were my favourite things. And the gelato. Oh, the gelato. Especially the cherry one I had from the restaurant/gelataria on the road above the Colosseum.

I took tons of photos, and I also did 3 shoeperwoman’s shoe challenge outfits. Yay! Although the photos of those aren’t so good. There are so many photos where you can see me to the ankles and then my feet are cut off. But oh well. First I wore the sandals. And I wore them here:

You can actually see them here:

So that is Challenge #6 I realise you can’t see them very well here, but they’re just flat bronze sandals from Asos. I would post a close up, but it seems like a waste of photo space. (I also wore them the next day inside the Colosseum and to the Forum and many places)

The second shoe challenge I did was this one:

that photo is slightly blurry, but it was beautiful.

slightly earlier in the evening:

and daylight:

Shoe challenge #7, Steve Madden wedges, and a dress that actually looks like this:

Really bad colour on the previous photo. And I’m not good enough at photo shop to correct it.

I also went to the Spanish Steps, where I wore my last pair of shoes:

Shoe challenge #8, lilac pumps from New Look. For a close-up, look here.

I wore these multiple times too (I was also boiling in the tights, but had killed my feet the previous days and needed them with my pumps for comfort.)

This was on the top of the Vittorio Emmanuel monument:

The views were amazing.

I could happily upload every photo I took, but I won’t. So finally, the Rome Fiumicino (or whatever it was called) airport:

Emporio Armani branding, as soon as you land!

Help Shoeperwoman!

This is a post from over at Shoeperwoman today, someone has been using the name ‘shoeper-woman’ unrelated to Amber, the real Shoeperwoman. I’ve been reading all of Amber’s blog for at least over a year now, and I can’t believe someone would try and steal her brand and stop Amber using it herself.

Important announcement regarding Shoeperwoman.com

Posted on April 8th, 2011 by Shoeperwoman

(First of all, the Shoeper Shoe Challenge roundup will not be appearing today as my time has been totally taken up with the issue below. My apologies to everyone who’s sent me photos – I promise I will publish them on Monday. In the meantime, I would really appreciate your comments and re-tweets on this post…)

I had really hoped not to have to write this post, but having exhausted my other options I’ve taken legal advice (from the wonderful Caveat Calcei, who you all know from the Shoe Challenge), and feel I have no option but to go public about an issue regarding the “Shoeperwoman” name and this site.

As most of my regular readers will know, I set up Shoeperwoman two years ago this month, having registered the domain in May of 2008 and spent a year planning the site. At the time there were no other sites using the name. Earlier this year, however, a UK-based company launched a shoe blog called “Shoeperwoman” and an associated retail website of the same name.

(Not my blog)

I don’t really want to link to these sites as I feel they are damaging enough to my brand without me helping their Google rank, but you can see the address of the retail site from the image above and the blog can be found at shoeper-woman.blogspot.com (note: all of the links in this post are nofollow, and this is the only time I will link to these sites.) First of all, I want to clarify that these sites have absolutely no connection to Shoeperwoman.com or to Midas Media. I realise it’s confusing for people as they are using the same name, and writing about the same subjects, often in exactly the same way (i.e. using phrases like “shoeperhero”, “Shoeperman” etc.) but there is no connection, so please know that this is the only “Shoeperwoman” site run by us (with the exception of our associated Twitter and Facebook accounts, which also use the “Shoeperwoman” name), therefore if you come across these sites, or any others, please be aware that they have nothing to do with us.

The other company is also using the name “Shoeperwoman” on Twitter, Facebook and other sites, which I realise adds to the confusion. If you are in any doubt whether something you read online is being said by me, or by Laura Blake, who is the owner of the other sites, please feel free to get in touch.

(Not me)

When I found out about these sites, I immediately contacted Laura Blake, who tells me that she does not believe there is any issue with her using exactly the same name as me for her two sites (although she has put up a disclaimer today which you can read on her blog). Obviously I’m disappointed about this. I set up Shoeperwoman.com two years ago: it is my livelihood (along with my other blogs), and Terry and I have worked very hard to build up the brand to where it is today. It’s disheartening, to say the least, to find that someone has knowingly decided to use exactly the same name and idea for a very similar project (Laura tells me she was aware of the existence of this site but decided to use the name regardless), and obviously this will make it much harder for both of the respective businesses to thrive, as rather than having our own unique identities, these two new sites have effectively set themselves up in direct competition to us instead.

(Not my Shoeperman…)

What Laura didn’t tell me during our lengthy email conversations, was that not only has she knowingly used a name which has been associated with my blog for the past two years, she has also applied for the UK trademark to the name “Shoeperwoman”. If she is successful in this application, this would mean that I would no longer be able to use the name I have made mine, and this site will effectively cease to exist. As the revenue from this site forms a large part of my income, I’m sure you can understand my distress at this, and the reason I’m writing this post.

To answer the obvious question that has cropped up in relation to this: no, we do not own the trademark to the name “Shoeperwoman”. We looked into doing this when we launched the site, however the very high cost of this was prohibitive for us, as it is for most other bloggers, and so we were forced to rely on the goodwill and common sense of our fellow bloggers/site owners, and to hope that most people would prefer to create something that’s truly their own rather than to duplicate another brand. Obviously that isn’t always the case: some of you may remember the issues Jennine Jacob’s The Coveted encountered recently when another site launched using the same name, and if this can happen to me, and can happen to a well-known blogger like Jennine, it can happen to anyone.

We have now lodged our own trademark application for the name, which means we’re already hundreds of pounds out of pocket in our bid to assert our right to continue to use a name which has been associated with this site for two years now, and which I have also used on Twitter, Facebook and other sites for the same length of time. Having taken advice on this, we believe it could cost us much more to defend our brand, which is obviously causing us a great deal of stress. This is where you come in:

How you can help Shoeperwoman:

Obviously this is a source of huge concern to us, so we would welcome any support our readers and friends have to offer us, in the shape of comments, re-tweets and advice. If you are a blogger, and would like to mention this is issue on your site, I would be eternally grateful, not just for my sake, but because as I mentioned above, this is something that can happen to anyone, and it is devastating to work so hard on something for so long, only to see it put at risk like this. Also, any links back to Shoeperwoman.com (especially those using the word “Shoeperwoman” as the link text) would be a huge help to us right now as they will help cement our position in search engines and support our right to the trademark when we file our dispute.

I also want to say a big thank you to everyone who has emailed Terry and I with their support over this issue: it really means the world to us to know that we have loyal readers who will continue to support us no matter how many other ”Shoeperwomen” crop up!