How to celebrate Valentine's Day without falling in the commercial trap

I heart Valentine's day but I hate how commecialised it is. So here is the Waking Up Famous Guide to celebrate your love.

1. Don't celebrate on Valentine's Day.
Frankly, you don't need to celebrate your love on this day itself. Be spontanous! Every day is acceptable to celebrate your love.
Mr. Wonderful and I will be celebrating it on Thursday.

2. Its not about the huge bouquet of roses, expensive candle light dinners or premium chocolates.





So first of all gifts, alternative less costly but still meaningful gifts to give for Valentine's Day be it for your soul mate, best friend or family.

From left to right:

1. Bake a Valentine's Waffle together for breakfast
2. Get this cute sequin heart brooch/hairclip from Ban.do for you and your best friend
3. Don't feel guilty about buying this couple Mr. and Mrs Moustache coffee mug because you're supporting artisans. For mum and dad.
4. Print out this downloadable stickers and stick on to your lover's favourite fruit to tell them how naturally swee they are.
5. Another cute printable to print and frame up as a gift!
6. No time to print? Once again if you have to buy something get one that supports artisans and are eco-friendly with this poster.

Got the gift? Good. Now the activity. Here are my top favourites things I did with and things to do with Mr. Wonderful.

1. Catch a free film screening at either Sinema Old School or the Substation and support indie film makers.

2. Go to a museum.

3. Prawn Fishing!

4. Cook food together, and snuggle up on the sofa for a classic romantic comedy movie. If the food fails, there's always take out. :P

There really is a variety of alternatives out there. You just have to be creative and research abit. PS. I published this post late because I really had no time to do it and you should watch the video above to find out another reason why? :D

The messy ponytail

I'm not really the type to keep long hair, I'm quite surprised that I've kept my hair past my shoulder. I happen to have an impulsive tendency to just go to the nearest hair salon and chop it all off.

Thank goodness, I have Mr. Wonderful to yell "NO!" to me.

Which is kinda funny cos I don't really listen to orders well. Anyway, I did instruct him to dissuade me if the taught of going to visit a salon came to mind as I intend to have enough hair for my school's Dinner and Dance to style. 

Oh and also to dissuade me from playing hair stylist as I have delusions of being a good enough hair stylist that I cut my own hair.

Anyway I digress,

I decide to do a quick scan of my favourite blogs and I came across this tutorial for a really cute hairstyle!

(via: cup of jo)

She not only posted instructions on how to go about achieving this, but photos as well for people like me who can only follow visual instructions. (Thank you God for Youtube) Its inspired by the J. Crew Spring Lookbook which is amazing!

Now to try it tomorrow for the G+ Lo Hei Session!

Blackheads be gone!

 Don't ypu just hate blackheads on your nose? But like me find the cost of pore strips a justifiable reason not to get it (I'm cheap ok!)

 Well it was pure genius when I came across this video by Michelle Phan, youtube beauty queen extraordinaire and her video on how to create your very own pore strip!



As I'm typing this, I have some jello drying on my nose. I think I used the wrong brand and my jello is pineapple flavoured. Maybe I should try the Japanese Konyaku Jelly Powder next time.

Craft: Marc Jacob Inspired Faceted Studs

I'm not one of those type that can wear delicate looking earrings but I don't really like too large chunky earrings. That's why I love this pair of Marc by Marc Jacobs organic facets studs.

Waking Up Famous - Image of Marc by Marc Jacobs Organic Facets Studs from stylefind.com

It has just the right amount of "chunk" for me.

But being a poor broke girl I can't get a pair for myself.

So when I came across this awesome tutorial  for the Marc Jacob Inspired Faceted Studs by Dismount Creative

I just had to share it!

Its so easy to make! and they're even selling a kit at their etsy shop so you can make one on your own!

Waking Up Famous - Image from Dismount Creative

Nokia OVI App Wizard Workshop

As I mentioned, I attended the Nokia OVI App Wizard Workshop by Nokia and Nuffnang and I learnt how to create my own app for the Nokia OVI store!

Waking Up Famous - Nokia OVI Workshop

I think that having an app for your blog is so cool!

Well apart from being cool, Its an awesome way to reach out to your readers and extend your reach beyond a computer! Waking Up Famous is now available on the go for Nokia phone users! How awesome is that??

Waking Up Famous - Nokia OVI Workshop

That's Elliot there, the guy from Nokia.

We played a short ice breaker game and I won!

Waking Up Famous - Nokia OVI Workshop

Along with Steven and Christina. We were the second group of people that found each other and we won Coffee Bean Vouchers. Hee!

Waking Up Famous - Nokia OVI Workshop

Waking Up Famous - Nokia OVI Workshop

I better start on how to create a app cos I can hear someone already shouting, "Get on with it you git!"

But WAIT!

Before you start, here are few things you need to prepare.

1. Your blog has an RSS Feed.
2. A 80 x 80 pixel image for your app icon
3. A 360 x 60 pixel image for your app banner.

Got all three?? Okay let's get started.

Step 1. Head to http://www.appwizard.ovi.com/ Sign up for an account and click build a new app on your dashboard.

 Step 2: Follow the instructions and enter in your RSS feed or your URL.

If its successful, you'll see your blog posts as how it'll look on your app in the emulator.
You can then add as many feeds as you want granted they have RSS feeds.
Click next step.

 Step 3. Is to customize your app. From the name, to the app icon and banner. (Have you made them as I told you too? No? Then make one!)
Upload it to the app wizard (Click the green arrow)

 At this step you can customize the background colours and link colour (Rainbow coloured square next to green arrow)
Click next and the following will pop up.

Make sure you own all the things or else..

Step 4. Monetize your app! You can monetize your app with two of Nokia OVI partners as seen below but you've got to have an account with them first tho. No account? Don't worry you can edit your app later on once you create an account.

 Step 5. This is very crucial cos you don't want your app to be lost in the app store! Enter your description of the app, keywords (Ultra important!), category etc.
You can also set your price point at this step. Mine is free of course but if you're confident that people will pay for your app, go ahead and put a price on it.

Then submit your app to the OVI store! It takes about 24hours for Nokia to review your app and put up in the OVI Store.

So how easy was that to create your own app? Congratulations!

You can creates as many as you want just make sure that you own the legal rights and nothing incriminating like Wikileaks or pornographic.

So go and download my app now! Head to store.ovi.com and search for "Waking Up Famous" to read this blog on the go!

How I process my photos

I confess, I'm a serial photoshopgrapher.

I especially love giving my photos the vintage or lomography effect and sometimes the process gets so tedious!

Well, I learn something new and I don't really like sharing my bag of tricks when it comes to editing my photos but I'll do it just this once because I'm trying to care & share. (I'm a very selfish person. Heh.)

So you want to learn how to turn this..

Into this?

Or this..

Into this with with just one click??

Let me tell you how. 

First of all you need a plain boring photo.

Like this photo of vintage cards I scored at an antique flea market.

And you need Photoshop. (I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS5)

Open up you photo in PS.

(you have to click the photos to see the larger version)

Look for the icon with the Play button. Circled in red above.

That is you Action button and is usually grouped together with your History tab.

Well basically what Action do is record what how you edited your photo and saves it so that it saves you the trouble of doing all the editing process again if you want to apply the same editing process to a batch of photos.

And that's what I did for the photographs in my previous post.

Select the action you want. For me I used the action I saved previously which is my very first lomography effect!

Then click the play button circled in red.

(PS: The selection should be the action and not the folder like you see in the above picture.)

Tah-dah!!

And here's one using one of the vintage effect action I have. XD

If you don't like the effect you can always revert it by going to File>Revert.

And as a bonus, Here's my Lomography Effect Action for download!

(See, I'm not so selfish after all!)

As for installing it, its the same like installing brushes, except you save it under the folder Brushes. Or you can just double click the .ATN file and it opens up on Photoshop.

If you are looking for more actions, there's plenty of free downloads floating in the internet. You just got to search for it.

So what'd you think of my first tutorial?

Any questions?