Inspiration from you inspiring women!

Hello LHIFTG fans,

We have been running our new Facebook promotion for just over a week now and we have been overwhelmed by the response!  I can't keep away from our Facebook page, I love reading you winter pick-me-ups, in fact I find them absolutely inspiring.  Your words have really got me to thinking about inspiration and motivation, where that comes from and what is inspiring in life.

Many of you talk about spending time with family on Facebook, which I am sure is a hot topic for all of you with school holidays in full swing!  Keeping those active bodies and minds occupied, while still keeping the cogs of everyday life turning is an absolute mission. I find Mums truly inspirational, especially their innovative ways of amusing the chidlets during the holidays.  Here are some cool ideas that some of my friends have come up with for school hols activities:

• Sidewalk Chalk - you can buy the large sidewalk chalk buckets for as little as $8 from Warehouse Stationary.  Find a big piece of sidewalk, wrap the kids up warm and let them go a little Michelangelo! 
• Make A Hut - even I used to love doing this as a kid, move the couches to make walls and use an old rug as a ceiling.  Seriously, you won't see the kids for hours as they play in the pirate lair/castle dungeon/secret cave!
• Homemade Playdough - for the littlies, here is a recipe to make your own Playdough.  Get them to help you mix it all up, then watch what they come up with!  Keep your Playdough in an airtight container to keep it fresh.
• Weird Science - for those with kids 8+, do you remember making a volcano when you were in primary school?  It's so much fun, quite a big project as well, which will keep them occupied in a hands on way for a couple of days.  Or try some of these ideas.....make a bouncing egg, some static electricity or a wormery!

I find stylish women really inspirational.  Jackie O, Audrey Hepburn, Gwen Stefanie, Alexa Chung - these beautiful women all have the gift of being able to put an outfit together, an outfit that suits them and that is on trend.  But it's the women that manage to do it on a budget that I really, truly admire.  Check out this blog:  http://whatiwore2day.blogspot.com/.  Recommended to me by a workpal, I haven't been reading her blog for long, but I find her style so inspirational.  Fashion isn't about how much you paid, what it says on the label or where you got it from.  Fashion is about expressing who you are, in clothes that fit your body and that you truly love.  This blog is an inspirational read and definitely makes me closely regard how I am spending my money on clothes. 

And lastly, but definitely not least....the people that I find most inspiring are my friends.  So I would like to dedicate this blog to friends - the friend who drives 5 hours to come to your party, the friend who tells you the truth when you put on that dress that is really too tight, the friend that listens to you gush about the new guy in your life (on and on and on), the friends at work that you spend 8+ hours a day with.  Without friends, our lives would be grey.  Thank you for being so inspirational!   

"Wherever you are, it is your friends that make your world" - William James.

See you back here next week!

LHIFTG xxx

Celebrating everything YOU!

Welcome to the Let's hear it for the girls show blog! 

Let’s hear it for the girls is all about “celebrating everything you”!  Whether you are into fashion, beauty, the latest online trends, health, wealth, travel, love, life or all of the above, it will be here within this blog!  We are an women's lifestyle event, but lifestyle doesn't mean just two days a year.  It's 365 days a year!

I wanted to start by introducing you to another online diarist, one very close to my heart.  If you are into fashion and you spend as much time as me daydreaming of the faraway fashion capitals of the world, then you are going to love this blog:  www.thesartorialist.com.  Scott Schuman has worked in such fashion houses as Valentino and has represented designers Helmut Lang and Jean-Paul Gaultier.  Scott travels the world, taking photos of people on the streets of New York, Milan, Paris.  “I thought I could shoot people on the street the way designers looked at people, and get and give inspiration to lots of people in the process. My only strategy when I began The Sartorialist was to try and shoot style in a way that I knew most designers hunted for inspiration”.  I love reading Scott’s words and seeing his new material every week, because the photos published capture just a tiny slice of a fashion world that we here in New Zealand very rarely get to experience.  I also believe that it’s a testament to great personal styling and confidence, many of the people in the shots are not wearing haute couture, but they look amazing and comfortable within their own skins.  Something we should all aspire to!

Carrying on with the fashion theme, the team here at LHIFTG are absolutely obsessed with Project Runway this season.   We are all very much Team Mondo, love his amazing aesthetic and use of bold, vibrant prints.  We also like that he’s a little bit of a diva!  The series is really hotting up with only five designers left.  Last night’s episode was particularly good, I am sure that all of us could see ourselves wearing at least one of the pieces that walked the runway last night.  Our event manager Hayley was on http://www.amazon.com/ first thing this morning, hoping to buy one of Andy’s beautiful geometric dresses from the New Balance line!  Can we suggest that next Thursday you get a group of your girlfriends, some chocolate and some blankets and have yourselves a Project Runway Girl Date Night?  I have been having Project Runway date nights for two seasons now and I never miss one.  What better way to spend a Thursday night than hanging out with the girls and watching amazing fashion being created before your eyes (and of course laughing at Michael Kors’ comments). 

Winter is here!   Being from the winterless north and now living in Taranaki, I find the winters particularly challenging.  Getting outside to exercise is so hard and fending off the cravings to indulge in carb-overload meals is even harder.  It is my firm goal that this year that I won’t emerge from winter wearing a 5 kilo “winter coat”, so the first thing I did was subscribe to the Healthy Food Guide magazine http://www.healthyfood.co.nz/.  Packed full of delish recipes and nutritional advice, I find it really a never-ending source of ideas, hints, tips and tricks for eating well while hibernating.  But I think the thing I find most useful is that every so often, they will have an article that give invaluable tools to use when you are shopping in the supermarkets, like how to read nutritional information on packets, or a Top Ten of great, healthy products to buy right off the shelves.  Eating healthy this winter doesn’t have to mean starvation and for that, thank you Healthy Food Guide!

That's all for this week, see you next week with more to celebrate about everything YOU!

xx