SL for Nowt – Living a digital life with (almost!) empty pockets

Fashionable Mystique!

January 1, 2023 Mar

Hi peeps!

Just a small handful of weekend offers today: one from Saturday Sale, and two from Happy Weekend!

These lovely comfy Fall Jeans with Boots are from Fashionably Dead in the Saturday Sale, and are L$75 per denim tone (with fits for Maitreya, Legacy, eBody Reborn, Kupra, Freya, and Slink Hourglass). I’ve teamed it with an old weekend sale jacket from Blueberry, and a positively ancient system top from Sn@tch (worn via Bakes on Mesh, of course!)

Below is a side view of the jeans and boots, plus an image of the boot colour options that you get with each single denim tone of the jeans. There are many more boot colours in the fatpack.

The hair is a fabby fatpack for Happy Weekend (L$60) from Wasabi, called Mystique, and contains three huge colour HUDs: Colours, Roots, and Variety. The makeup is from a mixed BoM and applier (BoM for the eyeshadows, appliers for the included lipstick) set for EvoX heads, from Vorobyev for Happy Weekend (L$60). I’ve teamed it with one of the lipsticks from the (now finished) Holiday Special giveaway, from Holloway Beauty (which looks like it still might be available, as the vendors are still out!)

New Year Sparkles – A pretty party look from Just Because, Kibitz, Sequoia, and Poppet!

December 31, 2022 Mar

Hi peeps!

Not only is it weekend sale time, but it’s also a big party weekend. If it’s not already 2023 for you, you can get your virtual glam on before the fireworks by running around in the next few hours and grabbing these lovely cheapies. And hey, even if it is already 2023 for you, you can never have enough glammy stuff; that’s what I say!

The dress is from Just Because, and comes in six pretty shades. It has animated sparkles (choose from several colours!) over the top of the dress, or you can turn off the sparklies if you don’t want them. This is a Saturday Sale item and costs L$75. It contains fits for Maitreya, Legacy & Legacy Perky, Kupra, and eBody Reborn.

Mar’s jewellery is all from Kibitz: the Marla’s Necklace (four metal colours, sold separately for L$75 each, with fits for Maitreya, Legacy, and eBody Reborn) for Saturday Sale, and the Tara’s Earrings (two metal colours, sold separately) which are unrigged and still available from Fifty Linden Friday.

The lipstick is from a BoM set for EvoX heads, by Poppet for So Kawaii Sunday (L$65) and the eyeshadow is a lovely EvoX applier set from Sequoia at The Sales Room (L$75). I’ve still got my Alaskametro sparkly BoM eyeshadow underneath it, to add a little bit of glimmer. Look in the previous posts for that one!

Lastly, the eyes are a stunning LeLutka applier & BoM set from Sequoia for Crafty Weekend Sales (L$75). Sequoia also have quite a few group gifts in their store, and the group join is only L$10. Well worth a peep if you want some new peepers!

Happy New Year, from Mar! x

Evening Glam – limited time offers!

December 25, 2022 Mar

Hi peeps!

If you need a glamorous look for a New Year party, now’s the time to grab these items! This look is entirely free, with the exception of the mesh body:

I blogged about the free LeLUTKA EvoX mesh head, and the IVES Beauty skin in my previous post. They’re part of the current 54-store Holiday Special giveaway that’s taking place until 30th December 2022.

The hair, by Doux, is also part of the giveaway, as is the matching hairbase from Not Found and the lipstick from Holloway Beauty.

The lovely eyeshadow is from Alaskametro. I have the fatpack, which costs L$125, but Alaska always has a free wearable tester that has no demo markings or anything on it. The wearable tester for this particular makeup just happens to be this pretty pink tone!

The dress is the ‘Pull Me Closer’ gown, from Lurve at The Free Dove. It comes in fits for Maitreya, Slink Physique & Hourglass, Belleza Freya & Isis & Venus, TMP, and standard sizing. And the jewellery is one of the group gifts from Orsini Jewelry. The group is free to join, and you can pick up some lovely gifts here at the in-world store.

Ravishing Raven! The big Holiday Special giveaway, featuring LeLutka and 53 other stores!

December 24, 2022 Mar

Hi peeps!

Oh my giddy aunt, have I been BUSY! I’ve spent almost the entire day shuttling around the Second Life grid, picking up gift after gift from the stupendously generous Holiday Special Giveaway. There are 54 stores taking part, including LeLutka with two free gift mesh heads – one male and one female – from their gorgeous EvoX range, so if you’ve not been able to afford a mesh head before, or you want to get some alts kitted out with some gorgeousity (totally a word, and not because I just made it up) then you need to take a bit of time to grab this stuff!

There’s a ton of stuff included, and it’s all free, but here is one skin that knocked me for six when I put it on, so I used it for the banner image for this post!

Isn’t that absolutely Be-YOU-tiful?! I was seal-clapping like a loony when it rezzed; it’s just so lovely!

In the above pic, I’m wearing the Raven gift head from LeLutka, and I deliberately kept the default shape (but blended it with my preferred body shape by copying the body shape numbers over to the head shape numbers). I’m also wearing the lightest tone of the head’s eyes. And the skin? That’s the ‘Rae’ Skin from IVES Beauty, again, completely free! This is the ‘Icy’ skintone, and you can find the matching body skin from the ‘Venus’ range at Velour. If you use Velour’s ‘Ipanema’ body skin range, this skin also contains matches to that one, too! It comes in the following tones: Blush, Chantilly, Cloudy, Glam, Ibiza, Icy, Porcelain, Praline, Rose Kiss, Sienna, Snow, Sunkiss, and Valley, and it has both brows and no-brows versions included, together with a shape, a brow-shaper, and the matching ear tattoo layers that EvoX heads need.

There’s a ton of skins in the big giveaway, covering all the tones you could possibly need, including a fantasy tone set from Nuve.

Skin creators in the giveaway include: ALT3, Amara Beauty, Avarosa, Bold & Beauty, Clef de Peau, Deetalez, Dernier, Glam Affair, Gloom, Heaux, IVES Beauty, Koonz, LeLapeau, Lueur, Moccino, Mudskin, NonNative, Not Found, Nuve, Pumec, Tres Beau, The Skinnery, plus Velour with body skins, for Legacy F, and eBody Reborn only.

Guys, you’re not left out either! To go with your free ‘Quinn’ EvoX head from LeLutka, there are free skin offerings from: Avarosa, Avi-Glam, Bold & Beauty, Clef de Peau, Not Found, NXS/CheerNo, and Stray Dog. Giveaways like these tend always to favour the ladies of SL, but you chaps also have hair from Vango, ADE, and Doux, plus hairbases from Modulus and Volkstone.

In addition to all that (as if that wasn’t enough!) there’s a load of makeup, jewellery, hair, shapes, piercings, eyes, tattoos, and other stuff. Because it’s almost Christmas (just a couple of hours to go for me here in the UK!) I’ve added some lippy from the event (by ALT3) and some sparkly eyeshadows from Alaskametro (which I already had in my inventory).

All glammed up and ready for a party!

A little note before you begin zipping around the grid: you’ll need at least one or two group slots free, as almost all of these gifts require you to join the relevant store’s group in order to get the gift. I’ve seen quite a few people suggesting this, but while you’re at each store (and still have their group tag active) hunt around to see if they have a group gift wall. I picked up tons of extra goodies that way! Also, some of these stores are worth keeping the group, if you have enough free slots. Those ones usually have fees to join them (sometimes up to L$300) but right now they’re all free to join, so it’s time to get yourself and your alts into them if you can!

As I whizzed around the grid, I found two stores – Heaux and Nuve – that have a daily ‘click here to increase your store credit’ thingy that’s a group only thing, so those are two of the groups that are definitely worth keeping on!

You can find all the info about the participants in this event, here on Seraphim. Start with one of the linked regions at the top, to pick up your free LeLutka head(s) (and the free LeLapeau skins also there) and while you’re there, click the big sign about the event. That will give you the list of participating stores that you can paste into chat and start clicking those SLurls. The event ends on 30th December 2022, so you have a week to get everything!

Happy gift-grabbing, and a Merry Christmas from Mar!

Mar’s Inventory Faffage – The Great Sortification!

December 11, 2022 Mar

*taps on the screen* – *peers into it* – Is it on? Oh! Yeah, I think it’s on! – *clears throat*

Hi peeps!

Are we back? Well, we just might be. No guarantees, because I have noooo idea what the remit of this blog is going to be in the new SL shopping climate of weekend sales and the like.

In days of old (“Eeee, when I were a lass!”) I’d blog about freebies and cheapies with an upper price limit of about L$75, as well as the odd simple tutorial here and there. But like I said, the weekend sales have those under-L$75 cheapies covered like woah these days, so I’m honestly not sure what this blog will turn into. Maybe a “best of” or “here’s some lovely things I found this weekend to make an outfit” type thing? Who the heck knows! All I know is that I have a bit more time now, I can be in-world a little bit more now, and I felt like revving the old blog up again.

So, to begin with, what the heck is that post title all about, Mar? Inventory faffage? Is that some kind of naughty euphemism?

Nah, sorry to disappoint!

I’ve spent a couple of weeks faffing around (from the definition above, it feels like frantic activity, but it’s actually kinda zen and meditative, because I love getting all organisational) and sorting inventory, following this method by The Virtual Bloke. His method spoke to me and my chaotic (and multiple-sorting-attempts!) inventory, so I thought I’d give it a go. And flippin’ heck, was it an eye-opener! Shoving everything from one store into a folder just for that store, and then filtering inventory alphabetically showed me just how many times I’d picked up duplicate freebies. I had stuff that I’d unpacked several times over, and you don’t even want to know the item count of my folders for the Legendaire and Sn@tch stores. Let’s just say that I winced when I saw the final total, which was in the thousands for both of them. Ouch!

I’m still wading through the initial creation of folders for stores and shoving everything by those stores into their folders, but I’ve also tried out some of the sorting advice in that post for when you want to tackle one of those store folders. It really does reduce everything down, and I love the idea of sub-folders for each item type. In fact, I might just keep my inventory filed that way: by store name, with sub-folders for different types of things sold by that store, rather than creating sub-folders elsewhere in my inventory. I do tend to think of things ‘by store’ when I want to find something in my inventory, and that blog post has got me really fired up and sorting like a madwoman! Give it a read and see if it sparks anything for you.

What else have I been up to since I started logging back in? Well, I’ve rezzed a lovely old apartment skybox that I’ve had for ages but never used, and furnished it so I have an actual home now instead of just a big square box with a full-bright photo booth along one side. I still have a photo booth in the skybox, but it’s in a rezzer that I’ve set up, so it’s only out when I need to use it (and it’s also no longer full bright). I’ve also got a little platform to the side of it with some ready-made (and prettily-textured!) archive boxes that I can shift-drag more copies of when I’m boxing up my inventory and working through it. And, of course, at the moment I have a gorge Christmas tree and some lovely decorations set out, because ’tis the season to do things with halls and holly and balls and jolly… or something like that! ;)

A few pics of the new place are below. The big old box is still around for now, since some of my friends have it set as their home location and I don’t want one of their logins to end up in a 1500m plummet to the ground! But I’ve got the decorating bug now, so I might retexture that old skybox soon.

The cosy seating area with a lovely snuggly-warm fireplace.

My writing area, replete with Christmassy stuff!

Back of the room, showing the removable photo booth (it rezzes from a button in the wall) and the little deck of pretty inventory archiving boxes.

Blog-wise (if that’s not already a word, it is now) I’ll be going through all the linked blogs and places in the blog’s sidebar at some point, to find out what’s still relevant (or even around). That’s going to take me a while, so I might tackle it over the holiday break.

But for now, it’s nice to be back!

Limited LAQ!

December 9, 2018 Mar

Hi peeps!

Post number two from me today, and you have to get your skates on for this one, because the offer is ONLY on for today: Sunday December 9th 2018. (It was also on yesterday, but I was offline that day and didn’t realise – oops!)

LAQ are selling their Noelle Bento mesh head – just for this weekend – for only L$300. The Marketplace link for both the demo and the full head is here, and here is a screenshot:

This head comes with the following:

the head itself
a modifiable shape
alpha for just the head
alpha for the head and body
brow shaper
skin applier (single tone, head only)
user manual notecard

Note, too, that this head is Omega-ready, so you can use your favourite Omega skins on it!

Because of the way that LAQ sells their heads and HUD separately, there is no HUD in the folder for this head. The main HUD sells for L$3000 and it works across all LAQ heads, but if you only want to be able to clear layers on this limited offer head, you can pick up the Clear Layers HUD for just L$50 at the LAQ mainstore:

If you join the LAQ group (it’s free, just paste this link into chat and click it) you’ll find the following group freebies on a table at the mainstore:

pale skin applier (single tone, head only)
snowflake on tongue with animation
eyelashes applier
eye reflections & shadows applier
mouth & teeth applier

The LAQ mainstore can be found here. And here – while Mar is stalking some lucky chairs! – is a quick screenshot of what she looks like after a little bit of shape-work. Her skin applier is an old one by The Plastik:

Falling for Apple Fall

December 9, 2018 Mar

Hi peeps!

A little something different from me today. Apple Fall is one of my favourite homeware stores in SL, and they have just put out a lovely permanent freebie. But there are also several other nice little freebies in the store, if you know where (and how!) to look. In the lobby area of the store you’ll find the Happy Santa figures at the top of the post, but the big freebie is just to the left of the landing spot:

This is the Hetton Barn. It’s a 50LI always-free gift from Apple Fall, and it’s gorgeous! Perfect for any season, it’s a cosy little home with one level. The house footprint is just 7m x 12m so it will fit on even the smallest of plots.

To add a bit of decor to your home, I ran around the store finding what freebies I could. I’ll show you piccies, but you can head to the store to find their exact location!

Freebie #01 is these two individual colanders, found on top of an old stove:

Freebie #02 is these magazine files, found inside a wooden shelving unit:

Freebie #03 is this beautiful pair of magnifiers, found on a low table:

Freebie #04 is these plaster candlesticks, found on the floor by a comfy couch:

Freebies #06, #07, and #08 are these wine bottles, wine glasses, and whisky decanter, found on a travel trunk-style coffee table:

And the mega-freebie section (again, on an ‘always free’ basis) can be found on one corner of the store. There are four chairs, lots of different balloons, some cakes and macarons, a coral sculpture, some gourd cloches, and some gardening tools:

Head to Apple Fall and pick up some lovely decor items today :)