Otherworldly

When she entered the castle, rows of ice sculptures of strange creatures greeted her. She wandered among them, marvelling at how life-like they were. Not until it was too late did she realise why they looked so real—they were not sculptures at all!

The stunning Sarah Ball Gown by HEXtraordinary looks absolutely amazing and based on the brands first forays into clothing I cannot wait to see more. The texturing is top notch and the meshes beautifully made. This particular gown is of course inspired by the gown worn by Sarah in the dream sequence masquerade in Labyrinth (raise your hands everyone who has that as a favourite scene!) and at first I wanted to capture something of that in my photos. Alas, while I know a replica of the ballroom was made in Second Life, it was many years ago and I did not buy it at the time. But then I got the idea of instead using the ice sculptures that were also made by HEXtraordinary, creating something a little inspired by Narnia instead with the help of the imposing Stalker Castle from Fanatik.

Another great release from the Engine Room is the Monarch hair by Magika. This is a beautiful updo with long tendrils framing the face and a dramatic crown with tall spikes. The latter can be turned off for a more casual look. This round of the Engine Room closes in ten days, so don’t miss out!

The faerie leads you through a flowering field towards a secret door beneath a hill. Will you dare to follow her? If you do, will you ever emerge into the world again and will a hundred years have passed in a day?

We Love Role-Play is open for another round and I love how the releases from deviousMind and lassitude & ennui go together (you’ll see the latter in the second photo) for a dryad/faerie look. To find the perfect spot to photo this, I paid a long overdue visit to Ode and found it as lovely as I remembered.

deviousMind’s April outfit is a bikini made up of flowers, butterflies and bees. You can choose between three levels of coverage for both top and bottom. The Dryad shoes from lassitude & ennui are low, lace-up boots that look as if they’re made from leaves. Both the bikini and the shoes are for Maitreya Lara only.

Both poses used are from Be My Mannequin? The first is Pandora (includes the key prop) from the Pandora’s Box fatpack and the second is Vastness from the Star Gazer fatpack.

Need those perfect pants for layering under coats and corsets or tucking into boots? Then these striped pants by lassitude & ennui, available as appliers or as BOM, have you covered. Well, half of you, anyway. They come in 7 colour versions for 120L$ per pair or a mere 360L$ for the fatpack and you can find them at the Engine Room together with other cool Steampunk-inspired items.

The sleek, elegant hair is Wasabi’s latest release, Delaney, which is out at Uber. It represent a (trial) return to offering single colour packs. You can get this hair in just one shade range (about 60 colors) for 275L$ or you can get the Absolute Pack for 400L$ as usual. This hair offers four style options.

The Engine Room is open again and it may be even more amazing than usual, posing a serious danger to any virtual wallet. I’ve been by there a few times already and I expect a few more trips as I agonize over colour choices.

My first choice for what to feature was easy, however. Chandra Meehan of deviousMind has released the Agnes clock harness and leather top which works together with a number of her other releases. I opted for combining it with the Avery set as it included both hotpants and a pair of seriously cool boots. The end result might be called boudoir steampunk?

From Del-ka Aedilis comes the Beekeepers set, which includes beehives and a beekeeper’s stump with animations, some generic and a couple for preparing honey. The beehives include optional sound and would be a lovely, atmospheric add-on to a garden. Here I set them up next to the edge of the forest and added a carpet of flowery grass around them courtesy of Fundati.

I don’t often impulse buy skins, but a charming face and a good cause sold me on Zlata by Leronso, a Ukranian creator, at the Skin Fair. The creator will be using all profits from selected products (such as the Zlata skin) to support help organisations in Ukraine and that is of course something I am more than happy to contribute to in the current situation. Zlata is a pretty, subtly freckled skin that comes with red brows or without brows. Since I rather like red hair, I kept her as a redhead, but these brows are the new ones from alaskametro. I also went over to their main store to pick up a body skin; these come in fatpacks of all the tones and there’s a few different variants to choose from depending on the type of shading you prefer.

Wasabi’s new Coconut hair is cuter than my usual style, but I really love it with this face. Coconut comes in two variants and with optional, unrigged bangs.

The saucy, inviting pose is the latest from Be My Mannequin and it is out for the Limited event, which means only 120 copies will be sold. Also available at the event and limited to 120 copies are two special fatpacks: The Boss Is On A Roll and The Fall Of A Rebel Angel.

Be My Mannequin has released three single poses meant for gazing up at the sky; a stand, a sit and a lay. I loved the mood of them but struggled with finding the right setting. That is, until I recalled the Utaraa set from deviousMind for We Love Role-Play. These faceted crystals made me think of reflections and so I went and setup the lay pose, Vastness, in the water and started playing around with the EEP settings for both the sky and the water.  I am very happy with the final result, I think it conveys the sense of Vastness very well, almost letting water and sky merge into one.

Zaara is participating in the current round of We Love Role-Play with the beautiful Umrao ensemble consisting of anarkali (dress), churidar (pants) and dupatta (scarf). For the first time, she’s offering both Maitreya and Legacy fits, including Petite and Perky versions. The colours and textures are impeccable (just look at the embroidery on the chest, such exquisite detail) and with the fatpack you are able to mix and match all the pieces in a variety of ways.

The Estrella skin by alaskametro is not new, but an updated version that also uses her updated skin tones will be available at the Skin Fair when it starts on the 11th (click here to learn how to get early access today). If you have already bought the skin, you can of course redeliver it to get the new version, you don’t have to buy it again. I really like the nose and the lips on this skin, they’re very nicely shaped. The Gel eyebrows are also from alaskametro and these are a Skin Fair exclusive. They include six colours (plus they are tintable) and both regular and EvoX fits.

Speaking of Skin Fair, I was hoping there’d be some interesting skins for the SLUV, but when I looked through the booths it was all EvoX among the new releases. I will need to give it a closer look, but it does seem like the market has become completely EvoX dominated. As someone who likes to use a variety of heads, its disheartening.

Time to revisit some of those Teegle releases for the Home & Garden Expo, now together with releases by The Flying Pony and Cosmos Boutique, both from the mall on Hope 6.

Remember that the Home & Garden Expo raises money for RFL and each of the vendors will have at least one and generally several RFL donation vendors!

It is not every day that you find a unicorn grazing outside your house, though chances are certainly better if you live in an enchanted forest cottage. Be sure to always greet the unicorn in a kindly manner, for although friendly at heart their horns are sharp and they will defend themselves if need be. Carrots and lumps of sugar are very welcome.

If a horse isn’t what you need for your home & garden, then the Expo still has you more than covered. If you haven’t visited yet, the sims are now much less laggy then the first few days, so what are you waiting for?  And, as always, remember to pay special attention to the RFL vendors so that the Home & Garden Expo can raise as much money as possible.

For today’s post, I am looking at Mesh-Entity/Cosmos and LunaMare Designs.

The Home & Garden Expo runs from February 26th to March 20th and raises money for Relay for Life. I will be covering one of the nine sims, Hope 6, and giving you a taste of the merchants that can be found there and what their new releases and donation items are. The main sponsor of Hope 6 is Teegle and so my first post focuses on new releases from Teegle and Teegle-associated brands. The two big ones are undoubtedly the Quarter Horse Teeglepet and the Western riding system from Mythril. But there are also two new coats from Teegle and three new decor/home & garden items. And Cheval D’or, which also has its store on Hope 6, has fitted all their existing sets to the Quarter Horse as well as released a new wavy mane and tail set. They also have a 20% off sale at the Expo. To give you a good look at these items, I’ve put together a video on location. I even tackled showing off the gaits from the Western riding system and managed to keep from crashing into the fence too many times. ;)

I’ve featured the Ludus Magnus from Del-ka Aedilis before, but what better build to use for a bad-ass battle pose? This is another pose from Be My Mannequin?‘s set of poses for Enchantment’s Iliad and Odyssey round, this time using the included prop sword. The Ines set from deviousMind for We Love Role-Play is perhaps not standard-issue gladiator wear, but this leather-and-feather set has such a fierce attitude. The hair from Analog Dog is currently a free gift in the mainstore, in the Freeball (you need to cam around a bit to find it). I also like how the Ashlynn head from Slink came out with this expression from Vista’s Facial Bento hud.

To show off the Ludus more fully, I built up a small mountain with the help of Fanatik’s Lofoten set and placed it on top, with one of the sim surrounds from Landscapes Unlimited providing the dramatic backdrop.

With Dutchie‘s latest release, chances are the male avatars in your life will take significantly longer to get dressed. The new mainstore release is a walk-in closet for men with a wide array of (display) clothing options. Indeed, if you get the full closet package you also get boxes of additional display clothing on hangers or folded as well as extra display shoes. You can use these to switch out the contents in the wardrobe or to decorate with. Or why not as props, as I do in the second photo? The clothing, both the pieces already in the wardrobes and the extras, can also be tinted for further customization. If you just want the display clothing, you can buy this separately.

There are 10 different wardrobe setups included, 7 with different clothing contents (5 wide, 2 narrow) and 3 closed (1 wide, 2 narrow). You get 6 texture options for the wood, where the white and black make excellent bases for tinting. The wardrobes can be arranged together any way you wish, so if you don’t have the right room for a full walk-in closet setup, it will still work beautifully.

The only downside is that you can’t actually wear any of the stylish pieces filling up the wardrobes! But it does make it look like you have a very expensive Second Life clothing collection.

The current round of Enchantment gives me creative anxiety. I love (read: am completely obsessed with) the Iliad and the Odyssey, which means that I want anything I do inspired by that to be especially nice. Hence I have spent days trying to decide what to do!

Then an idea presented itself as I tried out the set of “Build-a-Battle” poses from Be my Mannequin (available as singles or a fatpack at the event). I wanted to portray one of the Amazons, who came to the aid of the Trojans later in the war (after the death of Hector) under the leadership of their Queen, Penthesilea. With the hunt-gift helmet from Whymsical Marketplace and an earlier release from deviousMind inspired by the goddess of the hunt, Diana, I put together my look and went in search for a good location. Once there, I couldn’t resist this night-time windlight, just look at that wine-dark sea.