Enough about me, let's talk about YOU for a minute: Sydney Shop Girl

Welcome to the Enough about me, let's talk about YOU for a minute series on my blog. It's to celebrate my birthday and blogiversary week. Each day until and including 15 December I will feature a guest blogger who I admire. I hope you enjoy the series as much as I did collating it.


It is the final day of my Enough about me, let's talk about YOU for a minute guest blogging series. It has been fun. I hope you found some great new blogs to read if you weren't reading them already. 

Sydney Shop Girl is a blogger I knew I'd click with. She's smart, funny, stylish and a great writer.


We both love shopping. We both love food. We both like to take photos. She also uses Hipstamatic. And we both blog. So when we met, it went just like our virtual worlds went: we shopped, we ate, we took photos and we blogged about it! But unlike our virtual worlds, this time we did these things together! She is as nice in person as she is on her blog. And she can shop. We should form a duo in the shopping Olympics. 

I have been reading her blog since she started it. It's a regular stop for me. And I love how she writes almost every day about the things I enjoy. 

She influenced my fashion purchases. After I saw the wonder of her Fauxpard Jacklet from Target, I bought one myself. And I also bought the Cotton On grey heart knit top after she did. I would say Sydney Shop Girl has influenced my fashion purchases just as much as my favourite magalogues InStyle and Shop Til You Drop have this year (and they are her two fave magalogues too). I invented the phrase 'fauxpard jacklet' and it is now in her blogcabulary. We influence each other. 


I love our friendship.

Guest blog by Sydney Shop Girl:

I’d like to thank Carly for the privilege of being a guest on her blog. Tune Into Radio Carly turns one this month and I hope it buys itself something special and has chocolate cake for breakfast all December. Actually, that sounds like great advice for all of us, birthday or not. December is such a frantic month but its also full of joy, love and families. Just remember to take some ‘me time’ and to breathe somewhere in its 31 days.

Sydney Shop Girl is the first blog I’ve ever had. I was never a diary or journal keeper so I’ve been pleasantly surprised that I’ve been able to keep going for as long as I have. 

 

I started blogging basically because I was on facebook an awful lot writing status updates that ran into paragraphs. Friends ‘liked’ and ‘commented’ and this made me feel ‘connected’ and ‘related to’. However, it got to the point when I thought that perhaps there are things that I update about that don’t really belong on facebook. I think the hourly status updates were starting to wear my friends down too….

Why not take it to blogger instead?

That way any interested parties could just find my blog and read whichever parts of it took their fancy at a time convenient to them. 

 

It was time to for my life to set forth for the blogosphere.

So, in January 2010, Sydney Shop Girl was born. Sydney because this is my adopted city. Shop because I do. Girl as reference to the childhood that started my love of reading, writing, imagining and laughter.

There were a few teething problems.

It took me a few weeks to find my writing style. At first I tried the tumblr format but I just couldn’t take to the short and sharp style of using different media. I got obsessed with trying to find a ‘focus’ for my blog, resolute that it had to ‘be about …. something’.

I would sit and think for hours about what I should write about, whether anyone would read it, whether I should write about my feelings, whether to ‘leave faces in photos’. The usual novice blogger issues.

Then it just happened. 

An OMG moment. I would keep it simple. Write, take pictures, write about pictures I’d taken and take an active interest in the world around me.

For me, writing Sydney Shop Girl has been an amazingly rewarding experience.

There were the obvious (to me) benefits:

1. my blog is a pretty permanent record of my thoughts and photographs
2. it has helped improve my general knowledge (and spelling), the number of times I have had to google and wiki things….
3. it has been a wonderful creative outlet – I had forgotten how much I enjoy writing and also how interesting it is to learn how to use a DSLR camera
4. ‘For the blog’ has been the reason for many an interesting adventure this past year
5. I like reading me live feed, how things I write about end up in other people’s google searches on the opposite side of the world
6. most importantly, the friends I have made.

What lies ahead?

 I hope to keep writing as Sydney Shop Girl for as long as I can.

It is a great gift to be able to freely publish ones photos and words in a medium that is immediate and allows potentially any other individual to wonder over and have a gander.

Thank you for the opportunity, Carly and everyone else who kindly reads this.

(All photos from Sculpture by the Sea, 2010 at Bondi Beach.)

http://sydneyshopgirl.blogspot.com