DIY statement necklace workshop: the result

Remember the DIY statement necklace workshop I participated in? Well, I had still to show you the final result of it :)

After the workshop we all went home with the material we needed to finish the necklace by ourselves and a couple of us made an effort to have it finished by the time of the Farewell Conference... and we all wore it on that day! This is how mine looks like:

You can see more pictures of it and of the others in Emina's blog. This ended up being a great souvenir from my time in Brussels and it was great fun learning how to do it with the girls!

DIY statement necklace workshop

Last week, the DIY Sub-Committee organised this workshop led by Emina, a very creative trainee who was kind enough to teach us how to make one of her original creations: the statement necklace! A bunch of us girls got together after work and started to craft with these materials.

Our results after day 1!

This type of necklaces takes a long time to make, so we brought some materials home in order to advance on our work and we will have a second meeting next week. Afterwards we will be all sporting our bright and colourful new jewelry pieces in the Commission's corridors :) Emina has also posted about this event, you can check her article here.

Pinhole workshop

This weekend I participated in a pinhole workshop, organized by the Photography and the DIY Subcommittees. We met in a working room that also had a photo lab and built our own cameras, made out of carboard boxes. We then went outside to shoot and returned to reveal the photos.It was a lot of fun, as I really like photography and with this workshop you could really understand how things work inside a camera and how photography is made.

Make-up workshops by Make Me Up

Last Sunday I participated in something I had never done before: a make-up workshop! Indeed, I was invited by Make Me Up to participate in two of their make-up workshops, in the beautiful The Hotel. This is a project created by designer Pierre-Antoine Vettorello and make-up artists Sybille De Beuckelaer and Nathalie Peeters. Each month they host a set of 3 make-up workshops in Brussels, always with different themes and teach you the techniques for each of them. Lunch is included and when I arrived to the 26th floor of The Hotel this is what awaited me:

After eating this delicious lunch, we passed on to the "real business": learning how to apply an eyeline technique, to perfect a defined lip, to magnify your eyes with false lashes, to find out which is your face type and all about contouring and highlighting. The workshops I attended were suggestively called "like Marilyn" and "play with light".

Eve Pearl make-up, which allies cosmetics to skincare and you can try during the workshops, is available to buy in the end

Still some goodies to eat during the afternoon and real quality fake lashes to buy

The view from our room

The make-up artists would always apply the technique first on someone from the audience in order to show us how it is done 

... and then we would apply it on ourselves under their supervision and (occasional! *cof cof*) corrections.

Me, playing with our individual mirrors

Me at the end!

I found these workshops very useful and, most of all, fun. You can try a great variety of products you normally wouldn't have access to and create different looks from the usual you're used to make everyday. The artists explain you everything very detailed and help you do it for yourself the right way. Moreover, they advice you on what looks better on you, as there are no absolute rules in make-up that can apply to everyone and it's up to you to see what fits you best. All the workshops are carried out in English, so it's great for the expat community in Brussels. Additionally, they provide you all the products and make-up needed, although you are advised to bring your own products in case you want to learn how to apply those specific ones (as those are the ones you're then going to use at home). If you're looking for a different program for a weekend, to have fun with some friends, or to just adventure yourself in the world of make-up with great professional coaching along the way, I recommend you to sign up for these!

They have open the registrations for their next workshops, to take place in the last weekend of May. Here you have the instructions to book. The first one ("make-up for business success") can be specially interesting for us trainees!

Develop Your Own Career workshop

I recently got in contact with OrientaEuro because of my website and discovered a very talented consultancy firm led by professionals with managerial experience in top companies and educational institutions around the world. They count with an interdisciplinary and international team of psychologists, career coaches, communication experts, career advisors, designers and web programmers.

In 2008, they started operations in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as Desarrollarme, now the #1 referent in Latin America for professional career development and coaching. More than 1 million people have been helped by them with their careers so far, and still counting. In 2011, they widened our scope developing the most popular iPhone app for career development and studies election: Jobs and Career Test. And in 2012 they extended their operations to Europe, through their branch OrientaEuro, delivering their services already in Spanish, English, French and Dutch.

So right now they are in Brussels, ready to serve you with their advises and will have a workshop specifically directed to the trainees who want to pursue a career and get a real job once their traineeship ends (which would be the majority of us, I believe).

This workshop is called Develop Your Own Career and it'll take a full-day in Brussels (Saturday 27th April 2013, 9am – 6pm, in Aloft Schuman). They summarize its contents this way:

What will you take from the workshop specifically?

• Certainty in your personal and professional goals, values and priorities
• Self-knowledge: your strengths, weaknesses, skills and preferences
• Tools for analyzing jobs and alternatives for your own best interests
• Conscious development and improvement of your online and offline networking skills
• Improvement of your effectiveness in recruitment processes: Curriculum Vitae, motivation/cover letters and interviews

Answers - We will work to answer the following key questions in a productive way:

• Who am I? Who do I want to be? Where do I want to go?
• What am I good at? What do I really like to do? What should I avoid?
• What does the market value? Has it something to do with me?
• What’s the role of money in my life? What are my priorities and values and in which order?
• How could I “sell myself” better?
• With a little help from my friends? (networking tips and tricks)
• Would it be better to be my own boss? If so, under what circumstances and how?

You can find all information on it and be able to register here.

I have decided to become affiliated with this initiative because I can see how the Brussels employment market is competitive (stories from former trainees are enough to make you scared of it... which you don't have to, if you know what you can expect from it and gain the necessary tools to face it, which is exactly what this workshop is meant to). I think that you can hear a lot of stories and get feedback from several people, but in the end all of those will be personal experiences only (like mine that I share here with you) and not professional advice like this firm can give to you, as that is what they have been doing professionally for years and know what will suit you - as an individual different from all others - best. I also saw their concern in meeting with a current trainee - me! - to ask some questions and to try to get a better understanding of what is going on in a trainee's mind.

So, given this partnership we have established, if you insert the code atib1304 when paying for your registration, you will get 10% off the final price!

If you sign up with a friend until April 14th you can benefit from this reduction and still add to it the 10% discount I mention above by inserting the code.

If you are currently a trainee and want to find a job after (either in Brussels or anywhere else, as this knowledge is helpful everywhere), start thinking about it now, take this opportunity to help your career and register for the workshop!