The ninth anniversary of the FaMESHed monthly shopping event is upon us, and almost all of the vendor booths at the event have a free gift for you! Vanity Fair will model some of those fabulous freebie fashionista finds for you today. Here’s the first look:
Vanity Fair’s entire look, from head to toes, consists of gifts from FaMESHED! She is wearing:
Hair: Diana hair by Phoenix (which comes in a full fatpack of colours)
Sunglasses: PM N1 glasses, the present from the BONDI booth
Top: this double-layered blue-and-white top is part of a complete outfit, a gift from Neve (which includes matching shorts)
Pants: these two-tone jeans are the gift from the Pink Cream Pie booth (they come in versions for flat feet and high feet), and they match the Neve top perfectly!
Shoes: peppermint Ada pumps by Garbaggio
Watch: Lana watch with a fabric wrist strap, the gift from Baiastice
Here’s the second look, once again FaMESHed gifts from head to toe!
For our second look, Vanity Fair is wearing:
Hair: Lola by Navy+Copper (comes in a full fatpack of colours)
Earrings: Leaf earrings by RealEvil Industries (comes with a HUD with 4 metal choices)
Dress: Maddy dress by Seniha
Boots: these sexy boots are the Farah tassel boots in gold, the gift from the Gos booth
Here’s the third look, again consisting of free gifts from FaMESHED:
Vanity is once again wearing the Ada pumps from Garbaggio, along with:
Hair: No Basics hair by no.match (comes in a full fatpack of colours)
Earrings: Triple Tear earrings in azurite from EarthStones
Dress: the Star dress in mint by Safira
For our final look, Vanity Fair is modeling:
Hair: Dana hair by Sintiklia, which comes with a Colors & Pastels palette as shown above (Vanity is wearing the default colour, right out of the box)
Dress with optional belt: Charlotte dress, the gift from the Luas booth
Shoes: Debra platforms by UTOPIA Design
The FaMESHed event runs from May 1st to May 27th, 2021. Happy freebie shopping!
Fasten your seat belts! Today I will be telling you how to receive a whopping six hundred and six Christmas presents on Christmas Day, all completely free!
Many of the Second Life stores which have Advent calendars and 12 Days of Christmas calendars allow you to visit once on Christmas Day, and pick up all the gifts at one time. Very convenient!
Below is a listing of the stores, each with a brief description of the gifts, and a SLURL to take you directly to the calendar. In some cases, I have also included a picture of the calendar.
This task would have been practically impossible without the truly Herculean work done by Andonia, who shall be henceforth known as the Queen of the Advent Calendars! Nearly every day, Andonia criss-crosses the grid, hitting as many calendars as she could, and then posts pictures of each day’s gifts to her blog! Here’s her list of 2020 Advent calendars, which she has published on the Kinky Fox Designs blog. Please peruse it, to get a better sense of what kinds of presents each calendar offers, so that you may efficiently draw up a plan of attack for your Christmas 2020 looting and pillaging 😉 Thank you, Andonia! 🙂
For this endeavour, you will require only three things:
at least one free group slot (in many cases, you will need to join the free store group in order to pick up all the Advent calendar gifts; you can then leave the group immediately afterward to free up that slot for the next store on this list!);
one Linden dollar (for the 12 Days of Christmas calendar at Baby Monkey); and
at least a couple of spare hours to teleport from store to store! If you, like me, are stuck at home during a pandemic lockdown with some time on your hands, this might be the year for you to go a little crazy with the virtual freebie shopping!
Ready? Set? Let’s go!!! Remember that you will only be able to pick up all the gifts on Christmas Day (for some stores, Christmas Eve, but please see my note about special Christmas Day presents at a few stores at the very tail end of this blogpost). If your time is limited, I have listed what I think are the best calendars for apparel and footwear first, then all the rest in alphabetical order.
Christmas Gifts of Men’s and Women’s Apparel, Footwear, Jewelry, and Accessories
Baby Monkey: No group needed; 12 gifts of women’s apparel and footwear; pay L$1 for each one, and your Linden dollar will automatically be refunded. The gifts all come with a three-colour mini-HUD, and together they comprise a capsule wardrobe!
Petite Mort: No group needed; 12 gifts of womenswear.
UPDATE December 25th: the Christmas present from Petite Mort is this beautiful white ballgown!
Oubliette: No group needed; 12 gifts of gothic womenswear.
UPDATE December 25th: the final gift from Oubliette’s calendar is this gorgeous black ballgown, the counterpart to the white gown gift from Petite Mort.
JUMO: No group needed; 15 gifts of women’s apparel, footwear, and jewelry.
No Shot: No group needed; there are two calendars, one with 12 gifts of womenswear and the other with 12 gifts of menswear.
Ari-Pari: Free group join is required; 25 gifts of womenswear, home decor, and a L$250 gift card (Dec. 14th). Gifts can only be claimed once, so select Deliver on the blue pop-up window, and then be sure to click on Accept rather than Discard, because you won’t get a second chance! (UPDATE Dec. 22nd: I have been informed by the owner of Ari-Pari that I can get all these Advent calendar gifts redelivered via the redelivery terminal found in the store.)
EscalateD: No group needed; look for the green Advent calendar (the red one is for V.I.P. members only); 24 gifts of hairstyles and accessories; for pictures of the gifts, see Andonia’s blog or the listing compiled by the Russian Vkontake group Second Life – FREE (use the Russian-to-English translator in your Chrome web browser). UPDATE Dec 24th: Please note that on Christmas Eve, you only need to click on the green advent calendar ONCE, and you will receive a folder containing all 24 gifts! If you click on all 24 numbers, you will land up with 24 copies of all 24 presents!!!
UPDATE Dec. 21st, 8:58 p.m.: I forgot to mention Altamura‘s 12 Days of Christmas calendar! Free group join required; 12 gifts of seasonal menswear and womenswear, including free Bento, Bakes on Mesh-compatible full-body male and female avatars (more information here). As the Altamura group usually costs L$100 to join, you might wish to stay a member of this particular store group, as Altamura sometimes offers group gifts and discounts to group members throughout the year.
12 Days of Christmas gifts at Altamura include Bento, Bakes on Mesh avatars
Some other stores you might wish to visit on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day include:
AppleTini: Free group join required; 24 gifts of women’s fingernails.
Amore & Amore: Free group join required; 24 gifts of women’s clothing.
Black Angel: Free group join required; 24 gifts of womenswear.
Blackbird Lace: Free group join required; 24 gifts of women’s apparel and footwear.
BYRNE: Free group join required; 25 gifts of women’s apparel, footwear, and accessories. UPDATE December 25th: You’ll need to take the teleporter to the Advent calendar. Most of the gifts are womenswear, but a few items are unisex, and the present for Christmas Day includes both a women’s dress and this men’s black Victorian-era suit, with either a red or teal vest:
The Christmas Day gift from Byrne includes this men’s suit, as well as a women’s outfit
Coveted: No group needed; 24 gifts of men’s and women’s wear, accessories, and home decor.
DM Design: Free group join required; 24 gifts of womenswear.
Donni’s Dollies: Free group join required; 24 gifts of men’s and women’s apparel and footwear.
Enchantress: Free group join required; 24 gifts of womenswear.
ROA Design: No group needed; 24 gifts of womenswear and accessories.
Sands Design: No group needed; 24 gifts of women’s clothing.
TrendZy: No group needed; 24 gifts of womenswear and home and garden decor.
Home and Garden Decor and Christmas Decorations
If you are interested in home and garden decor, including Christmas decorations, please visit the following calendars:
Chic Buildings: No group needed; while Chic does not have an Advent calendar this year, she has put up two calendars with gifts from 2017 and 2018 for a total of 48 gifts of home furnishings; for pictures, see Andonia’s Advent calendar listing on the Kinky Fox Designs blog (press Ctrl-F and do a keyword search for “chic buildings”).
Dench Designs: No group needed; 24 gifts of home and garden decor.
Flying Arts:No group needed; 24 gifts of outdoor Christmas decor.
Fonzo Fest: No group needed; 12 gifts around the Christmas tree; childrenswear, family poses, home and garden decor.
Illustrious: No group needed; 24 gifts of home and garden decor.
Kim’s Creations: No group needed; 25 gifts of home and garden decor.
Christmas Presents from Shopping Events
On Christmas Day you should also pay a visit to a couple of shopping events where the gifts are all gathered together. I have not added the count of the gifts from all these events to the total given in the title of this blogpost; there are so many, that I simply don’t have time to count all of them!
Cosmopolitan shopping event(running Dec. 14th to 26th, 2020): Free group join required; the gifts are in Christmas stockings hung on a huge Christmas tree near the entrance. Participating vendors are adding stockings to the tree every day between now and Christmas, so I would advise dropping by on Christmas Day and picking up everything at once. If you want to see pictures of all the presents in the stockings, please check the daily listing of gifts compiled by the Russian Vkontake group Second Life – FREE (use the Russian-to-English translator in your Chrome web browser).
The Christmas tree at the Cosmopolitan shopping event has dozens of gifts!
The layout of the stockings around the tree can be somewhat confusing compared to traditional Advent calendars, and you might land up collecting the same gifts multiple times. You might want to use this tip provided by SL blogger Chic Aeon: once you have clicked on a stocking and received its gift, right click on it, Select More from the pie menu, select More again, then select Derender, then Blacklist. You will no longer be able to see that stocking! (These are the instructions for the Firestorm viewer; I do not know what the equivalent is for the standard Second Life viewer.) This is a genius tip! Thank you, Chic!!
Another shopping event you should hit is SWANK (running Dec. 18th, 2020 to Jan. 8th, 2021), which has four large Christmas trees at four corners of the sim (be sure to turn up your draw distance in your SL viewer to be able to see them!), under which are dozens of Christmas gifts from participating vendors. You will need to join the free SWANK group to pick up these gifts of men’s and women’s apparel, footwear, jewelry, and home and garden decor.
Finally, the Firelight Hair mainstore has, in past years, allowed you to pick up all 24 hairstyles on Christmas Day, along with a free store gift card to use on any hair in the Firelight store. I don’t know if they are going to do that again this year, so be sure to pop in, just to double check on December 25th! The Advent calendar gifts are mostly women’s hairstyles, with a few male/unisex styles thrown in. The Firelight group is free to join.
Also, Entice usually puts out a store gift card as their Christmas present every year, so check that out too! The Entice group is free to join.
Hair can be expensive! Today, inspired by the new hair wall at The Free Dove and by Cat Pink’s new video (appended to the end of this rather long blogpost), I decided to compile a list of all the places I like to go when I need to pick up some fabulous free tresses for my female alts! Some you might already know about, but some you might not.
The Free Dove
Palomma Casanova has completely revamped the free hair wall at the back of her venerable freebie store, The Free Dove (here’s the exact SLURL), so if you haven’t paid a visit in a while, why not pop in? It’s still the single best collection of freebie hair for men and women on the grid!
Firelight has generously donated different eight hair gifts, including the Leslie long hairstyle, which comes with a HUD with six colour options, plus a separate tinting HUD to adjust it to any shade you desire:
The Dolly hair, another gift from Firelight, comes in a sand brown colour:
The Marilyn hair, a gift from Alli&Ali Hair, comes in a light brown colour:
The blunt-cut Olivia medium-length hairstyle by Sintiklia is extremely versatile! It comes in a complete fatpack of colours, and a styling HUD with nine options:
The Rina hair-and-fedora combo by Lara AC is cute (it comes in just the brown shown, however, and you cannot change the colour of the hat, either):
D!va
One of my favourite places to go for free hair is D!va. Join the D!va store group for free and you can pick up this lovely Aria hairstyle from the panel right behind the front counter, which comes in a full fatpack of colours, plus a styling HUD:
And, if you walk around the narrow wall behind the front counter, on the back of it is yet another fabulous free gift from D!va: the Iris hairstyle, which again comes in a complete fatpack, with a styling HUD, and separately wearable parts for the long fall in the back, the front fall over the shoulders, and the braids! There are just so many ways you can wear this hair. The Iris package even includes the gown you see in the picture below!
The Stay at Home Club
Another wonderful place to pick up some free, high-quality hair is The Stay at Home Club website (check the Accessories section, and just click on the pictures to get the SLURLs of the stores). Here I show you three of the free hairstyles available for female avatars.
The curly Sugar hairstyle by Miss Canning comes with a HUD with 40 different colour choices:
Versaci, among a generous selection of other Stay at Home Club gifts, offers you a complete fatpack of this shorter, bobbed hairstyle called Beckie:
The long, wavy Rhea hair by Sintiklia comes in a full fatpack of colours, and includes a styling HUD to wear each side forward or back as you desire. The Rhea hairstyle package also includes two styles of bangs, which are separate attachments.
Note that, in addition to the Olivia hair at The Free Dove (mentioned earlier), and this Rhea hairstyle, there are a number of free hairstyles on the Free Gifts wall at the Sintiklia store, so be sure to take a good look around once you’re there!
NYNE
Visit NYNE, join their group for free, and you can pick up no less than thirty-nine free hairstyles from the shelves behind the front counter! Six newer hairstyles are in the bags on the lower shelf, and there are another 33 hairstyles from 2018 and 2019 in the gift boxes on the upper shelf. Seriously, no other store on the grid offers you so much free hair! (There’s also a Stay at Home Club hair gift nearby too, to make it an even 40 free hairstyles!)
Let’s look at a couple of the hairstyles, all of which come with a HUD with six or seven colour options, plus separately colourable streaks.
First up is the long, straight Anissa hair:
Next is Tivi, a fun, crimped hairstyle:
Finally, here is the Kim hairstyle:
Firelight
In addition to the free Firelight hairstyles you can find at both The Free Dove and the excellent freebie store at Ajuda SL Brasil, head on down to the Firelight main store, join the Firelight group for free, and pick up the current and all the past group gifts:
The Emma braided hair comes with a HUD with nine colour options:
Lamb
Lamb has five free hairstyles as group gifts (the Lamb group is free to join).
This is the Angel hair, which comes in a fatpack of colours:
Navy and Copper
If you join the Navy and Copper group for free, you can pick up three free hairstyles from their store (here’s the SLURL):
Here is one of those three gifts, the Green Tea ponytail, which comes in a complete fatpack of colours:
Olive
Olive Hair has a wall with fifteen lucky boards, which do not require a group join. The letters change frequently, and there is usually a crowd of avatars waiting for their initial to appear, so your chances of picking up a free hairstyle are pretty good:
This is the White Rabbit hair, which comes in a blonde fatpack, with optional bunny ears:
Finally, Cat Pink SL (bless her heart) has just published a brand new YouTube video, with no less than twenty different places she goes to for free women’s hair in Second Life! Some of them I have mentioned up top, but many I have not.
If you visit the video page on YouTube (be sure click on “SHOW MORE” in the description text located below the video), she even provides a very handy list of the SLURLs to all the stores she mentions!
So, as you can see, lacking in Linden dollars does not mean you have to go bald in Second Life! Happy freebie shopping!
