I saw a similarly-named post on Tumblr the other day, and it got me thinking about those essential elements of a skater's life. Obviously this is a hugely personal list, so I'm going to be doing this with some nice obvious items and events, but I'd love to hear what your must-haves are on either the social media (see bottom of the post for links!) or as a comment on this post!

If you're anything like me, you don't have enough space in your closet as it is. Adding skating costumes to this is kind of a space-consuming nightmare, so I thought I'd write a post today on a few storage options for skating costumes, to liberate your wardrobe a new!

Well today's post has nothing to do with skating (although I do have a grandiose 5 skating posts in the works at the moment, so stay tuned!), but it is important to my blog anyway, so I thought I'd go ahead and share the news!

A little over 3 years ago I started getting wrist and hand pain, an injury which has only worsened over time. Eventually I had to give up writing, in lieu of typing, and even that has now become painful when I'm very active on my keyboard.

Well I was taking a look at one of my favourite rhinestone seller's eBay page recently, and I came across beautiful rhinestone strips of all sizes, and colours! It instantly got me thinking of ways you could use this fantastic product in skating, and voila! a new post was born!

Hey guys!! I'm back!! *waves*

Thanks so much for stopping by today. I realise it's been a while since my last post, and for good reason(s): I've seen the hand surgeon and it turns out I'm going to need some more tests (this may mean that blogging slows down again in the near future... boo); I was going through my end-of-year-3 (out of 4! Woohoo!) exams at university; we've been cleaning out our house (and oh yes, that means emptying that last moving box from 2 years ago... *hides in shame*). So as you can see a lot has been going on! I'd love to know how you've been spending the start of summer, so don't hesitate to drop a comment or come say hi via Facebook or Twitter!

Now, on to today's post. I was going through some old skating photos and thinking back to my childhood in the rink, and I must admit that my mind did wander to that feeling of going into a competition, knowing you weren't going to win it. Of course this happens 99% of the time (if not more), but usually for a ton of reasons. It happened to me quite a bit simply by glimpsing at the competitor list however: if a trophy-hunting skater was participating, I knew the top spot was as good as already taken.