Just Starting Out: Part II

February 29th, 2008 at 01:20pm Express Zenovka

In my last post I featured some of my favorites at Free Dove so in this post I’ll focus on the GNUbie Store. Unlike Free Dove, GNUbie is organized by designer. Each one has a stall, wall, or display and whatever items they have offered are available together. What you find and at what price varies from designer to designer, but everything there is either free or $1L and modifiable.

One of my favorite freebie jeans, especially when I first started, is available on the second floor of GNUbie. There are six different types of Rebelation jeans from Rebel Hope of RH Designs, available in black and blue, with various tattoo-like designs and patterns on them. The textures aren’t flat and dull, but actually look like jeans. The seams though, admittedly, need a more than just a little bit of work. All in all these are a solid set of jeans that go for 0L. Out of the box, I found these jeans are tad bit on the baggy side, so I went and modified them down to a shape I preferred.

I realize that I mentioned “modding” in my last post but didn’t explain it. For those of you who don’t know how, this can be done with the sliders that are available when editing appearance. Under Edit->Appearance, just click on the pants button and various options including length and bagginess will be available if the pants are modifiable. Get in the habit of making sure you save a copy before you edit though. While it isn’t a problem to grab another of these jeans from GNUbie, messing up a pair of 500L jeans from another store and realizing you didn’t make a copy isn’t a very good feeling.

While you’re upstairs you might want to look for the name Bryce Tully. Bryce recently updated his offerings at the store (meaning I didn’t notice his new stuff until the last time I looked at GNUbie), offering one free hair style and package of clothes. The hair style, called Mouth, is one of a precious few free hair styles available for all men. The style is short and simple. I found that I liked the way it looked after stretching it vertically slightly to fit my head better (closeup here), but mileage with vary based mostly on the size of your head. The “Dood Pack,” on the other hand, contains a handful of shirts, tattoos, and jeans. While no part of the pack is utterly extraordinary, there no very awful part to it either. The jeans come in brown and two different washes of blue. The shirts come in a variety of colors as well, with two different layouts. The other one is here. Simple tinting of the pants and shirts allows for plenty of variations from the standard colors, making this pack rather versatile.

Now, I happen to be a big fan of layering shirts. Where I grew up, wearing a long shirt under a tshirt was usually enough to stay warm. Of course, if it got “really cold”, I could pull on a sweatshirt. For guys like us, Torrid Midnight offers TorridWear Men’s Long T’s at $1L. Available on the first floor, the set comes with tshirts on the jacket layer and a long sleeve thermal on the undershirt layer. In addition, there are optional gloves included that extend the sleeves of the undershirt onto the hand. I’d have preferred if the thermal came on the shirt layer, but i suspect the gloves look better over the the sleeves than under. Since it off-white, simple tinting will let you get most of the colors of the spectrum. The texturing isn’t great and reminds of a waffle cone when I look too close, but from a distance it looks pretty good. The jacket-layer shirts are also simple, with minimal texturing and shading. They come in five different colors: black, gray, red, green, and blue. Unfortunately, since there is no white it isn’t very easy to tint the shirt any color you want. If you’re smart about choosing which color shirt you start with, though, you can get just about any you want. I happen to like my shirts darker, so I just tinted each of the red, blue and green shirts till I got a maroon, navy blue, and forest green colored shirts.

There are quite a few other finds available on the first floor — including tshirts and clothes packs from various designers, hair and hair vouchers, and some skins. So wander and a pick and choose your favorites. Again, like Free Dove, check back every month or so to see if a designer has put up something new. Visit the GNUbie Store at Indigo (227,71,31).

Disclosure: Seen in World: Yes | Review Copy: No | Friends List: No

Notes: On Express: "Antonio Dark - Stubble" skin by Funk Schnook (FNKY!). "Hansen Primero" shoes by Steven Hansen (Hansen Shoes) available at Free Dove. "PE Boyd - Black" (modded) hair by Aemilia Case (Philotic Energy). Eyes made using template by newbie_template Linden.

Entry Filed under: Freebies, GNUbie Store, Hair, Jeans, Shirts, Urban