Tis' the Season Nails

Everywhere you look on Pinterest you can see Christmas-especially in the nail tutorials. From Santa hats, Santa faces, and Santa suits, inspiration was everywhere. I decided since last weeks nail tutorial was a horrible failure, I could try again this week to get into the Christmas spirit. I will be trying three different Christmas nails, all of which were pictures uploaded with no tutorial. For each one I will be using red, white, black, light pink, and yellow/gold nail polish with toothpicks and cotton swabs as applicators. The first one is Santa's suit
Picture I'm basing my instructions on:                          Picture of my nail:

 

Start by applying a red nail polish to your entire nail. After the red is completely dry, use a Q-tip to apply    white nail polish to the tip of your finger and down the middle, making a T. Then use the toothpick to apply a row of black dots down the white strip (The middle line of the 'T'), and a horizontal black line across the middle of your finger. Follow by making a square box with the golden nail polish around the middle of the black line and your Santa Suit nail is complete!

Picture I'm basing my instructions on:                       Picture of my nail:

                                              

Next nail was for Santa's face. Start with a clean nail and apply red to one third of your nail, starting at the cuticle. Once its dried, apply a white line over the tip of your nail, like a french manicure, then apply a parallel line with a Q-tip over the bottom of your red line.  Use a toothpick to make two black dots below the white line for Santa's eyes and one pink dot below the eyes for his nose and your Santa's Face nail is complete!

Picture I'm basing my instructions on:                       Picture of my nail:
                            
For the Santa's hat you once again start with clean nails and apply red to one third of your nail, but this time you start at the tip of your nail. Apply a line of white nail polish with a Q-tip underneath the line of red.Use a toothpick to apply red nail polish from the left side tip of your nail down to the middle and then put a white dot on the tip of your white to be the puff-ball (or if you want to glue a sparkle on as seen on the left picture above) and now your Christmas Hat nail is complete!
None of my nails were nearly as good as the pictures, but keep in mind I am also horrible at doing nails, so if you have any talent you could do it much better than I could. I was most happy with my Santa suit, and the Santa face was just off centered. I would suggest the Santa hat for most beginners because it's the most basic and takes the least amount of time.
Since these nails all take a significant amount of time I would advise them on one finger per hand then keeping the others simple. Red and white strips are a favorite of mine in the Christmas season because it reminds me of candy canes! Have a happy holidays everyone!

Frozen Bubbles

It was recently brought to my attention that a major part of my childhood was missing. Like any other child, I enjoyed blowing bubbles and chasing them around to try and pop them, but apparently I was missing half a years worth of fun! Not only can they be used for summer play time, but during the winter you can blow a frozen bubbles.  There were no set instructions, but the idea is pretty simple. You go outside and and blow a bubble, and as long as it is below freezing after a couple of seconds the bubble will crystallize. The example pictures all looked stunning and I figured there wasn't any way to really mess it up. Not to mention, it seems appropriate to make the best out of the cold weather.
It was about eighteen degrees, well bellow freezing. I dug out some of bubbles that were packed away with the other summer toys and bundled up in my hat and gloves. I blew the bubble and caught it on the wand so I could watch it freeze. At first it didn't look like it was changing, but I think it was because I was using a wand that made big bubbles. The bubble started  freezing and it looked magnificent. Depending on how long you waited before popping it, would pop in different ways. If it wasn't entirely frozen, it would move, almost like melted plastic, like this:
 .
If you left it in the cold for it to become completely frozen it would shatter (my dog went crazy when they shattered). I would highly suggest this for you to do with little kids, especially if they enjoy being outside but get bored with just making snowmen and sledding by the end of winter.
It is pretty self explanatory, but if you want to look at the instructions that I followed you can find them here.

Marbled Nail Polish

What comes to mind when I say Pinterest tutorials? For me, it was marbled nail polish, so it seemed only fitting that it be my first tutorial. The tutorial I choose was pinned from a website called Dollar Store Crafts (Marbled Nail Polish Tutorial). The process looked simple and easy to follow, but I had the feeling it would be more difficult than it looked.
First, I gathered the necessary materials listed on the website: white nail polish, 2 colors of my choice (I chose 2 different shades of pink hoping they would coordinate), a top coat, a glass of room temperature water, a toothpick, tape and nail polish remover and cotton swabs. I decided to skip the base coat because I was going to have the white nail polish on anyway.

After applying the white nail polish and letting it dry completely, I tried to tape around my finger so that all of my surrounding skin was covered to minimize cleanup when I was finished. The next step was where the errors could occur. I had to add alternating drops of each nail polish to the cup of water, use the toothpick to swirl the colors to get the "marbled" effect,  and then submerge my nail in the water-all in a a small period of time.
When I first tried adding the drops of nail polish to the water, I realized it was hard to make each new drop in the center of the last drop, so instead I placed the drops randomly in the water and swirled all the colors together with the toothpick. After I swirled the colors, I dipped my taped finger in the water as instructed.

This is a picture of the water after the water had been added and I swirled it with the toothpick.
After submerging my finger in the water, I was hopeful about how it looked. My hope deteriorated as I sat with my finger in front of my heater for 40 minutes trying to get my nail dry. Because the nail polish was so thick, that's how long it took to dry-or at least how I long I thought it took. After 40 minutes I went to remove the tape from around my finger, but it ended up ripping up part of the polish, and smudging the rest. In the end it looked like this:

If you were try to do this nail style, I would suggest using the nail polish sparingly unless you have 2 hours to sit around waiting for it to dry.

Hey Everyone!

Nowadays, it seems like you can find anything and everything on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, it's all out there for the world to see. One of my personal favorite forms of personal media is Pinterest-a photo sharing website that allows its users to "pin" things they have found on other sites. They can include anything from hair styles to articles of clothing to quotes. People can follow their friends and "re-pin" whatever catches their eye.
Anyone familiar with Pinterest knows that it is ripe with Do It Yourself activities, or DIYs, from making your own clothes to cute house decorating projects. But are they all as easy as they seem? The articles may promise quick assembly with only basic skills required, but the true test is if someone as uncoordinated and anti-craft minded as me can do it. And through this blog I will be putting them to that test. Keep in mind I am like your average person, the extent of my crafting was art class in kindergarten and late night public television shows. Before I came up with the idea for this blog, the closest thing I had to DIY pinned on my Pinterest boards were recipes for food that looked delicious but I knew I would never make.
I will  be uploading at least 2 blogs a week. My goal is to post a new blog every Wednesday and Sunday to keep them balanced. Some posts will be small individual crafts, while others could be one of many blogs if I'm involved in a larger project.  Hopefully there will be a mixture of both so I can get a full range of crafts. To keep the posts diverse, I will do a variety of things found on Pinterest, including hair and nail tutorials, home beauty and illness remedies, and do-it-yourself crafts. I am also open to suggestions, so if you have any interesting tutorials that you've seen on Pinterest, or anywhere on the internet, comment below so I can check them out!
My Pinterest is already full of possibilities for this blog and I've got my hot glue gun standing at the ready. I have a Pinterest board that is dedicated solely to what will eventually be included in my blog so if you want to check out the board to see what I have planned you can find the link here. Feel free to follow the board to stay up to date on what's coming up!
Let's get crafty everyone.