Month: January 2012

Soooo you know how I made pretty romantic Valentine’s Day banners as part of my goal? They’re great and all, but what about the people who frickin’ hate Valentine’s Day? What about the people who thinks is cheesy commercialized crap, or maybe aren’t in a relationship, or think mushy couples are disgusting and want to shout it from the rooftops? Well DON’T WORRY, because I got you covered.

Forever Alone
I knew I wanted to make this banner, but I didn’t know how to make it special. Ombré wasn’t right, some fancy new typeface wasn’t right… but what was??? Last night I was just about to assemble it all plain with black paper on the back when a bolt of inspiration struck me: CATS. I know, it’s amazing.

Love Stinks
This was another experiment that turned out AMAZING. Originally I was just going to do the regular secondary-colour-on-the-bottom ombré, but something about the phrase “love stinks” paired with the acid-y green colour made me think drips.

Well so far it seems like this week is gonna be as much of a butt as last week was, in fact, I’m going to go ahead and say it: 2012 SUCKS. Bring on the end of the world.

I’ve tried everything I can think of to get out of this funk but every day I feel crabbier and more miserable. Too crabby and miserable to blog, even. I have a bunch of real posts percolating in my brain, waiting to get typed up, but instead I’m going to post the only thing that I can: DOG PICTURES.

I was eating cheese popcorn the other night and Dougal was ON BOARD, like he REALLY wanted some. I don’t share people food with dogs though, so he was out of luck.

Georgie has a faux-fur dog bed under my desk but Claire has been hogging it. Cats are no respecters of property ownership.

Finally a picture of Georgie and I in better times, ie New Year’s Eve, before this turd of a year kicked in. God my hair was fantastic that night. WOULD THAT WE COULD GO BACK TO THOSE HALCYON DAYS.

Hey internet, long time no blog. A WHOLE WEEK I KNOW I’M THE WORST. I hope you all were able to get along without me.

Anyway the reason I didn’t post last week is because not to be over dramatic but every day felt like 100 years in hell and the absolute worst day of my life.

It was my first week back at work after my sweet, sweet Christmas vacation, I had my lady time, I was sick and my dog went insane and peed on the hallway carpet 350,000,000 times.

WHY YOU GOTTA PLAY ME LIKE THAT, DOG??? Anyway I’m all resigned to my fate as a working stiff, recovered from my ailments and yesterday I rented a carpet steamer and cleaned the hallway carpet like, SIX TIMES so it should all be okay now.

One thing I DID do while I wasn’t blogging was work on my new year’s resolutions, of which I only made one, and which I made a very concrete, attainable goal instead of something nebulous and easy to fail at. I said I wanted to make at least two non-custom banners for my etsy shop, every month, so I would have things for sale other than just my custom stuff (I think it looks better to have actual, real items for sale somehow). Anyway last week (while finishing up the last of my custom orders, so if you are waiting on one that hasn’t shipped yet it’ll go out today) I made not two but THREE all-new banners!

Since Valentine’s Day is coming up (part of the reason for my goal was I didn’t want to be blind-sided by holidays like I was by Christmas) I decided to make some cheesy yet lovely and romantical banners. Doing non-custom work also gives me the opportunity to try out new ideas, and for each of these I did something I hadn’t before.

True Love
For this banner I used a double-ombré technique. For my other ombré banners I’ve used a single colour/blend of colours, but for this one I did two separate colours. Starting with a white (diamond) glitter base, I did a pale pink (kunzite) glitter to about halfway up each letter, and then I added a deeper pink (tourmaline) to the bottom ¾” to give it more dimension.

Be Mine
This was the third banner I made and the idea for it just popped into my head. I wasn’t sure how (or if) it would turn out but it looks basically how I pictured it. I used ruby (red) glitter for the letters, and added metallic red confetti hearts to the bottom 1½-2″ of each. I tried to make them look like they’d been scattered randomly, but I actually glued each one in place individually, which did not take ten thousand hours at all.

Always
This is my Harry Potter-inspired banner; I’ve made a couple of custom ones before (Mischief Managed and Expecto Patronum) but this one was all my idea. It’s from The Prince’s Tale chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; if you’ve read it you’ll understand the significance, and if you haven’t well then what is wrong with you? I used this weird, pale gold glitter (which I am now out of) and although I’d originally planned on adding a white/silver ombre to it, in the end I decided to leave it simple. What makes this banner different from others I’ve made is the back; instead of using plain paper I used cream paper printed with the text from relevant passages of the book (I scanned it and printed it out; no books were harmed in the making of this banner!).

I haven’t done my nails in a couple of weeks, not since Taylor’s office holiday party. The day after that was the day of Claire’s medical emergency and I’ve had so many banners to make I haven’t had time, plus all the exacto-knifing involved isn’t exactly polish-friendly.

It hasn’t snowed here at all so I had this idea to do a wintry nail with white & white shimmery polish, plus the silver crackle topcoat. Then I recoloured my hair before I had the chance so any plans for easily-stained pale polishes went out the window.

Hard Candy in The End plus Sally Hansen in Hidden Treasure

I know everyone in the world has already done a Hidden Treasure over black, but I’ve only done it over pastels and tbh, I don’t like it over the black as much. Maybe I’ve just seen it too many time? I did two heavy coats of Hidden Treasure to try to make it more interesting to me but I’m still “meh” about it. I do love this black though; it’s one of the polishes I won last summer and it’s a great glossy black with perfect coverage in just two coats.

Also please take a second to appreciate my excellent gloves (there’s no light inside so I had to go out in the cold to photograph my nails).

I got them in my Christmas stocking and they are the perfect blend of gloves and mittens; warm and cozy (and cashmere!) with the tops on, but easy to flip open AND with flip-open thumbs for when I need finger dexterity. Thanks, Santa!

We didn’t do anything. I mean, we did stuff but we didn’t go out to a club or a party or have people over or anything. Last year Sym was home but this year she was at her dad’s so it was just me, Taylor and the pets. I was actually in a really bad mood, I’m in kind of a bad place, physically pain-wise right now and I was not in the mood to have fun.

So grumpy! I wasn’t going to “get ready” or anything but I figured it might pull me out of my New Year’s funk. I curled my hair and put on makeup and BOOM, mood improved.

The only problem was I used this Moroccan Oil Luminous Hairspray when I was a curling my hair and although it worked well as hairspray, it smelled EXACTLY like a Diaper Genie (if you have Diaper Genie experience then you’ll know why this was an unacceptable situation).

Taylor made us a feast of frozen hors d’oeuvres and I made sparkly pipe cleaner crowns for us to wear, as well as one for the pets. I knew none of them would keep it on so I figured they could share.

Normally Taylor and I watch Anchorman on NYE, but we started our evening so early (I had my first glass of wine at about 5) that we decided to watch both parts of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows first. Apparently I felt like spending my evening bawling my eyes out! We finished those at around 11:50 and took the dogs out for a walk, so we were in the park at midnight. People were screaming and setting off fireworks and we kissed on the street corner, it was nice. When we got home we put in Anchorman but both fell asleep on the couch (although I stayed up long enough to guzzle a couple of bottles of water to counteract the couple bottles of wine I polished off) until 2am, when I managed to get us both to bed.

Happy New Year! I hope you all had as wonderful an evening as us!

I’m not really one for New Year’s resolutions- I think last year I came up with an idea to do mini-resolutions every month that lasted two months before I got bored. This year I have one resolution: to make at least two non-custom banners for my etsy shop each month, so I don’t get caught unprepared for every holiday. I was going to say I should make one a week, so four a month, but that seemed a bit ambitious. Babysteps, right?