Thank you Pinterest! Marble nails

I found this fun nail art on Pinterest, if you would like to see the original here it is!  It was pretty easy, though it didn't make sense to me in writing so I Youtubed it.  Below is a picture of the final product.

It was really quite simple.  You want to have a small cup of ROOM TEMPERATURE water.  You could probably even use the little plastic cups that come on medicine, if you have an extra.  You also want to have the nail polish open, so that you can move faster.  

Start with a base coat, then paint your nails a light color.  The video I watched said white, which I don't have so I painted mine yellow.  I also wanted the yellow to show up.

As you can see, I was not careful with the painting!  I knew there was no point, you will see that picture in a minute!  :)  Then you let a drop of nail polish fall into the water, change the color and let another drop fall into the middle of the first one, continue on with this until you have the desired amount.

After you get the amount of color changes you would like, take a toothpick and pull it through the polish.  Start from the outside and pull toward the middle.  

Sorry for the blurry picture, it was hard to take a picture with the polish all over my fingers!  You don't want to wait too long, it will not move as smoothly.  After you put some swirls into your polish you dip your finger (nail down) right in!  (Sorry again no picture of the next few steps....  TOO MESSY)  Blow onto the polish (with finger still in water) to dry the polish around the finger.  Use a toothpick to pick up the remaining polish before taking your finger out of the water!  Repeat these steps for each finger, or only do one per hand!  Your choice!  :)  After it has dried for a couple of minutes put on a top coat!  IMPORTANT:  If there are drops of water on your nail gently blow on them to dry them off.  I didn't for a few of my nails and where there were water spots there were little air bubbles.

This is why I was not cautious with the yellow coat!  I washed my hands several times with hot water then used a cotton swab to remove the polish from my fingers.  I left a small line near my nail all around it.  I didn't want to mess up and get part of my nail!   This was a time consuming project!  In the morning when it was completely dry I used my loofa to get off the remaining polish from around my nails.  I used the plastic ones and just rub it over my whole nail/finger.  It takes polish off of fingers, but not nails!  :)

I am pretty satisfied overall!  I don't think I am too old for these colors (at least not on my toes) or this design, but I think I am too old for the combination of the two!!  If I do this again, I will use more subtle colors!!  :)  I told Tony that my nails remind me of a 70's kitchen!  ;)  

Until next time,
Lyndsay

Thank you Pinterest! Take two on hair!!

So, I tried again today!!  Attempt number two, not so bad!!  Cute even, at least I think so..   You can watch the video here to see how it is done.  It definitely takes longer than 3 minutes for me! I believe that is partly because my hair is longer, maybe thicker, and I have much less experience doing things so extravagant with my hair!  My idea of a fancy hair style is sleeping in rollers, or pulling it back in a pony/bun!!  Hair styling know how needed to accomplish this?!  On a scale of 1-10, I would say maybe a two!! ;)  

Here are the pictures!  This is how it looked BEFORE work..

This is how it looked after work!  Note: it was super windy today, I had recess duty twice, and went to my sister-in-law's track meet for a bit.  To protect my "do" I draped a scarf over it while outside.  It was cold enough to want protection, but I didn't want to use my coat hood..

Last, this is how it looked after I took out the bobby pins, all 21 of them.  Not a curly as I would have thought.  My hair was still slightly wet though!

All in all, with better weather conditions and some work, I think this would be a doable hair do, even for us hair illiterates out there!!  If you have no desire to watch the video, it was really quite simple in theory.  Grab a strand of hair twist it around you finger (as if you were flirting with the cute boy in middle school science) then twist it with your other hand into a spiral type thing and pin it to your head!  I recommend watching the video I am sure my description was about as informative as the pictures on how to!  :)  I am going to try a couple of other techniques to accomplish the same look, and maybe a more secure look!  First though, I got my new nail polish, and want to to try the marble effect!  That probably won't be until Friday when I am off work though!  Thanks!!

Until next time,

Lyndsay

Thank you Pinterest?! Maybe not so much this time...

Well, I attempted the beautiful hairstyle that I found on Pinterest.  The video I watched was on this blog.  I did the first one, "The classic twist and pin."  I cannot say that it was an epic fail, but it was a fail none the less!  :)  The below picture is my sad, sad attempt....

I know that the top of my head is cut off.  By the time I readjusted the camera to get my whole head, the bottom two twists were already undone!  I am going to attempt this again tomorrow with wet hair rather than dry hair!!  Here's hoping I can figure this thing out!!  If I am still unable to pull of that lovely look, I will try one of the others!!  :)

Until next time,
Lyndsay

Thank you Pinterest! "Modeling Dough" Balloons.

**REVISED ear placement!** 
I decided that I would actually try something that I pinned from Pinterest! If you would like to see the original post here it is!  I work at an elementary school as a para and run the after school program.  I wanted to do something for them for Easter and came across this and thought I could make them look like Easter eggs.  After thinking about this for awhile I realized these little balls of fun are made to be squeezed.  I didn't think that filling the whole balloon with marker would be a great idea, eventually I am sure it would come off on the kids' hands.  Then I somehow came up with the brilliant idea to make them into bunnies!  I found a 24 pack of the dough on sale for $11.99!  They were only 3oz rather than 5oz but I thought that would be ok!

There were some issues of course!  The first issue was that I happen to be allergic to latex..  My fingers were burning after a few balloons; another obstacle was that I happen to only have two hands!  A third hand would have been a wonderful addition!!  I tried several things some of which included: using my toe as an extra finger (yes they were clean) to hold it open, which kind of worked but as you can imagine was awkward!  I also tried holding a nail polish bottle between two of my toes to act as another mode to keep the balloon open.  That DID NOT work and was still quite awkward!!  ;)  My lack of success, and burning fingers inspired me to find something that I would be able to pull the balloon around with a large enough opening that I could still get the dough inside!  This is what I came up with!

 

This is a science beaker.  The opening on the side was perfect for pushing out the air as I pushed in the dough!  It made my life so much simpler!!  :)  (Please excuse the dough all over my fingers/nails)

I also had trouble getting out all of the air bubbles.  I tried to poke holes into the top of the "neck" of the balloon in hopes that it would offer a place for the air to come out as I kneaded it.  That did not work.  In the end I just squeezed the balloon until I could get all of the air out.  Then to prevent more air from slipping in when I tied it I twisted the "neck" so that no air could enter as I tied the knot!

I made 17 of these little ones!  I think they are actually a great size!  I also like that they somewhat lie flat!  This made it much easier to make the bunny faces later!  :)

I had also wanted to make some of these for my nieces, nephews, and little brothers/sister in law.  In order to do that I would have needed more dough than I had, so I decided to go the dollar store to pick up full size canisters.  The dollar store had a 5 pack of an off brand for $2.50, or a 4 pack of the name brand also for $2.50.  I opted for two-five packs.  This ended up being a bit of a mistake.  The off brand is more sticky.  It was harder to get into the balloon as it stuck to the "neck" of the balloon, and it was harder to remove the air bubbles!  I was unsure if this was because of the increased amount of dough, or if it was because of the brand of the dough.  I decided to combine two of the remaining name brand colors to make 5 oz.  I even used a scale!  :)  The result was that it was still MUCH easier to get the dough into the balloon, and I liked the squishiness (not a word I know..) of the name brand better than that of the off brand..  Oh well, live and learn!  :)

 I knew that my beaker would not work for the larger amounts of dough; there is no way it would have fit back through that hole!  I told my husband that he would have to be my second set of hands...  He does not share my passion for projects!  He came up with an even better plan!  He found a funnel!!  GREAT IDEA Tony!!  It still had about the right size opening to fix the balloon to, and once I was done filling it I could pull it off and it would "fall out!"

 

This was of course one of those DUH moments for me!  The only problem I had with this was that the balloon would slip back into the funnel leaving too small of an opening to put the dough in!  I try to fix it onto the funnel near where the balloon starts to take shape.  This provides much more room to get the dough into the balloon!

In the above picture you can see my solution to the slipping problem.  I pulled the balloon over the opening of the funnel, and then pulled the balloons "ring" up over it to act like a rubber band to hold it into place.  I also held onto the balloon as I was stuffing it.

As you can see, those 2 oz do make a difference!  I am a little bummed that the purple balloon looks black!  You can tell it is purple when you squeeze it though.  After I filled all of the balloons I looked online for a bunny ear template.  I should actually say, after attempting to free hand a bunny ear template, I decided it would be in my best interest to find one online!  This is the one I decided to go with here.  It is from Martha Stewart.  This happened to be a perfect size for the bunnies!  I did have one mishap with this as well!  I didn't factor in the whole left side right size might have different angles thing, so I ended up needing to make another copy of it.  If I was planning ahead, I could have traced the outside of both ears, cut that part off then traced the inside...  I labeled them "L" for left and "r" for right.  Though they ended up being switched as I didn't want the pen marks on the side that shows!  :)  I didn’t want to cut down under the outline, just in case I went too far and made them not fit together as well. To attach the ears to the balloon, I made a small tab glued to the back of the ear.  I then used a low heat glue gun to attach the balloons to the ear.
**REVISED** The hot glue did not keep the ears on very well.  They came off very easily.  My BRILLIANT husband came up with another fabulous idea!  He has "Shoe Goo" to fix his shoes (he refuses to buy new shoes/boots until he can feel the ground through them) and thought it might work.  So far it is working pretty well!  It does have to dry overnight though!

I added the next two pictures after it was brought to my attention that I was unclear on how to attach the ears to the balloon!  If you look at the bottom of this ear you can see the small tab that I glued to the back of the ear. 

The picture below shows the ear/tab glued to the balloon.  As you can see, I made the mistake of originally gluing the smaller color onto the wrong side of the larger one!  OOPS!!  :)

The finished product!  I think all in all they are pretty stinking cute!  Once I FINALLY finished all of them none of them had the exact color combination of balloon and ear colors!  So they really are one of a kind!  ;)

All in all, this was a fairly simple project.   It did take a lot of time (hours) but it was fun, and worth it in the end. It was fairly cheap, I spent about $20 and made 28 balloons and have leftovers! They are similar to those stress relief balls.  They could also probably double as the hand strengthening gadgets!  

As you can see by these faces I am no artist!  That is partly why I wanted to start this little section on my blog.  I am going to attempt doing things I find on blogs/Pinterest and see if they really are as simple as those experts make them sound!  I will start a board on Pinterest of pins I have succeeded at!  Trust me; if I can do these things so can you!

Tomorrow I tackle one of those beautiful hair dos everyone posts!!  I have only found a few that actually tell you HOW to do it!!  Seriously, why tease me with things that don't teach me how to do them!!  I am not clever enough to figure it out on my own!!  :)  

If you are interested in checking out my "Thank you Pinterest!" board it is here!

Until next time,

Lyndsay 

P.S.  My fingers are still burning!  The tips of my index and middle fingers on both hands are red and sore!  The heat from warm water burns my finger nails when I was my hands or shower!  If you are allergic to latex (or wheat), I suggest wearing latex free gloves while doing this project!