November Already??? (pic heavy)

Happy Anniversary to my dear husband and me. Twelve years ago today I married my best friend and soul mate! I look forward to many many more years of happiness! =D

It's been ages since I blogged, as many of you also are facebook friends you might already know how my life is right now, but just to play catch up... hubby's deferment was approved, so our new report date is the 10th of December. We are still heading to NY and are trying to decide when we want to leave GA. I saw my doc on Halloween for my final appointment and have been given the all clear to get back to normal life. (although he did say not to over due it, no gymnastics and such! ;-D lol)




Speaking of Halloween...money was a little tight this year so we kind of made due. My youngest was a soldier, my middle was Jack Skellington ad my oldest decided he wanted to dress up too. He was a character of his own creation. He was the God of Fortune from a story he is writing. (no he wants to steal my cape because it's so warm and comfy! =D On a side note I've had that thing for close to 15 years {it was a gift from my Dad and Step-mom!} I love it and now that they are back in fashion I cannot wait to wear it this Fall and Winter! ) We had tons of kids...nearly a thousand!!! How do I know, you ask...well I bought a HUGE pail of 1000 suckers and aside from a few dozen kids that came around twice and a small handful of kids at the end, I was only giving each child 1 sucker, and after 2 hours of trick or treating (ours lasts from 6-8) ALL the suckers were GONE!!! There were tons of really creative costumes, but honestly none of them topped the adult wearing the homemade Optimus Prime (Transformers) costume! It even had working lights!!!

On the crafty/doll front I have been playing around making clothes for Cleo...I started out with a simple one piece vest pattern I created, I altered it several times and ended up with half a dozen various felt and denim versions. Then I used a small scrap of left over denim (I'm repurposing the legs off an old pair of jeans!) to create a halter top. Since all my ribbon is in storage in NY I took 12 strands of sewing thread and sectioned it off into 4 thread groups which I braided to use as the halter ties! Next up I created 2 different skirts... a slim pencil skirt with black trim and this purple gingham trimmed skirt! All of my other Cleo pieces can be seen over in
my Flickr photostream.

As far as nail go, I have been keeping them painted most days, but I've been rather lax in taking pics. :-( But here is my Halloween mani... Revlon's Mad about Mango scented polish on my ring fingers, and 2 coats of China Glaze's Ick-A-Bod-Y from their 2010 Halloween collection. On my ring fingers I did a quick free hand jack o lantern face. Right now I am wearing this pale simple pearly number. I've got 4 coats of OPI's Pearls of Wisdom on all my fingers. On my ring fingers those layers are mixed with 3 coats of Wet n Wild's Party of Five Glitters which I them topped off with Hard Candy's Matte-ly in Love (which I am totally in LOVE with, and seem to use it over nearly everything! lol)

So in a nutshell that's what's been going on in my life. Next week I'll be busy working on cleaning and painting and such to get ready to head to New York. (man I'm still not totally ready for that, but hey that's where the Army wants us so that's where we're headed. We'll make the most of it! :-D ) Thanks for stickign aorund and reading all this. HUGS

MOTW

Well I had planned to share this one with you yesterday but Blogger didn't want to co-operate. Soo here is yesterday's mani. I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with this one. The end result turned out gorgeous, but getting there was a royal pain. Color 13 on my wheel is by Piggy Polish, it's called Teal me About it. In the bottle its a luscious glowly teal. Sadly this color is DEFINITELY a layering polish. It took me 5 coats on my sample wheel to get it to look halfway close to the bottle. :-( (and once you throw the pink of the nailbed, well you're screwed! So I chose another of my e.l.f. polish from the other day. This one is called Blue Mist. Like it's Lilac sister, Blue Mist went on very sheer and rather streaky. It took me 3 coats to get a nice covereage, although had I not been putting TMAI over top of it, I would have gone with a 4th coat. I added 3 coats of TMAI and then did a thin strip of Petites Figi. Figi is a much darker and more opaque verion of TMAI. In the end I did love the final results as with Blue Mist underneath the TMAI really glowed, and there really appeared to be a ton of depth to my mani. Sadly the downside to lots of layers of polish is they do then to peel rather quickly. So this glowy mani only lasted 2 days. :-(

MOTW and what I'm doing now...

Last Saturday was my sisters' baby shower, on my way there I stopped at the Walgreen's just up the road from her hoping to find the Sinful Colors brand copies of the OPI Pirates of the Carribean On Stranger Tides collection. These colors are gorgeous dirty/murky pastel shades, but I honestly can't pay $8 a bottle for polish. So with Sinful Colors being only $2 a bottle I was excited! Long story short my Walgreen's hasn't gotten them in yet, but since I need to break a $20 anyways I picked up 2 Sinful Colors bottles and a Wet N Wild glitter! ($6 total! =D) So without further ado today I have for you Sinful Colors Mint Apple. Mint Apple is a pretty green leaning turquoise with what appears (in the bottle) to be a silver shimmer. Although on me this does leave the tips of my fingers looking a little red I adore this color!!! I've got 3 coats on as the 1st two are a little streaky and leave a good bit of VNL (visible nail line) showing, the 3rd coats evened everything out and left my nails pretty darned opaque. What I discovered was the silver shimmer is actually more gold on the nail! Even better! To top off this mani I used some gold swirly nail art stickers to add a little pop and play up the gold shimmer. I added a clear coat over top (although I should have done 2 to hide the edges of the stickers better) Et Voila! =D

This is what else I've been working on this past week. I want to get back into making Barbie doll clothes so decided to get several pieces ready to sew. So I picked my favorite pattern SEEN HERE. So I grabbed several fun fabrics and set to work tracing out the pattern pieces. I hate working with the tissue paper patterns so I scan and copy them onto card stock and then just trace around the pieces onto my fabric. The other reason I do this is so I can seal the edges of the piece. I use Crafter's Pick The Ultimate glue to keep the edges from fraying. The Ultimate is billed as a water based super glue. I LOVE this stuff, I use it for EVERYTHING!!! (Heck I love it enough that I ordered a case from the manufacturer =D) But anyways, back to the dresses, I now have 8 dresses ready to sew as soon as I break my machine out. For the most part there are just 7 sets of basically straight lines of stitching on these pieces. Of course there are darts and details, but hey that's the fun stuff! So be on the lookout for new attire coming soon!

MOTW x 3

Yeah so I'm a little behind with sharing my nails! Sorry, I'll start with the oldest: my Memorial Day mani. We took the boys camping down at Kolomoki Mounds State Park. It was about a 2 hours drive hauling the camper but turned out to be well worth it. We were situated on Lake Kolomoki and aside from the swarms of gnats it was a wonderful quiet relaxing weekend! We hiked and toured the mounds and museum. (Pics can be seen HERE!)We grilled out, had campfires, roasted marshmallows and just enjoyed quiet time together. For my weekend mani I used 2 coats of Wet n Wild in Waves of Enchantment WoE is a gorgeous pink-y, coral-y gold flecked color. (that really dislikes my camera! LOL) On my ring fingers I added a layer of Sally Hansen Nail Prisms in Pink Pearl, on top of that I added a nail art sticker. I liked the look and all polishes went on very well! =D

My nails went bare for a bit while my husband and I finished up the dollhouse. My next mani was purple. LOVE me some purple! I couldn't decide what color to paint my nails so I asked my facebook pals. Purple was the first color suggested so that was what I went with. I went through my little sample wheel and picked a shade I hadn't already worn. Totally Cool by Milani looks just like it's name in the bottle. It was a bit of a disappointment on the nails initally though. In the bottle TC looks like a warm maroon-y purple with a multi-chrome shimmer. (shimmer that changes shades)
My nails ended up with 4 coats on them as the 1st 3 coats went on ridiculously sheer and with way more of a blue cast to them. It isn't until that 4th coat went down that the maroon-y color really shows up. The other thing that bugged me about this color was the shimmer. In the bottle it appeared to shift from red to orange to green, but on the nail only the red really showed up. While I did like the end result, the fact that with base coats and top coats I had like 7 coats of polish on my fingers bugged me. :-(

I started taking it off last night as I decided to 'bump' up the shimmer a bit by adding a coat of Nubar 2010 over it. 2010 is a gorgeous top coat with iridescent flakes that is just stunning over nearly anything! However I discovered that the 2010 reacted with the TC and caused it to shrink and peel off my nails. :-( Bummer.
But anyway, that cleared the way for todays' mani. When I asked my friends about polish colors, green was the 2nd color suggested. Today I have 3 coats of Nina Ultra Pro (at Sally Beauty Supply stores) in Leaf Me Alone topped with 2 coats of CoverGirls Boundless Color in Ruby Dust. LMA is a nice apple-y green that is a little dusty in coloration. RD has tiny round silver glitters in a sheer pink base, my favorite part of RD aer the larger holographic hexagons. Now of course these hexs are only about the size of a ball point pen tip, but they do pack a nice punch. I actually with there were more of them in RD. My left hand has 2 coats of RD while my right has 3 as the glittle didn't seem to want to cooperate. But all in all I like the fresh crisp look! =D

MOTW and Yay...PROGESS!!!!

Last nights' mani was loads of fun. I used 3 coats of Cover Girls' Aglow Pink as my base. (over a coats of clear base coat of course!) Then I used my ball stylus to add dots in 6 more shades of pink. For the most part I am happy with this look, although I can't ever seem to start my manis' before 8pm, which means they aren't fully dry by the time we got to bed. They looked good this morning, but after using acetone to get the last bit of residue off the furniture to be painted( a bit more on that in a sec...) The tips look atrocious. Soooo I'll be repainting my nails here in just a bit.
After spending a few hours out this morning with my hubby, we came home to an empty house. My sister had 'stolen' our kiddos to take them swimming at her place. (yep I did know they were being stolen. ;-D) Hubs and I chilled for a bit, before I got to work masking off the parts of the Barbie furniture I didn't want to have to repaint. Then I laid down a nice big tarp and some newspaper and set to work with several cans of Krylon Fusion paint in white, hammered aluminum and cast iron. The kitchen island started life being deep fuschia, the first vanity (there is a 2nd one coming soon) was hot pink, and the pair of 4-poster beds which were pale pink out of the box are all now crisp satin white! YAY!!!
After the paint has cured for a day I will start on the detail work. (although I think a trip to the craft store is needed to pick up some model paints) On the kitchen island I masked off the 'countertop' which is a pretty flecked pink color.
The vanity has a nice black top to it and I decided to leave it that way. I repainted all 4 of the night stand tops white, but and thinking about repainting 2 of them black to match the vanity top. I also repainted the refrigerator from deep pink to hammered aluminum. I had originally intended to paint the interior white but yeah, um...I decided that 8yr old little girls aren't going to care that the inside is silver! lol Last on my To-Be-Painted List was the dining room set. I had planned on leaving them white when I bought them, but once I realized that the seats sat way to low, I figured out a way to raise the seats. However doing this was going to leave things looking a little rough, so I used the 'cast iron black' Fusion paint to repaint the chair bases (the seat cushions are getting black sateen covers) and the table base. The also got left unpainted as it is grey with flecks in it so it looks like granite. (btw here is a link so you can see what some of the pieces originally looked like!)

MOTW 2.0

I decided to play a little today with the rich teal mani from yesterday...I took a kitchen type sponge cut a small piece and then tore and edge to rough it up a bit. Then I took a pretty silver polish called Athena by Stila dropped a bit on some waxed paper. I used the sponge (which I dampened and wrung our really good) to dab the silver onto the tips of the nails and then up about a third of the way up the nail too. I am really happy with the way it looks now. I think this color is a bit dark for a fun spring mani, BUT I am loving the technique and will do it again for SURE! =D

MOTW and new phones

So today was a gorgeous day and we had intended to take the kids out bike riding. Instead we found ourselves drawn into a River Monsters marathon on Animal Planet. None of us fish (heck I don't even eat fish!) but this is an awesome show! So after watching about 3 hour long episodes we decided it was too hot to hit the park. (it had hit 90 degrees by noon!!!) The hubs and I decided to venture out to Verizon to trade in our old phones and switch over from T-Mobile. (With T-M, we barely got signal in our HOUSE!!!) My hubby got a Brigade which is a heavy duty phone. And with MY husband that's a good thing! LOL Me, well I went in intending to just get a simple phone. I mean I really don't use it for much other than making calls and texting...well needless to say I walked out with Droid 2!!!! Now I can take my 'computer' with me anywhere I go! I love the QWERTY keyboard and love that I can facebook and twitter from my phone. hmm I might even be able to blog from it!

After getting our new phones the hubs and I went used car shopping. While he was deployed we dropped down to just a single vehicle but now that he is home he needs one so that I can have transport to do things during the day while he's at work. We didn't find anything that we both liked that fit all our criteria. So we'll save that for another day. (although we do have a lead on a dealership a few hours from here that has some NICE looking cars on his lot)

After a dinner of slow cooked pork roast, brown rice and fruit, I removed the pink holographic polish from the other day. I had hubby look through my polish sample wheels and asked him to choose. (He's got a great eye for color!) He narrowed it down to 4 that he liked, 2 greens and 2 teals. He liked the teals just a bit more so I decided to go that route. Since my Sees-ter is wearing one of the 2 colors he picked on her toes I decided to go with the other one.

This polish is from a cute little set I found at TJ Maxx. It was 8 full size bottles of Goldie brand nail polish. My sister said this was a brand that Bath & Body Works used to sell and my research online confirms this. However B&BW no longer sells it and so far the only place I've been able to find it is online for RIDICULOUS prices! I think I paid about $8 for the SET in the store, but online they are selling it for around $30!!!! That to me is insane! My color today is a rich dark teal with a heavy metallic shimmer. While the shine is gorgeous without a top coat the amount of shimmer in it really requires one to have a smooth finish. honestly 2 coats of top coat would be better. The polish goes on really smoothly and 2 coats left me with a fantastic rich coverage!

A little something new...

I recently got back into doing my nails on a regular basis. No long acrylics, just a nice comfy length that still allows me to work with clay. I went on a bit of a polish buying spree a few weeks ago and wound up with about 90 polishes!!! So I'm going to start doing my nails atleast twice a week. (that way I can justify them! LOL) Some days it'll just be a simple paint job, but I also want to try doing some nail art too. So I'm going to try to add a Mani Of The Week (MOTW) feature to my blog!

This weeks mani is an awesome holographic polish from Sally Hansen in their Nail Prisms line called Pink Rose Diamond. (these are available on ebay) It's a pale rose color with an amazing color changing holographic quality. It goes on super smooth and covers well. It also looks awesome as a single coat over a dark polish too!