wildflower nails

Hello All!

How's your week going so far?

I'm really excited about tomorrow! My work is having it's "Summer Outing" (i.e. get out of work at noon and day drink together) at Little Goat.  I've been to Girl and the Goat and it was amazing, so I can't wait to try some snacks at Stephanie Izard's Diner.

For this week's nails I went all floral!

I started out designing these nails for a SallyHansen contest.  For May, June and July they're having a nail art contest.  I missed May, but I thought I'd try for June and July.  The "theme" for June is "Liquid Mani-A: texture, shine, matte and embellishments"  So my plan was to add some rhinestones, highlight the flowers with glitter and paint a matte top-coat over them...

Well, I got as far as rhinestones.  I tried a matte top-coat and it just didn't look right.  Sometimes following a theme just doesn't work.

After doing the flower last week I was excited to try some more free-hand florals, and I think these turned out pretty nice.

What do you think?

tulips

Its Friday again! Yippee!

Do you have any big plans for the weekend?

I think I'm going to spend some time researching tulips because they've recently amazed me.

For our anniversary The Man bought me some flowers. He always knows to get me a weird mix of stuff, so I was very excited to go home and arrange them.

I put them all together in this glass pitcher and I thought it looked great.

After a few days I started to notice something. The tulips were growing taller.

The stems grew twice their original size! I never new that flowers could continue to grow after they were cut. How cool is that? I mean, it kinda ruined my arrangement, but it's still pretty cool.

So, is this common tulip knowledge? Or did I just blow your mind?

Have a great Weekend!!!!

mom's day bouquet in may

My mom got her Mother's day present on Tuesday (honestly not as late as I thought it was going to be  :) way to go FedEx!).  So now that it won't ruin the surprise I want to show you what I made her!

I love flowers and beautifully arranged bouquets but damn can they get expensive, so as a lady on a budget I was trying to find an alternative that was cheap to purchase without being cheap looking, and voila! I found tons of great tutorials on how to make crepe paper flowers!

The funny part was how difficult it was to find crepe paper.  None of the art or craft supply stores in Chicago had anything, or even knew what I was asking for, so I took to the internet. 
Oh trusty internet, your knowledge and supplies are so vast.

I mostly used this tutorial but this one was also helpful for variety.

I used the thicker wire to bunch them together and stick them in the vase, and then I added a few "leafs" for greenery and to fill in any gaps . . .

It was super fun to make the flowers, and I'm definitely going to make some more for my own house.  I'm terrible at keeping plants alive so it'll be great to have a little floral pop in the house without having to worry about it getting moldy. (Does that happen to anyone else?)

I also made my mom a card from a photo my Dad took of us sleeping (or pretending to sleep) when I was little.  It turns out that the original photo was actually taken on Mother's Day! How cool is that!

I Love you Mom!

floral nail stickerz

I got these nail stickers from Sephora a while ago, and last weekend I put them to use . .

They are pretty cool, and super super easy to put on.  They're fairly durable too, (you can see mine started chipping off, but that was after about 5 days).  I've received a lot of compliments on them this week, and it's definitely a design I wouldn't be able to replicate. . .  but still, I'm not sure if I'd use them again.  I love putting the effort in to decorating my nails by hand, and these just feel like a cop-out.

But if you want the pretty without the work, then you should try them. It seriously took me about 15 minutes to put them on, and there's no drying time!

spring has sprung

Everything is starting to bloom . . .

I just hope it's not too soon!!