Summing up Sunday: 2014 - Week 1

This week has been a whirlwind and has gone by in a quick blur.

New years was a last minute thing on our part because initially we were supposed to have a few friends here, but one thing led to another and no one could come! :-(  Instead we went to our friends' Linda and Claudio's house to celebrate with their friends and family as well as to meet their new baby son Giorgio. He is sooooo super cute!

I dedicated the first few days of the year to caching up on Sera's memory quilt and even started sewing some pieces together.  It's really much more satisfying than just cutting up all that baby clothes is.

I've also been on an organising/purging/cleaning kick and managed to tackle the compactum where we keep all our outerwear, our laundry 'room' (it's really a closet in the kitchen/den), my 'home office' (the closet upstairs) and Sera's toy kitchen.  Feels good to accomplish things.

YesterdayI made some doll clothes for Sera's Barbies (tutorial to come!) and then we went to Piacenza for lunch with Mauro and Carlotta.  Really a lot of good fun and good food!

A few photos from the week:

• sparkly glitter New-Year's nails
• first brekkie of the year: pomegranate, banana & clementines
• Sera learnt to draw 'Humpty Dumpties'
• lots of work on a memory quilt
• all dressed up for New-Year's party
• our newest friend Giorgio
• Sera slumber party
• playdate @ IKEA with Lele
• baby bloomers to Barbie clothes (tutorial post coming up this week!)

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Sparkly Glitter Nails

I've done several tutorials on DIY nail patches in the past but the application I did for new years was by-far the most successful experiment I've done so far.

Firstly, head over to the original DIY nail patches tutorial to get an idea of how it works. Then follow these steps for some special nails:

1. Paint a mid-grey nail polish in two coats for each nail patch, making sure to pay specific attention to the rounded, cuticle edge of the patch, keeping the side borders straight. Remember, this is done on the oven paper, not on your nails!
2. Let the nail polish dry slightly, maybe a few minutes, and then sprinkle fine silver glitter, like you'd find in a craft shop all over the nail patches.
3. Shake off the excess glitter onto a folded A4 paper to facilitate putting the extra back in the bottle.
4. Let dry 1 hour.
5. Coat glitter nails with 1 thick coat, or 2 thin coats of clear nail polish until smooth and sealed.
6. Let dry 2 hours
7. Paint a thin coat of the same mid-grey nail colour on one nail at a time.
8. Before the nail polish dries, peel the corresponding nail patch off of your oven paper and apply it to your wet nail, pressing down firmly and making sure to press the edges.
9. Continue with the rest of your nails
10. Use a fine nail file to file off the excess nail patches at the tips
11. You're ready to party!  Make sure to wait about 20 minutes before submerging your hands in water or doing any hand-heavy activities. You don't have to be as cautious as with a traditional manicure, but it's best not to start constructing anything with wood or preparing chicken for a tiny while.

Voilà!

DIY Festive Candy Cane Stripe Nail-Art Patches

Back in May I posted a tutorial on making your own nail patches at home. The post didn't get too many hits, but I suppose it's because I was still new at all this blogging. I haven't done another nail patch since but thought I'd post this new tutorial today as I experiment with a new look for holiday nails.

I'd like to mention that the photography in this post isn't amazing but that's mostly because, for as wonderful as my hands are at crafting and creating, they are equally as plain and awkward. Years of arthritis paired with my natural tendency towards boniness and dry cuticles doesn't make me the world's most glamorous of hand models, but I love my hands and fingers just the same.  Maybe the next time I do a tutorial like this I can get a friend to be the model.

Now onto the patches.  Head over to the original post for an in depth how-to.

For the candy cane style I first painted a light pink base coat onto silicone based oven paper in the different sizes of my nails. I always do 20 nail patches at a time in case I mess up while applying them so i don't have to then redo the artwork from scratch. When the base coat was dry I added a golden sparkle coat on top of that and let it dry overnight.

The next day I took a bright pink Sharpie marker and drew diagonal lines over each patch. I had to stop half-way through though as Sera got it into her head that she had to colour them.  We went onto other crafts instead.

After the Sharpie I applied a second coat of glitter polish and let that dry entirely.  It was six hours before I got back to my nails.


The best part about nail patches and the most satisfying part as well is the final application of them. I painted my own nails with a thin coat of the pale pink and then with tweezers carefully peeled each nail patch, one by one, from the oven paper. I pressed each patch onto each corresponding finger and my manicure was done! 10 seconds after finishing I was eating dark chocolate on the couch in front of the TV... something unthinkable at least for a half-hour with a traditional manicure.

And I'd be lying if I said that I could have ever gotten those lines so perfect with my left hand!

This application should last from 5-10 days so stay tuned for my next nail-patch experiment in a week or so!

manicure without the wait!

I love to have manicured nails but I hate going for manicures. I hate all the wasted time waiting for all the filing and cleaning up of cuticles to get done while I listen to the nail artist(?) chit chat with everyone else in the salon. I don't like chitchatting myself and so normally just keep quiet. I hate waiting for nail polish to dry and not having access to my hands for 10-20-30 minutes (somehow every time I go nail polish dries slower and slower). Mostly, I hate having to fork out anywhere from 10 to 35 euros for something I consider generally a DIY project.

But in order to give myself a manicure at home I have some obstacles as well... firstly, nail polish still needs time to dry which means I need time to apply and dry which I can't guarantee during Sera's naps and and generally too tired to think about come evening bedtime.  Then, there's always annoying possibility of smudging, chipping and generally ruining the job within the first 3 hours of application. That means, no tidying, cleaning, typing, or playing for ages and ages.... Boo.

Nail decals seem to solve this problem as they go on dry, don't have any wait time and if you're interrupted while applying nail #7 you can always pick up where you left off when you get back (hopefully the same day and hopefully before you go out for dinner with your husband's colleagues). The other advantage is that you can get that fresh, modern nail-art look, quickly and easily and have no dry-time. Sephora does some nice nail patches and I pick them up when I get a chance, but of course at €9.50, they are much more expensive than the traditional brush in bottle wet-application nail polish.

I decided to try making my own homemade nail patches, similar to the ones I normally buy with the nail polish I already have in the house.  Follow the steps I did for similar results.

What you'll need:

• tweezers
• nail polish
• wax/oven paper
• pen or pencil
• quickdry topcoat

Step 1

clean your nails as perfectly as possible. Remove all residues of nail polish and scrape away any overgrown cuticles.

Step 2

Draw the rough shape of each of your nails on a piece of wax paper with a pen or pencil.

Step3

Paint the wax paper nails as if you were giving them a manicure with or without whatever style of nail art you want on your own final manicure.... make sure to paint the nails slightly larger than your drawn outlines and to coat the nails well.

Step 4

Go away.  Go do something else... shopping, go to the office, little league, on a picnic. I don't care as long as you leave the manicured wax paper alone for at least the next hour or two... when you get back to this project the polish must be DRY DRY DRY.... not half dry like when you put your hand in your purse to get your wallet to pay for your manicure dry... really dry.... go to sleep if you have to.

Step 5

When the wax paper manicure is dry, really dry, put a base coat of clear polish (or the same base colour as your design) onto your actual nails and let that set for 5 minutes.

Step 6

Very carefully, with your tweezers, peel each manicured wax paper nail patch off the paper and place gently over the corresponding nail. Press down with your finger. There will be nail colour overlapping onto your cuticles and off the tip of the nail if you followed step 3 correctly and made the patch larger than your nail.  Don't worry! Leave it alone for now. Do this for all your nails until you have a patch on each. They should naturally stick to your base coat underneath.

Step 7

With a cuticle pusher, gently smooth the nail patch onto each nail and push into your cuticles and along the edge, underneath the nails. The patch will tear at these points and you will be able to easily remove the overlap.

Step 8

Continue to smooth down all the patches until they adhere properly to the nail underneath and you are satisfied with the details

Step 9

Apply a quickdry transparent top coat and let dry.

Have fun and be creative! With this method you can really play around with colors, layering and styles!