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Make’n’Tell Day 10: Pedi on My Piddies

~ Lola ~ Leave a comment

Spring has begun sprunging here in the Northeast, so I’m back to flipflops for the duration. Which means I need more than basic red on my toes. It’s been awhile since I did a fun design, so hey, there it is. It’s really subtle, which I’m not sure if I’m pleased with or not. But I’m not changing it now!

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ALSO, I re-did the two rows I ripped yesterday plus a few more, and have now completed the first mosaic section. YAY ME! (I’m actually writing this before it’s done. Let’s see if I’m prescient or just indulging in some wishful thinking.)

And in other, non-makey news, I have a big hole in my mouth (no, you don’t get a picture of it). This one tooth has been a problem for YEARS. I’ve gone from fillings to root canal to post & core with crown…and the other day the crown popped off and I swallowed it. Ulp. To make matters worse, my beloved dentist (who did all the recent work on the tooth) hurt his back a few months ago and hasn’t returned to dentistry. So I went to his associate, who tells me the reason the crown fell out is because the tooth broke, and now there’s not enough tooth to mount a crown on. My options are: gaping hole, bridge, implant. Oh, and by the way, the remainder of the tooth needs to come out and it’ll have to be a surgical extraction because the root has fused to the jawbone. GOOD TIMES. Good, very expensive times.

Now, my aforementioned beloved dentist would totally cut me a deal on the implant (or bridge, but I’ll probably eventually go implant b/c it’s lower maintenance and only a couple hundred bucks difference which at that point isn’t worth quibbling over), because he’s awesome like that and even though it’s not his fault he always took responsibility for when his dentistry didn’t stand the test of time (seriously, though, it’s not him — it’s this tooth). But the new guy has no reason to do that, which I totally understand — it’s just irksome because I’d be going to my guy if he was available.

On the plus side, though, it’s not at all painful, so it could definitely be worse. I mean, it’s going to be painful when I have the extraction, so I have that to looks forward to, but at least it’s not an emergency type situation. Small favors and all that.

TBT: Fire and Ice and All the Stars Above

~ Lola ~ Leave a comment

Originally published on Tasteful Diversions, August 12, 2011.

In addition to all the delicious food I’ve been finding on Pinterest, I’m finding lots of fun beauty tips (remember the hair? Still loving that!). Lately I’ve been getting into the whole decorative nail polish thing. I’ve played a little bit with stripes and stuff, but last week I went to the drugstore for shampoo and deodorant and found myself in front of the nail polishes. Normally I’m a more high-end polish kid of girl, because polish chips like crazy on me (I like OPI, China Glaze, and Zoya, in case you’re wondering), but for the fun stuff I tend to cheap out. Sinful Colors runs two bucks a bottle and they have a veritable rainbow of shades to choose from, plus metallics and glitters and all kids of other stuff.

This time, there was a pretty blue glitter that I just fell in love with, and then there was a bright orange that I picked up. Now, I’m not normally an orange girl, but I figured if I’m going to start doing arty stuff like flowers and whatnot, orange is a color I might want to have. This was a reddish orange, and reminded me of the color of one of the Vettes we had when I was a kid – orange being my dad’s favorite color, we had a lot of orange stuff. Hell, the house I lived in until I was 8 was orange. No kidding. Anyhow, I picked this up and glanced at the name – because I love a cleverly named color – and it was Big Daddy. So that one went home with me.

When I got home, I took a look at the stuff I had, and then at the new stuff, and then a plan formed: I would do grey/blue on one hand for a rainy day theme, and orange/yellow on the other hand for a sunny day theme, and then I’d try the galaxy thing on my toes (again – didn’t work out last time, but I thought I knew why). I did my toes first, and they came out just fine this time – I even did constellations! (From left to right: the Compass, the Indian, Bird of Prey, Orion, Cassiopeia, Big Dipper, the Sculptor, the Fox.)

Yeah, I need to work on getting them cleaner. But I still think they’re awful cute!

On to the fingers. I did a grey and silver base coat, but then I had a hard time keeping the blue up as high as I had intended. Also, all of tutorials I read said if you keep patting with the sponge as you’re doing the gradient it’ll smooth out, and that never happened for me. But, when I put the glitter coat on that hid the texture issue so that was fine. However, it didn’t look so much like a rainy day. Then my big plan for the other hand just went to crap. I can’t even begin to tell you what went wrong – it was just all kinds of fugly. So I started over. I decided to scrap the “sunny day” idea and try for a fiery look to contrast with the icy look of the other hand. I started with a hot pink base coat, then added orange, dark pink, and red over top, then finished it all off with a gold glitter topcoat. I’m pretty pleased with the final result, though I’m going to work on doing gradients higher on the nail.