Pinterest is my crack – DIY French Manicures!

price stickers – just have them around

I have a rather shameful admission.  I am a nail biter.  Wait.  I probably already admitted that when I posted about cuticle oil.  Okay – forget it no surprises.  I am a nail biter, so when I have nails, it makes me very very excited.  This means I’m willing to try just about anything.  My other not, so secret shame is Pinterest.  I love Pinterest and trying all of the fun fun fun things there.  You all know this.  I wanted to do a quick post of a nail project I did on whim.  I saw a picture of someone using hole punch reinforcements to create the arc for a french manicure and thought why not.

Sticker Guides 🙂

I didn’t have hole punch reinforcements, but I do have some old price stickers from another project.  Check it out.  I put them over my nails,

painted the tips and took them.  Voila… kinda funky.

Final Product – Mediocre

If your nails aren’t perfectly straight it’s hard to make a good arc (as you can see).  I tried to fill them in on my own and it looks…okay a little crooked, certainly not salon perfect, but worth a try.  Give it a whirl and PLEASE let me know how you manage to align the circles better than I did.

Regardless, I had fun trying, so totally worth it, even though it was a bit of a fail.  Happy Painting Anyway!!!

My Memoirs – In 5 points a day….

I don’t know about you, but scattered around my place are the start of at least 10 different journal efforts.  At best, I have one journal that’s 3/4 complete and if you look at the dates, the entries come about every 3 or 4 months, unless i’m in total angst, then maybe every 3 or 4 days…the silence.  I love the notion of keeping a journal, of being able to go back and see what I was up to (although admittedly, I’m not even sure when I would do that), but the commitment seems to go against my very nature.

I was recently reading O magazine, which I love almost as much as I love Real Simple and there was an article about keeping a 5 point memoir.  It was fascinating, the author wrote 5 points about her day each day.  It was short, concise, forced her to pick the most memorable/important moments, but also provided the experience of recording the days ups/downs and everything in between.  5 point memoir…challenge accepted!  I created myself a private online blog to capture my own 5 point memoir and so far – so good.  Granted, it’s only been about a week, but she was right.  It keeps me on point and it takes no time at all.  I admit, some days I struggle to find 5 interesting things, okay, most days I struggle to find 5 interesting things, but there was at least one day when I really had to prioritize what I wanted to capture.  I don’t yet know if I’ll be able to keep this up (I’ll keep you posted) or if I’ll ever really go back and read these things, but I like to believe that perhaps I’ve found a way to reconcile my desire to journal with my inability to provide a bunch of time to my many rants and my general large number of thoughts.  Most importantly, I thought this was a great way for YOU to record your thoughts and what happens each day.  If you have kids, are getting married, divorced, starting a new relationship, whatever or nothing much at all, what a fantastic and concise way to revisit the experience later in life when it’s time to remember all of the lessons you learn through these experiences and through the very act of waking up each morning and going about your day.  Plus, you just never know when you’re going to become super famous and need to publish these gems as an official memoir!

Happy Writing and PLEASE let me know how it works for you…

Pinterest is my crack – Uses for over the door shoe pouches…..

Now I can find ALL my tights! Yay!

In case you didn’t read my post about the scarf hangar, Pinterest is my crack.  I absolutely can’t get enough of it!  There are many a post on the fantastic uses of over the door shoe pouches.  I ordered two (or three) to experiment with organization (I love Amazon Prime) and if I had more doors, I’d order more of these.  THEY ARE GREAT!!!  I did manage to deal with two areas of nuisance in my life, my tights and pantyhose collection and my pantry/kitchen counter situation.  I went through my tights drawer, which is typically overflowing and difficult to find.  I took the shoe pouch and organized my tights and hose by color, texture, and foot (footless or not).  I also put a few pairs of leggings that I would only wear with tunics or skirts in the pockets.  Perfect!  The only thing left to do is to take the old label maker out and label the pockets.  I’m debating that because I don’t want to be locked into the current organization.  I’ll label once I get a full feel for the system.

I took the second pocket to the kitchen and put it on the back of the pantry door.  I put all of the random things on the counter and the most frequently used items from the pantry in the pouches.  I ended up with a bit of a hodge podge, but it’s functional for me.  The less often used items are put at the very top or the very bottom.

Now I can find my Dixie Cups! SCORE.

Frequently use items, like my smoothie straws are right at eye level.  Again, the only thing missing is labels, but I like to give myself a good 90 days of any new organization system to make sure I don’t have to do some quick fixes (an organization retrospective if you will).  Once I’m comfortable with the system, I’m going to go a label making spree (I think it’s less dorky than it just sounded…or not).

Bottom line – over the door shoe pockets are AWESOME for things other than shoes.  If you want to store flip flops or flats, I’m sure they are fine, but I use racks for any other shoes.  The pockets are PERFECT size for anything else.  Other uses, put on in the coat close for scarves, gloves, hats, etc.  If I didn’t already have hooks in the coat closet for these things, I’d be all over it.  It could also be great in a smaller bathroom to store bathroom items you don’t want to leave on the sink.  I’m toying with using one on the other closet door for belts, but I can’t decide if I’d find it annoying.  I may experiment.

If you want to order one (or three) look for something like this online or at your local store: http://www.amazon.com/Honey-Can-Do-Clear-Organizer-Storage-White/dp/B001F51AHG/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1359687764&sr=8-3&keywords=over+the+door+shoe+pockets

HAPPY ORGANIZING!!

Pinterest is my crack – D.I.Y. Scarf Hangar

1/10 of my scarf collection

Let me start off by saying, Pinterest is my crack.  I can spend hours and hours and hours on that site pinning things that I’ll someday hope to do once I get off the site and get productive.  Pinterest is the ultimate catch 22.  I find all sorts of ways to be productive, save space, and do things I enjoy, but I’m so busy “pinning” these items to my “boards” I never do them.  Thank you Pinterest.  Anyway, I did take the time to try out one little project, a scarf hangar.

Handy Dandy Hangar, Shower Hooks

Last year, I became obsessed with scarves and as with everything else I do, I didn’t stop until I had a nice bundle.

I finally got tired of having scarves draping all my furniture, so I pulled out one of my handy dandy velvet like space saving hangars and completed one of my Pinterest hobbies.  Simple.  All you need is a hangar and some shower hooks (that close).

Put the shower hooks on the hangar, hang the scarves, BAM…..  Scarf hangar.  There’s only one problem, all the scarves end up bunching on one side if the hangar happens to tip one way or another.  That’s a total Scarf Fail.  Not convenient at all….

Scarf Hangar Fail

Now, being a crafty gal, I keep all sorts of things around the house, including pink animal print duct tape, because you never know when you’ll need pink animal print duct tape.  Now, we all know duct tape is miraculous and can be used for just about anything, I mean anything.  I fully believe that given enough time and duct tape, you can solve almost any household problem.

Pink Duct Tape….Yes Please!

I solved my scarf fail by cutting my duct tape into 4-6 inch, pieces and then cutting each piece vertically into 4 “strips”.  I wrapped each strip around the hanger on top of each other to create spacers that would keep the shower hooks separated and ensure my scarves were evenly spaced apart regardless of how many scarves were on the hangar.

I saw other people do this with ribbon, but pink animal print duct tape – even better!  Final product, an awesome scarf hangar that I put in my coat closet.  LOVE IT!

Awesome Scarf Hangar with Duct Tape Dividers