Polish attempt

Craft buddy Spooky Little Girl and I made nail polish a while back. It was fun, messy, and mostly a failure.

I thought I could just dump glitter into nail polish to get amazing, custom colors. It doesn’t work that way. The colors look great in the bottle, but they make fingernails look like gunk spackled on dirt. The glitter makes polish thick and unusable. After a few days, the colored glitters that were added to clear varnish turned silver. The clear polish took on the color of the glitter, but the glitter lost its color.

Making and naming them was fun

From left to right, the polish I made:

Pumpkin juice – multi-sized orange glitter in clear polish. an homage to that hideous pumpkin juice I made
Pumpkin guts – steel gray polish with orange micro glitter, and orange hex glitter
Orc – steel gray polish with flecks of olive, orange, and black glitter
Absinthe – clear polish with “tinkerbell” green, emerald, and grass green glitter
Green Apple – green polish with all the abovementioned green glitters
Nameless purple polish – the only one that looks good. violet polish with orange micro glitter

A blurry close up of my nails. Lumpy, with little evidence of glitter. But the bottle color looks great.

 
This is Orc. In my head, it was the best one. In execution, it makes me sad.

If you etsy search “indie nail polish” you can find some beautiful, creative colors. I totally thought I could easily make that. So did some of the etsy sellers – there’s some dreck for sale. Some are sincerely amazing.

Pumpkin failure, berry success

In March I started Fairytale Pumpkin seeds. So far, I have lengthy vines, lots of flowers, but no fruit set. Boohoo.

Thankfully, the berries have been incredibly productive. The two blueberry plants have given me about 2 pints of delicious berries, and the second harvest is coming in now. Check out these radioactively large berries:

 
Giant berries, dwarfing normal-sized berries

Here’s a pic from really early in the season. Strawberries, a few cherry tomatoes, blackberries, a lone boysenberry, and blueberries.

The boysenberry plant’s second set of blossoms are fading now. Hopefully the second harvest will be more prolific. I had never eaten a fresh boysenberry before – they’re delicious. I love boysenberry treats during my annual trips to Knott’s Haunt (link), but fresh are so much better. Fresh boysenberries are so fragile that the few berries that have matured have broken in my fingers as I attempted to pull them off of the prickly vines. So far they’re delicious and worth the effort.

Recovery and Reruns

For the last month, I've been recovering from surgery. That means that I've logged more time sitting on my ass than is probably healthy, even for someone recovering from surgery.

Pic from my brief post-surgery hospital stay

I watched a lot of TV, and there are few current shows that I enjoy more than Community. I had a birthday recently, and I considered getting a cake like Troy’s non-birthday birthday cake (the character is a Jehovah's Witness):

 
The cake presented to Troy on his 21st birthday

In the vein of meme-y Community, I asked the lady at the bakery to pipe a picture of my favorite food on top of my favorite food. She did a nice job.

 
An oddly angled picture of my 2012 birthday cake

The cake was moist tres leches filled with peach and strawberry and finished with the best whipped cream frosting I’ve ever had from a bakery. Possibly my favorite birthday cake ever (and birthday cake is a Really Big Deal to me).