Birthday Cake Nails

I have been eyeing the Deborah Lippmann, Happy Birthday sparkles for quite some time now and finally bought them last week :) I painted my nails pink and then put two layers of sparkles at the tips.

Rainbow Leopard

Just another twist on classic leopard print.  I tried to do marble nails today and it didn't really work out.  I had some great practice though! I will try again next week.  Happy Memorial Weekend!

....Dots....

First I painted my nails with two coats of white.  I had a wooden skewer with a small circle shape on the ending, so I used that to make the dots.  All you have to do is dab a little nail polish on a surface (I used a plastic bag) and then dip your tool in the nail polish and then onto your nail.   Repeat this for each spot.  I will probably get an easter egg painting tool to do my dots next time, that way they can look smaller and neater.

April Showers Brought these Flowers

It is very easy to achieve this antique flower look.  Paint your nails as you normally would with any color.  I chose a hot pink.  When it was dry, I painted blobs of yellow, and leaf-like shapes next to the yellow shapes.  When the yellow and green were completely dry, I made petal type shapes over the yellow.  I usually use a small brush, but today I used a nail art pen made by Sally Hansen.  Either way, the shapes don't have to be perfect, so this is an easy design for a beginner! 

~Spring Nails~

This is a different take on Galaxy nails!  I first did a white base coat and let it dry.  I then painted a color on a piece of a sponge and dabbed it in a random place on each nail.  I repeated with a few different colors.  At the end, I added one coat of glitter and finished with a top coat!

**Galaxy Nails**

So this was my first time doing galaxy nail and I am pretty pleased.  It was very easy to do and you can use any colors you want to!  I used a dark blue and did one coat over all of my nails.  Then, I used the light green on the tips/middle of my nail.  I cut off the side of a sponge (I just used a kitchen sponge) and painted some color on the sponge and dabbed it on the end of my nails.  I then used a little white on some edges.  I would have liked more of a splatter effect with white but I don't have any really solid white colors- mine are all a little see through.  I need to get on that.  Then I did a coat of bluish sparkles over all my nails.  I used a Deborah Lippmann silver  glitter, "Today was a fairytale" on various places on each nail.  Finish with a topcoat and you are finito! I like using the sponge technique.  I will definitely be using a sponge to do cool color mixtures in the future. The top photo was with a flash so it makes it look a bit different than this one:

All Girls Hoard Bags

Hey girlfriends! Now don't be telling me you don't have a bag collection somewhere in your house! No, I do not mean purses... I mean BAGs- you know, paper bags, plastic bags, cloth bags, tall bags, skinny bags, Whole Foods bags, Ralphs bags, Lulu bags, and every other brand imaginable... You know what I am talking about! The term "bag lady" didn't come from nowhere!

This bag hoarding idea came to me last Easter when my dad and I went over to my cousin Rimas and wife Myia's house.  Somehow it came up that my mom had a real problem throwing away these grocery/shopping bags and he started finding them all over the house.  He said it had gone to far when he was finding them under beds, and made her throw SOME of her bags away.   Lets be realistic- what woman can throw out ALL of her bags?

Right then my cousin Rimas starts talking about Myia's bag problem and opens the closet next to us, where millions of all types of bags fall out.  She immediatly starts rationalizing why she needs so many bags.  I then realize that I also hoard bags in the back of my closet.  You know, those big nice ones from Bloomingdale's or the cloth ones from Free People, plastic ones in the kitchen.  Anyways, I think the reason we save them is because "you never know when you might need a bag".

 I like to think my bag obsession is a combination of genetics and LA's idea that lunchboxes were lame and you needed the coolest little paper bag from a trendy clothing store to keep your lunch in.  Oooh those Elyse Walker light pink bags with the cloth brown handles were my favorite lunch bags.  In high school we also used these cute little bags to return clothes to friends after wearing their dress and not wanting them to see how crumpled it is until they got home by shielding it with this beautiful bag.  Return a crumpled dress alone and you never let them borrow anything again.... return a crumpled dress in a bag and its ALLL gooood.  But when was the last time I used one of those nice bags to bring someting to someoone? Um probably never, and so my collection grows.

Aleksandra, my roommate and I subconsciously collected bags under the sink this year.. In about December, things were getting ridiculous in the bag department and I got up the nerve ;) to bring up our obvious but never spoken about bag hoarding problem.  Now we joke around about it, and pretend we don't cherish every little plastic bag we use.  Everyday we have new stories about bags we collected or secretly reused that day.  We kick ourselves for not remembering our cloth bags at whole foods but then delight in the idea that we will get new bags from our trip to the store. It's an addiction.

I could go on and on about bag stories, but I will not.  If you're a girl, you know it's true.  I hope all of you prosper in all of your bag endeavors!

And if you're wondering if I threw out the bags pictured above that we keep under the sink.. NO I DID NOT THROW OUT OUR PRECIOUS BAGS, but I did organized them :)