All that glitters is nail polish

I am not the girliest of girls. I don’t wear make up, skirts and dresses are reserved for weddings or when my Gran comes to visit, and I live in trainers and jeans. However the one girly thing I love is nail polish. Any sort of nail art is so much fun. One of my problems with makeup (besides laziness, and a general lack of skill) is that I am allergic to most of it! An evening spent with eyeshadow on results in a week of itchy swollen eyelids. A day of foundation is followed by days and days of dry, itchy skin. The joy of nail polish is that its pretty hard to be allergic to it! Yay!

Its only been the past year or 2 that I have really got into nail polish, and I am not hugely skilled in nail art (although I do try, I aint no cutepolish – http://www.youtube.com/user/cutepolish). I thought I would put together a wee picture post of some of my favourite nails I have had in the past year.

Who doesnt love a bit of pink sparkle?!?! ( This picture was actually taken to show off the ring. It is my maternal Grans wedding ring and I had just got it back from the jewellers after it got repaired and resized)

One look I loved this year was the Effie Trinket from Hunger Games style nails. This is the only cutepolish design I have ever pulled off. It started a massive love of glitter nails for me and despite how difficult glitter nail polish is to remove, I cant help but try this look out with every glitter polish I have!

 

I also really like nail wraps, or nail foils. Minimal effort, easy to put on yourself and can last anything up to 10 days (though cheaper sets, in my experience, only last a day or 2). The only down side to nail wraps is that they are fairly expensive for a single use item. Between £4 and £7 for a reasonable set. Compared to the price of a bottle of nail polish, it’s quite steep. Still, that hasn’t stopped me indulging.

Finally the most recent nail art trend I have tried is the caviar/glass bead manicure. I was given a set for Christmas and tried it out on Christmas day. I loved the way it looked, and it was really simple to do. Just put on a coat of nail polish, pour the beads onto the nail and press them down. You have to do it one nail at a time, because the nail polish still has to be wet for the beads to stick but it doesn’t take much longer than doing a normal 2 coat manicure.

It is a completely impractical manicure though. I had to wear rubber gloves to dry my hair as it kept getting caught on the beads, and I had beads inside my tights after putting them on (yes I wore a dress….it was Christmas Day). I had to take it off that night. Next time I would wait until I was all ready and dressed before I did it. And perhaps I’ll hire a servant man to open doors and lift my knife and fork for me. It’ll last longer than a day then 🙂

Anyway, that’s enough close ups of my left hand so I’ll leave it there. There’s lots of other manicures and nail art things I want to try. Next on the list is the velvet manicure, and I may do a little experimentation with rhinestones. For now I’m trying out OPI Nail Envy as my nails are half dead. I have heard good things so I have high hopes.

Ciao

Jennifer

 

 

It’s (almost) CHRIIIISTMAAAAAS!

So it’s that time of year. Santa is getting his sleigh MOT’d, Rudolph has been hitting the gym and children around the world have been on their best behaviour. I can’t quite believe Christmas is less than 2 weeks away. I feel decidedly un-Christmassy this year. I am hoping that will change. I am looking forward to the day, don’t get me wrong. I’m just not super excited yet.

Anyway, despite my lowered enthusiasm, I have been working away at some handmade Christmas gifts for friends and family. Handmade gifts is something my family has adopted over the past few years. Personally I quite like something that has been made for me. It may not have cost alot, but when you can see thought that has been put into a gift it makes it that much nicer. For example, about 3 years ago my younger sister wrote out the lyrics to my favourite song by my favourite band (February Stars by Foo Fighters), glitteryfied it and framed it. It wouldn’t have cost much, but it’s something that I really appreciated and it hangs on my bedroom wall.

So on the note, and in relation to the picture above, I have been sticking rhinestones on things for 2 gifts. I also have to do alot of sewing (I don’t know what possessed me to choose a sewing project for a gift. I hate sewing. I did a fashion design course, the majority of which was sewing and  I hated it) for 1 gift, and be creative with liquids for at least 1, possibly 2, gifts. Ooooh, interesting, no?

Also in the spirit of the season, last Sunday I got out of my bed (at 7.15am! On a Sunday!!!), dressed up as Santa, and ‘ran’ 5k around Glasgow to raise money for Glasgow Womens Aid with a bunch of hungover maniacs and 2,400 other Santas.

If you feel generous (tis the season after all) here is the Just Giving page. We are painfully close to our target, it’d be great to hit it before Christmas – http://www.justgiving.com/team-hangover (I would like to clarify I was not hungover. I barely made it as it was!!)

And here is some pictoral evidence for your delictation:

My Santa mug shot

A sea of Santas as far as the eye can see.

Team Hangover. We did it, and we got medals to prove it!

Ciao

Jennifer x

Come Dine With Me

I have been going to write this entry for a week and a half. It appears I am a rather lazy blogger, but anyway here it is.

My 2 sister, my best friend and I decided a while back to host a dinner party each, a la the tv show Come Dine With Me. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the show, 4 (or sometimes 5) strangers agree to host a dinner party each over the course of a week. the other 3 (or 4!) attend the dinner parties and score each night out of 10. The winner is announced on the final night and gets a tasty £1000.

Rather than have 4 dinner parties, one right after another we decided to have a Saturday each in November to host ours. Mine was the first night and it was on November 3rd. My menu was Balsamic Beetroot and Feta Salad, Sicilian Pesto Tripoline and Lemon Polenta Cake with Limonchello Syllabub. Everything was made from scratch on Saturday. I had never made anything with polenta before and I have never made pesto before either (although it was so easy and delish that I will be making it again!)

 

I also had a butler, although he wasn’t very good. He seemed to take more interest in being adored, and then went out for most of the evening!

 

Charlie and his bowtie 🙂

 

The evening went really well. I like to think I set the standard pretty high. Lyndsay, my best friend, hosted her night on Saturday just passed (the 10th) which had a theme of ‘Cosy Winter Nights’. There was spiced cider (or spiced apple juice for us drivers), hearty veggie soup, veggie shepherds pie and home made apple strudel. My older sister, Eileen, has her night this Saturday coming…her dress code is ‘School PE’ which I am slightly concerned about. I was never very good at PE. Sarah, my younger sister, will have her night a week on Saturday and its at her night that the winner will be announced, although unfortunately we don’t have £1000 as the prize. The winner will just have to be content with the glory!

Clockwise from top – Lyndsay, Charlie the butler, me and Sarah.

If music be the food of love…….*insert something witty*

One of the things I enjoy is the music of my youth. I love rock music, and used to go to gigs as often as I possibly could. These days its not very often a gig rolls around of a band I would like to see. Alot of them are big gigs, where you cant get within 50 feet of the stage, and you have an elbow in your neck and someones sweaty hair in your face and you pay close to £50 for the privilege. These days I am too old for that kind of nonsense and prefer yo stay up the back where there is lots of space but zero view. My days of being kicked in the face by crown surfers are well and truly behind me.

This weekend past a gig rolled around that was well worth going to. A 90s rock band called Terrorvision were playing one of the clubs in Glasgow and me, my 2 sisters, brother and best friend (plus a few other waifs and strays) all got tickets. We spent an hour and a half down the front, jumping, pogo-ing, yelling, singing and gesticulating wildly. it was just like the gigs I used to love when I was younger. You got close enough to actually interact with the band. It was a nice smaller venue and it wasnt rammed full, we didnt wait 45 minutes just to get outside, everyone had a brilliant time and we all left with a smile on our faces (plus, no crown surfer injuries, bonus!)

FYI, Terrorvision:

 

P.S. As if my body have to prove that I am too old for leaping about at gigs my back, shoulders, calves and voice all still hurt…the gig was 2 days ago. Yay for being 30!

Ciao

Jennifer

It’s my own little corner of the internet.

Looks like I decided to start a blog. I’ve had quite a few in the past, but they have usually been for a specific reason or to follow a theme. The problem is that I have such a short attention span that I’d update them for a few months and then get bored and wander off to play with something shiney.

Hopefully this blog will last a bit better. It’s not going to be themed, it’s going to have posts covering all my interests as well as just day to day life. It’ll get rambley and probably a bit random in places but that’s ok because organisation is boring.

I’ll put up an ‘About Me’ post in a while, but for now I’m going to play with themes!

Ciao

Jennifer