Month: October 2014

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Night of the living Wed

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Halloween!!!

So I’ve been avoiding doing any posts about skin care or makeup. Yes I do this stuff for a living, that doesn’t mean I’m confident in my abilities.

But… It’s Halloween, It’s my favorite time of year and an excuse to be someone different for a change. So I thought I would show off what I’ve been doing lately.

Last year I had a couple of different costumes.

My social costume was Marceline the Vampire Queen. Although technically I wore the clothing pertaining to Marshall Lee because a little boy’s black and red plaid shirt was far easier to find and implement. Not to mention something I’m likely to wear again.

Marceline and Marshall Lee in case you’re not hip to the kids.

And my work costume was a Tiger. Never underestimate a pair of cheap costume ears as inspiration for a costume

Oddly I have a collection of costume ears. It all started with a pair of bunny ears to hold my hair out of my face while I washed it or did my makeup … It’s gotten a bit out of hand since then.

Luckily this makes for a great party game that I had the privilege of playing this weekend at a Halloween themed bridal shower. Think “Who Am I” only with animal ears on your head. The devil horns made for a bit of a puzzler. “Do I have wings?”….That wasn’t really a yes or no question, we had to think about how to answer that for a moment.

I also had the privilege of being involved in a Halloween themed wedding this weekend. The ceremony was relatively normal and exceptionally gorgeous, until the zombies showed up. No seriously, there were zombies. Then the reception was costumes encouraged. Being the crazy person that I am I took fifteen minutes and dashed to the bathroom to transform from a lovely bridesmaid to the living dead. I’ll link to the video tutorial the groom sent me that inspired my quick change here.

These are pictures from my preliminary run through to figure out if I could actually do it in 10minutes. Turns out I could.

I was enjoying myself too much at the reception to bother with pictures.

All this being said I think the way to break my fear of posting makeup blogs is to just do costume makeup. I could work around a pair of ears and do a costume related post every month. It might also help me not run out of blog posts, which is super exciting as I am running out of projects or rather time to do them having just started a new job. I love doing costume makeup despite the fact that I don’t actually own any “costume makeup”. I’ve always just used makeup I already have. Things like bronzer (a.k.a. Tiger orange) and black khol liners and lipstick (blood more blood) and lots of eyeshadow.

I actually Have yet to figure out what I’m being this Halloween. It was suggested that I just do the zombie, but that is definitely not work appropriate. And I’ve tried out a couple of other looks the last month or so. Without loving them unfortunately.

I have the most marvelous devil horns, but this look just wasn’t… dramatic? .. enough for me.

And this look though really fun and surprisingly easy… I just don’t know what it is. Though a friend did point out that I look a bit like the captain from Treasure Planet

Photo bombing the photo bomber.

At any rate it’s something I’m new at so criticism or critiquing is certainly welcome and appreciated because I’m learning and love to do so. Also my amazon wish list just got super weird having decided to do this with things like liquid latex and rigid collodion and … yeah its super odd.
I’ll have a post up later about what I actually ended up doing for Halloween.

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Desk Part 4: The Break Down

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So we went from this

To this

Then on to this

And this is what it cost

Desk- $52.00

Handles-$27.00

Stripper- $11.98

Stain-$8.49

Tung Oil-$10.07

Paint for handles and broken foot-$2.98

Glue and resin for broken foot-$6.98

Sand paper-$2.00

Steel Wool-$3.97

Brushes-$1.00

Shop towels-$10.98

Contact paper-$9.99

Gloves-$2.00

Grand total $149.44

A good number of these things (Brushes, wood glue, paint, stripper, shop towels, contact paper, steel wool)are things that either I just had on hand already or have some left over and will be used again for future projects.

In case anyone was under a different impression I just want to note that I am a complete amateur at this. As in, I’ve never done anything of this sort before in my life. There were a lot of firsts with this project. I had never used a rotary tool before, never stained anything before (at least not wood and not on purpose). I had never used Tung oil. I had never used a resin to sculpt something, never had to reapply veneer or try to remove shellac (hopefully I will never have to do those two things ever again). The point is, I believed I could do it. More than that I believed that this sad little cast off of a desk could be something beautiful again, and I’m so very glad that it’s my something beautiful.

Now I do believe there is a dining room table that is begging for some t.l.c. as well. But in the mean time I may need some smaller projects. If any of you have any suggestions I would greatly appreciate them. In fact feel free to follow me on Pinterest so we can swap ideas.

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(Not About The) Desk Part 3.5: Pride is One of the Seven

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Yep! I’m am pretty proud of what I have wrought.

 

So after the contact paper in the drawers I went a little contact paper crazy.

Or perhaps a lot.

I decided I needed a pad for my keyboard and mouse to sit on. That was easy enough I just stuck felt and contact paper together. Two sheets of felt, some scrap contact paper, a seam in the middle. Tah dah!

Using it right now I can say it makes a great mouse pad and I’m no longer worried about wearing a spot in my desk.

I also used every bit of scrap I had to cover my icky tape dispenser. Not exaggerating, it really was icky, covered in goo and sticky stuff and what have you. Now on to find fun washi tape for it.

And line a pen holder. Obviously the paper in the pen holder isn’t stuck to it. Its just two scrap sheets of contact paper still on their backing, with backs facing each other, cut to size, rolled up, and stuck inside it.

Oh yeah and a composition notebook just for the hell of it.

Did I go overboard? I feel like I might have gone overboard

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Desk Part 3: The Cherry On Top

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Oh! Finally! The home stretch.

All that’s left is to put handles on. One of those (the one seen in the blog post here) required new holes. I left the drilling of said holes up to someone else. Mainly because I don’t trust myself to get them positioned correctly.

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out Part Zero, Part One, and Part Two

I decided to paint the outsides of the drawer sides. Mostly because I got stain all over them. It wasn’t pretty, and even though I have no intention of leaving the drawers hanging open all the time it will be nice to have them look decent. Instead of looking like I’ve slopped stain all down the sides and hastily tried to wipe it up just to have it spread around. Which is what actually went down. Paint fixes everything in my book.

After one coat of my go to Dark Kettle Black.

I also lined the drawers to cover up the ink stains and various other oddness. This is very much a two person job. Not just a two person job, but a two person job in which you must delegate tasks according to strengths and weaknesses. It turns out my boyfriend is great at spreading out the contact paper smoothly however horrible at holding the contact paper up. I’m the opposite. Actually my boyfriend is likely better at both of those things but that night he couldn’t hold his arms up six inches after having spent the day painting a ceiling. I remember that pain and am not eager to relive it.

The cat approves of this one

The aforementioned handle makes an appearance

To do this you might want a credit card or a small squeegee to smooth out any bubbles or wrinkles, as well as an exact-o knife to cut the excess as close to the edge as possible.

So now absolutely everything is done and ready to be moved in. Its time you see why I was so eager to get a new desk.

This is the setup I’ve been dealing with for the last six months. It’s rather unpleasant in the way of room to work not to mention aesthetics.

Yup he approves

This is so much better, although I will be playing around with the setup over the next couple of days and I doubt my CPU will stay up there. Either way a vast improvement.

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Desk Part 2: In Which the Naked Desk Gets His New Clothes

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Yes, my desk is male. Yes, he likes frills and corner details and gilding. Do you have a problem with that?

So when we left off my desk had gone from this to this after a couple of very hot weeks in late august.

You can see its progress in Part 0 and Part 1

After that I wasn’t particularly sure what I wanted to do with the beast. Originally I was going to refinish the top with an ebony stain and paint the base with a grey chalk paint. Then I had planned to go over it with a dark finishing wax to give the carved elements dimension. However, after getting the whole thing sanded down I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to cover up that beautiful wood. So after some convincing and seeing what the top looked like stained I decided it would be worth the little extra work to stain the whole thing with a light ebony stain.

The top with its ebony stain.

I know light ebony sounds like an oxymoron … what I mean is just one light coat of an ebony stain to darken up the wood without adding any additional red since the wood was already reading as red (I’ve no idea what kind of wood it is but it’s very red).

I did some additional sanding over the whole piece with some fine grain sandpaper prior to staining then used a lint free cloth to remove any dust from the desk before actually applying the stain.

Before and after staining on the back panels and drawer fronts

I found it quite hard to get sawdust and lint out of the corners and carved detail no matter what I did. I finally hunted in the bathroom for a bulb syringe to blow air into these areas  and that turned out to be the perfect tool. It was far more efficient than a dust cloth or for that matter my lungs when it came to the crevices.

After all the staining was done it was a matter of protecting the finish I had just worked so hard to get. I originally purchased a can of polyurethane just assuming that’s how you finish things. After doing some research I decided to forego the ungodly coats of poly for just a couple coats of Tung oil. Tung Oil is pretty interesting stuff. If you’re thinking of refinishing furniture any time soon you should consider it as an alternative to poly. It was really easy to work with, a very quick process, and as far as I can tell quite durable. The only prep involved for the Tung oil was a quick buffing with a fine steel wool followed by dusting.

A couple of freshly stained drawer fronts getting the steel wool treatment before Tung oil.

In the end I’m really glad I went with staining the whole thing versus painting.

Tung oil really brings out the grain of the wood without being overly glossy.

Oh and remember that broken foot. It didn’t take stain luckily I had some paint handy, at least it’s an improvement.