Halloween Nails

It's October! With Midterms and Halloween right around the corner, October can be a scary month. To release stress and to celebrate, I painted my nails!

I couldn't decide on one design so I did five different ones. For my base coat, I used Sally Hansen's "Hard as Wraps". The orange is SinfulColors, called "Cloud 9", and the black is also from SinfulColors, called "Black on Black". For my top coat, I used Sally Hansen's "Hard as Nails" "Invisible". I usually buy the Sally Hansen brand for my base and top coat because they tend to be on the cheaper side and still work well. As for SinfulColors, I like them, my favorite brand is probably Chine Glaze, but SinfulColors is usually a bit more affordable. This orange is really light so I put on three coats on all my nails except my pinkie. For my pinkie, I still put a coat of orange so the black would stain my nail. For the jack-o'-lantern and splatter, I used a toothpick to create the designs and for my index and middle finger, I just used the brush on the nail polish.

Camping at Dillon Beach

Last week my family and I camped at Dillon Beach in California, so I had an idea to write a review about how my experience was there. The campground we stayed at is called Lawson's Landing and we stayed at site N8. This part of the campground is a large grassy field with sites sectioned off with lines on the ground. The sites here tend to be fairly large so it is great if you are camping with a lot of people. I would suggest that you tent camp in this section. You are allowed to trailer camp here, which is what we did, but it was a bit difficult to place the camper. Also, there are one or two fire circles just on the ground, I only saw about five sites where they had a fire pit. These campsites are surrounded by dunes, which you have to go through to get to the ocean, just about a 50 yard walk. The beach is windy! But if you want to go play in the ocean, it's fun because there are four foot waves.
  Another section of the campground is closer to the ocean. I would suggest that you would only camp here with a trailer because you are parked on gravel. However awful that sounds, you are only five feet from the ocean. This is also where you load/unload boats and there is a pier so you can fish and crab. The water is calmer here so you could take your dogs to the water here or go kayaking.
   There are also some houses farther up the beach that is closer to town that families can rent out. I don't know how much it costs but they seemed like decent size homes so you could split the cost with another family and go together.
   On the ocean front, the same beach that you walk to from the first section of the campground, is a  day use area. This is not affiliated with the campsite so you do have to pay to park here; however, there are no dunes to cross to get to the beach so this would be good if you brought grandma and grandpa or little kids camping.
   Overall, I enjoyed my time at Dillon Beach. This is the perfect place if you want to go crabbing (we did and the crabs were delicious) but not so great if you just want to hang out by the beach.

Disney's "Brave" Hair

I loved the Disney movie Brave! It had archery, draft horses, a girl with fiery, curly hair, and it was set in Scotland, and oh yeah, it had a good moral and plot line and all that stuff that's not really important in a movie. But I especially loved the hair! I have always wanted red hair and my hair is quite curly naturally (not Merida curly but still). I really wanted to try to recreate this hairstyle and I found out how using straws from a video on youtube from Cute Girls Hairstyles. My friend, who we will refer to as Red Wood, so happens to have red hair so I decided to try the hairstyle on her.

This is a picture of her hair up in the straws:

Sorry about the blurry picture, it was taken with my phone. But she slept in it all night and only one straw fall out.

In the morning, I took out the straws and separated the curls a bit and this is the result!! I think it turned out quite nicely. Because her hair is very long, I curled small sections of her hair. If you have shorter hair, you may want to take larger sections of hair or you might go from bouncy ringlets to a crazy afro!

I must give a shout out to Red Wood because she is an amazing artist! See her artwork on her blog at redwoodsart.blogspot.com.



Skyrim Birthday Cake

My brother's tenth birthday was coming up so I asked him what he wanted for his birthday cake. He said he wanted a dragon cake.... Well, I'm not the Ace of Cakes and I can't make a dragon out of cake but he said he would settle for a Skyrim themed cake. For those non-nerds, Skyrim is an AWESOME medieval action game made by Bethesda Game Studios.

Here are some pictures:

It was fun trying to think of ways to create a Skyrim cake and I thought a tower would be easy enough, much easier than a dragon. I didn't have much time the week of my brother's birthday so I cheated and bought Betty Crocker box cake. Three of them. I made two 9x13 sheet cakes and two 9" round cakes. I filled the cakes, between the layers, with lemon filling I made from the Wilton website. I made the simply named Lemon Cake Filling recipe. I liked this filling recipe but I must warn you that it is VERY lemony. I made a Basic Buttercream from Martha Stewart's website. I did not like this recipe at all. It was very difficult to work with (that's why the frosting is not smooth) and I wasn't a fan of the taste. It was very, very rich, even for a buttercream. To make the tower, I cut out cup size circles from my circle pan cakes. With the extra cake pieces, you can add frosting or pudding to it and it tastes so YUMMY! To help make the tower stand upright (though it did start to lean a bit), I shoved wooden kitchen stakes in the tower. The man on the tower and the dragon is from my brother's PlayMobile set. He was very happy with the outcome. 

Oatmeal Mask Fail

So yesterday night, my mom and I were going to treat ourselves to a little relaxation with a moisturizing mask. We didn't have any such masks so we decided to make our own! I went online and picked an oatmeal mask at random. Big mistake. The mask we chose had WAY to much liquid and when we tried to apply the mask to our faces, it ran down. The mask wouldn't stick or stay thus making quite a mess. The mask was from www.somewhatsimple.com. Now, I'm sure the mask would be fine with the ingredients given, however; the amount of the water and milk outweighed the oatmeal by too much. As much fun as it was to laugh at how ridiculous we looked with oatmeal running down our faces, I would still love to experience the relaxation of laying back with a moisturizing mask rejuvenating my skin. If anyone has any good websites or recipes, let me know! And I wish the best for all your at home spa adventures.

Sweet Potatoes and Avocados?

Anyone who knows me, knows that I am addicted to Pinterest. ADDICTED. It's a serious issue, but today I used my pinning powers for good. I found a new recipe to try for dinner. It's called "Sweet Potato Burrito Smothered in Avocado Salsa Verde" from cookieandkate.com. I wanted to try it purely because I wanted to see how sweet potatoes and avocados tasted together. The verdict? It was so GOOD!!! If you would like to eat this deliciousness yourself, here is the link: http://cookieandkate.com/2012/sweet-potato-burrito-smothered-in-avocado-salsa-verde/ . I did change it because I didn't have all the ingredients but it was still very good. I didn't have hot paprika or cayenne so I used regular paprika and red hot pepper flakes. For the Avocado Salsa Verde, I didn't have garlic. I was going to use garlic powder but I didn't have that either but the sauce still turned out amazing. This is a picture of how my version of the burrito turned out. Not as beautiful as the staged, and well-lit, pictures on Pinterest but, hey!, I was too hungry.

I encourage all of you to try this recipe! Let me know how yours turn out!

Newbie

Hello! I love going to websites and blogs that help to inspire me and guide me through my own projects so I decided to start my own blog to help others. I am by no means a expert on anything that I do but I love to dabble and I believe in learning by doing! On this blog, I plan on posting about what project I'm on at the moment, if that be an up-coming party, a costume, or just doing a cool, new hairstyle, and hopefully I will be able to help inspire and guide you through your projects.