A Rose Garden for Your Nails (Perfect for those who do not have a Green Thumb)

If you like nail art, you'll probably enjoy what I have to offer today. I've been toying with ways to make my Konad and Mash nail plate images a little more detailed. In the past I've been able to come up with some cute ideas, like my spiders and skulls (at right).

Or, my "High Roller" nails (at left).

But, more often than not, I felt like the images I could get with the Konad Plates were a bit... static and flat (at right).

I was always hoping to be able to create something more like the images I've been able to capture through my waterslide transfer method, like these "Graphic Novel" nails I did last year (above).

However, the other evening, I thought of a new way of layering. I was inspired by the stemless wine charms I'd made for my Etsy shop. Instead of layering the same image over itself, I thought of layering the image over a different color from the base color. I'm not a big Valentine's Day fan (our anniversary is right before February) so it didn't even occur to me that this would be a perfect manicure for February 14th, but it is. (As a side note, I'm not sure if this is true since I kill every plant I try to grow, but I'm told that February 14th is the ideal day for rose pruning. See? It works on so many levels.) 

And so, my Nail Art Rose Garden grew. 

1. I did a base coat in a light grey polish.

2. After that dried, I used the "vine" image from image plate Mash-10 with a shimmery green polish.

3. Then I made small dots (but large enough to accommodate the rose image) in random spots on my nails with the lavender polish.

Once the spots were dry, I added the "rose" image from KONAD plate m65 (I used my thumbnail to remove any part of the design from the stamper I didn't want to keep, but masking it off with tape would also work).

That's all there was to it!

A Small Change is Easy to Make

So, yes, I do still have a blog.

One of my goals this year was to do a monthly post about a good change. (Let's just ignore the fact that this my first post of the year and it's February.) At the end of last year (2012) I started to read Rachel McKay's blog about sustainability and zero waste. One of her first tips was about disposable paper products. You can read all about it here. Two of the tips that I found very easy to incorporate into our lives were the reusable napkins and the dishtowels. We don't use a lot of disposable plates and utensils, and years ago my hubby taught me the value of using old socks and t-shirts for cleaning rags.

Now, I'm the first to admit that I'm a bit squeamish about reusing the same napkin over and over. However, a quick inventory of the linen cabinet revealed that she was correct; we have so many of these. Where did they even come from? It seems crazy that there are so many of these lovely napkins in the house and they never see the light of day. In other words, we own more than enough napkins to have a new one at each meal and then we simply drop them in the wash at the end of the week. She's correct about that too, they take up almost no space at all.

Next issue, dishtowels. I love the idea of hand drying the dishes; but here again, there's that squeamishness factor. Easy solution, we hang one dishtowel by the drying rack, a second dishtowel is placed near the sink for wiping water off of counter tops, and the third dishtowel is on the refrigerator for hand drying. Switch them out once a week and we're ready for the next several days.

We are already down from at least three to four rolls of paper towels per week to one roll of paper towels per week. If we're particularly well behaved, we can make that roll of paper towels last a week and a half. If we try really hard, maybe we can get one to last for a month! I'm not sure we'll be able to achieve the heights of one roll per year, but one never knows.

Whether or not we can achieve our goal, I feel better that we are creating less waste in general. We're also saving not only trees, but money, in the process!