Galaxy Nails!

Sorry I'm Late, I Was Painting My Nails =)

Wow, it sure has been a while since I posted on here!  No real excuse other than I have been busy being crafty =) 

I have never been so creative.  Not so much in the painting and drawing sense that I used to consider my only talents, but in the sense that I want to experiment with everything!   Crochet, paper craft, sewing, nail art, soap making, baking…… the list goes on. 

I thought maybe I could share my explorations with you.  Because I have so many projects on the go I will have blog fodder for the next century for anyone interested in reading it.

Today I just wanted to share a nail art experiment with you:

Galaxy Nails

 

These are my favourite and so easy to do! If you want to practice first, get a set of falsies from the pound shop and give it a try!

I never used to have nails as I am a worrier and they would often disappear and the first sign of trouble….. but since I discovered this nail art thing…. My nails are doing very well!!

The polish I used is listed below and consists of various shades I had already, but you can use your own combination too.

Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear – Black Out / Barry M Chameleon – Blue (this one changes colour when you add the top coat which is pretty cool) / Avon – Mosaic Plum / Miss Sporty Lasting Colour – Shade 272 / Miss Sporty – Sparkle Touch / China Glaze – Dandy Lying Around

 

First I applied a base coat, the one I have at present is the Rimmel Nail Nurse which is nice and dries real quick.  This stops the black dying the nail and also makes the polish last longer.  I tend to brush a little of this on the tip and underside of my nail too.

Paint the nail black, running the brush along the nail tip as well, then allow to dry completely.  I have been experimenting with various ways to make the nail dry faster and have found the spray works best.  If you know of better ways please tell me because this is the only part of nail art I hate as I have zero patience =)

Then I used a bit of make up sponge to apply the Mosaic Plum, the Blue and the 272.  Apply in small areas, don’t cover the nail, and allow each colour sufficient time to dry before applying the next.

When finished with this I painted the Sparkle Touch over the whole nail and allowed to dry before using a dotting tool (you can use a tooth pick if you don’t have one) to put the little white stars on.  I found that the smaller the dots, the more effective the look.

Finish with a good top coat covering the whole nail and running over the tip as this strengthens against chipping, I have been using the Rimmel 3D top coat and love it.  It really thickens the nail and is super glossy, it also lasts ages before it begins to chip which gives you more time to come up with you next nail design!

Anyhoo, hope you have fun with that! Wishing you a beautiful day =)



 

What's it all about?

I realised the other day that it has been many weeks since my last blog. Upon realising this, my immediate thought was, I have nothing to write about right now, that fits with the way I want my blog to be.
This inevitably lead me to question what the blogs 'Theme' actually was and I began asking myself the question "What's it all about?"
So what is this all about, this blog of mine? What is its purpose? Why have I written nothing for weeks? Why is it so terribly important for me to make it about one thing?
Later in the week I decided to visit some old work colleagues. We had a lovely catch up and it was nice to see all of the old faces. One of these friends told me of her blog, perfectly named What Lulu Likes. A blog which is exactly what it says it is... It contains loads of things that Lulu actually likes! Eureka!
This thought stuck in my head. Firmly.
My Blog can be what ever I want it to be at anytime. Things that resonate with me. Those things may be spiritual, arty, crafty, foo and fitness, family, fun, books..... Anything.
I just thought I'd share this eureka moment because I think this is what I, along with many others, actually do with many aspects of life. This tendency to categorise things, pigeon hole things, make them hold a certain meaning or a certain purpose.
Perhaps it's time to uncategorised#un-pigeon hole#combine parts of our lives that have remain separate and see where it goes from there? When something is set free, what happens to it?
Lets see :)
Namaste xx

How Are You?

Hello Beautiful Peaple!!  First thing is first, I want to Ask you an question.... Get a piece of paper and answer a question for me. 

So, is today OK…Or Good… Or is today fantastic?  First I guess you need to asses what your personal level of ‘Ok’ and ‘Fantastic’ are.  If being OK means that you feel happy, content, joyful and have noting to complain about, then your in pretty good shape there.  Fantastic to you would be a truly wonderful experience.  Or maybe to you, OK equates to “Well, I’m not dying I suppose.”

It’s pretty important you figure out what your level of OK actually is.  Do you even know?  When a dear friend asks how you are and you respond with the customary “OK”, do you even know how you are?  Also equally important, do they know what OK means to you?  After all, their level of OK might be “I love my life”, and if your level of ok is closer to “Shoot me now”, there’s big a miscommunication going on. 

The dictionary defines OK (Okay) as passable, satisfactory… basically, nothing spectacular.  It’s a more or less universal word.  Yet everyone has a different definition of what is ‘OK’ for them.  Me, I’m with the dictionary.

Here is a little exercise for you ;0)

 

1) Get a piece of A4 paper and divide it into 3 sections lengthways.  I always find using coloured pens and pencils helps with stuff like this too =).  In the first section, take a moment to think about the word ‘OK’ and jot down some notes; 

·         What does ‘OK’ mean to you when you hear it or say it? 

·         What does ok feel like to you as an emotion and/or physical feeling? 

·         What needs to happen to you, in your life and around you in order for you to be OK? 

Got it?  Great stuff!

2) Now do the same for the word ‘Fantastic’ in the third section on your paper.

Done?

Congratulations, you now have two opposite ends of your very own happiness scale!!  I’m imagining blank looks, but humour me until the end =)

3) So, the middle section is where you explore the word ‘Good’.  This should be a whole heap easier because it is effectively smack bang in the middle of ‘OK’ and ‘Fantastic’.  Spend a little time filling out your good section now.

*Note: I haven’t put sad on your happiness scale… I choose to believe that ‘Sad’ hasn’t got a place on a happiness scale.  In order to change your thoughts, you need to stop thinking the ones that drag you down...  So we are eliminating the word sad.   Not to say that sad doesn’t exist, it does and it is an inevitable part of life that at some point we feel sad… but the more time we allow ourselves to think about being sad, the more time we spend being sad.  So, following on from my last blog… drop the rocks and give them no more time.

Lovely, your happiness scale is complete!!  What do you do with it now right?

Well, you have just outlined not only your definitions of 3 descriptors you use in everyday life, but you have also given them values based on your beliefs of them.  You are now more aware of what these words mean to you.

Why is this important?  This is important because you have identified what you feel when you are at the ‘OK’ end of the scale, what you feel when you’re ’Good’, and what you think ‘Fantastic‘ is.  You have also, if you’ve answered all the questions, written down what is going on with you and around you when you are at each point of the scale.

4) Turn your paper over and quickly note the answers to these questions;

·         Going back to that question I asked you at the start of the blog, how did you answer and where do you think your response landed on the happiness scale? 

·         Are you in a comfortable place on you happiness scale or do you need to advance from OK to Good, or Good to fantastic? 

·         What needs to happen/change in order for you to advance on your happiness scale?

·         Write one small thing you can do in the next 24Hrs to step closer to that next stage of happiness.

5) To review, hopefully, you now have a clear idea of how you view your own world.  So think about it, what do you know? 

·         You know that ‘Sad’ exists but doesn’t have a place in your everyday happiness scale.

·         You know what it means to you to be ‘OK’, ‘Good’ and ‘Fantastic’. 

·         You know how you feel right now. 

·         You know where you want to be. 

·         You know what needs to be going on in and around you when you are there. 

To be honest, you know quite a lot, so what are you going to do with that knowledge… well, you just wrote down one thing to do in the next 24Hrs.  All in all, that’s pretty fantastic work on anyone’s scale =)

And do you know what’s so beautiful about this exercise?  It is personal, it’s unique to you, and it changes as you change.  Repeat it as often as you need to. Share it with friends if you feel comfortable.  It can also be looked back on to review how far you have come.

 

So how are you?  I'm.....

 

I hope that you found that helpful, and thanks for reading today!!

Namaste!

Drop Rocks - Let Go!

I feel the need to talk about letting go and moving on…. Not in the sad sense, but the sense of setting yourself free.

I remember as a child I was obsessed with rocks.  One year in the South of France whilst on a school trip, I was swimming life jacket clad in a lake.  I remember finding a rock, that for some reason I wanted more than anything.  Only problem being, it was as big as my head, extremely heavy and I had to get it from where I was in the lake back to the shore.  In my infinite childlike wisdom I decided it was an awesome idea to stuff it in my life jacket and swim with it across the lake to reach the shore. 

Needless to say, I very nearly drowned myself through my insistence that this rock come home with me.  I struggled and struggled before I was eventually rescued by a flabbergasted teacher who proceeded to lecture me for the last 3 days of the trip.  My beautiful rock plunged to the depths of the lake never to be seen by me again.  However…   I found swimming much easier and lived to write about it, so I’d say that story ends well  =)

Why am I telling you this?  I am sharing this weird little tale because it is a classic example of why we should let go, metaphorically speaking.  Imagine those things that you are refusing to let go of are rocks in your ‘Life Jacket’ and you are swimming from one side of your life to the other.  The weight of those rocks will either make that journey both difficult and uncomfortable, or they will overcome you completely and make it impossible.

Drop the rocks, your buoyancy improves and swimming becomes pleasurable and uninhibited.  I urge you to drop the rocks.

The feeling of being stuck in a rut, going round and round, living the same boring story every day… this is the result of our minds clinging to something in the past.  It could be a singular event or a whole period of time, even a person we have loved and lost.  Whatever it is, our reluctance to let go of this ‘thing’ or ‘things’, is the very reason we are trapped where we are, unable to move on and be free.

So it seems simple enough doesn’t it?  Just let go of whatever it is that holds you back and move on.  It is a perfectly simple solution that seems to stump the vast majority of us.  A simple act that just feels so difficult for us to actually complete.  Why?

I’m starting to believe that this is down to those little things called thoughts again; created by that crafty little brain of ours.  Our thoughts advise us that that these memories are useful and help us in our journey onwards.  They tell us that nothing is as simple as just deciding to move on.  That cunning little ego compounds all this by reminding you of the past every time you hit a similar situation again, it triumphs in saying “I told you so!”  Even your emotions and physical reactions respond to those thoughts, making you feel exactly as you felt in the past; making you feel like the pain, fear, anxiety is still relevant. 

Isn’t it?? 

The answer is that no, it’s really not relevant at all.  More rocks in your life jacket.  Dump them and swim for it.

So far I have made this seem like we are only ever clinging to the bad, but this is not the case, often the things we cling too are the beautiful things in our lives we had to say goodbye to, lost, or left through choice but still remember fondly.  Things we think we have had once and will never be lucky enough to have again.   Many people long for a past period of time where everything felt right, or a person they loved who is no longer around…. Heck, some even wish they were children again when things were simple.

If you sit and cling to these things and refuse to let go then you are absolutely right, your life will not magically morph into something spectacular.   Because you are anchored where you are.  In fact there is a distinct possibility that your are already sinking.

Drop the rocks.  Swim. 

Earlier this year I decided to perform a mini letting go ceremony.  I won’t go into too much detail, however it involved soul searching, a Chinese sky lantern, burning of items I no-longer want in my positive space…. And a lot of self love.  That night I felt like I had lost 50lbs and could fly off after my lantern.  I designed my letting go ceremony so it meant something to me.  I poured every ounce of resolve into letting go of those issues I had identified, so that when that lantern floated away and the smoke from the fire rose…. I was saying goodbye.

 

 

If you are honest with yourself, you know what holds you back.  Your crafty little brain is actually quite stupid…. If you ask it, molly coddle it and make it feel important, it will tell you what holds you back.  Trick it, and when you have the answer, design your ceremony, and then go drop rocks!  What have you got to loose?

Namaste

 

 

New Adventures, New Beginnings

The idea of starting a new venture often fills a person with emotions, thoughts and feelings which swarm together to create that odd sensation which at its best can motivate you to complete said venture, or at its worst convince you that it must never be attempted in the first place.

We all know this feeling; we have all felt it at some point in our lives. 

Hope that this will be the best experience of your life, followed closely by the fear that your venture will fail. 

The exhilaration to be breaking out of the mould, swiftly followed by the realisation that unchartered territories hold dangers we cannot imagine.

Happiness….. Pure joy, that at last we have made the decision to move on out and be true to our dreams, shot down by the immediate realisation that we have no idea how our dreams can become reality… what if they can’t??  What will we do then??

Embarrassment, exhilaration, terror, impatience……… how is it possible for all of these things to coexist within one person and appear at the spark of one idea.  The idea that could, and most probably will, change us beyond our wildest dreams if we let it.

Here is the crux of it, the real dreams, the ones which make us feel warm and tingly to consider them as possibilities…. Real dreams are our spirits talking to us, telling us exactly what we are meant to be doing and exactly how to do it!!!  But the vast majority of us don’t listen to them and instead turn to something we believe is telling us the truth, based on facts, experience and knowledge of the world itself.  The majority of us file away our dreams and replace them with our thoughts.

Yes, you read that correctly.  Most of us replace our dreams, the voice of the being which gives us life, with the thoughts of the body we live in.  Thoughts are entirely based on memories.  Their so called knowledge comes from something that is no-longer real!  It is gone, past, done with.  Our minds alter the information they received almost as soon as it enters our brain.  100 people can watch the same play and 100 people will have 100 different versions of it playing away in their memories, recounting 100 different versions of the play 10 years later when asked about it. 

The spirit on the other hand, has no connection to the past and its only connection to the future is that it knows what it is and therefore where it needs to go.  The spirit lives in the present, it thrives in the present because that is the only place it can do things.  It recognises that action cannot be affected in any time other than the present and it sends us messages, in the form we call dreams.

Going back to that cocktail of emotions earlier; this is the result of conflict between our soul voice and our thoughts, or as some call it, our spirit and our ego.  Collectively as a population of human beings, we need to get in touch with our spirits and listen to our soul voice.  Dreams need to be discovered and followed.  Then our word will thrive as it should do, full of healthy, beautiful souls all living together in harmony.

So this is where I find myself as I start my own new venture.  That little idea, formulated in my mind evolving and changing with each given day, each new breath.  The idea that has remained locked away in the ‘Dreams’ compartment of my brain just waiting for me to take it out and look at it, praying to itself that when I do take it out, I don’t file it away again with so many other forgotten dreams. 

You are probably wondering how a blog can be a dream.  It is true that a blog is simple, and pretty much just a method of sharing your thoughts, experiences and life with others.  But searching this massive expanse of knowledge we call the World Wide Web, I have come across others whose blogs are so much more.  They share what they create and most importantly, they inspire, motivate and inform others on how to do the same.

The creators of these blogs nurture their audience and give them the food which they need to grow and become stronger as individuals.  The best bit is, they use their own inherent skills to do this, skills that already exist within them, skills that exist inside everyone even when they are unaware of it.

My dream is to create a place where people can go to feel nurtured down their very core.  A place where they can find the things they need to nurture themselves.  My dream is to motivate, inspire and bring beauty to peoples live through the art I create, the words I write, and the information I present to them. 

My blog is a starting point on this journey.  My first step towards the bigger picture; the physical, touchable, 3 dimensional space that I will create in a few years time.  My dream is to create a beautiful, spiritual, soul nurturing space accessible to all (one that will serve the best coffee for miles around).  Right now in this beautiful moment, that dream starts here.

I dearly hope that as my blogs get updated, my artwork displayed and your comments and question answered, that my dream will benefit you, the reader.  Please feel free to offer suggestions on topics you wish to see on here.  And thank you for absorbing my bloggings =)

Namaste