Monday Monday - those May Flowers better be spectacular edition

It's been a freezing rainy mess of a week. 

Forsythia flowers I expected, frost flowers not so much.

The trees are still budding and the grass is starting to perk up so I'm staying hopeful for Spring. My unsprouted basil planter however... that I've written off as a late frost loss.

I no longer accept the concept of a basil free life so I started fresh seeds in a trash-hacked plastic bottle seed nursery this weekend and I'm taking advantage of the spare light from my wee Aerogarden. I did about 1/3 classic sweet Genovese and 2/3 a deep purple colored Genovese style basil variety called Amethyst Improved. I'm hoping to see those sprout in the next week or so.

I got my hairs did this week and I've finally gone back dark, though since I'm growing my cut out I still have enough lightened hair that I was able to go this amazing nearly indigo pen-ink blue.

As far as stitching goes I did a few #yearofstitch pieces, this week's post is up on my main Instagram @the_itsybitsy

Oh! Speaking of Instagram, if you like Instagram and you like cats I now have a feed specifically for mine! I always wanted to post more of them but felt like I didn't want to take over my feed. Now that you can do multiple feeds with one log-in I took the plunge.

Follow Renfield the Black cat, Quincey the ginger fluff and Mina the cow cat at @Catfaxabbey

I will only be following pet feeds from there but if you have a more general feed drop me a line on The_ItsyBitsy

I had a new computer desk debacle this week so instead of a working desk I have a pile of (mostly intact) pieces in the corner of the office waiting on replacement parts.

Sorry about the weird formatting on this post - the components for my desktop are scattered across the office floor at the moment and apparently blogging on an iPhone really just doesn't cut it.

To distract myself from all that annoyance I wanted a fussy embroidery piece, but I'm still fighting with the new stand a bit too much to comfortable stitch on my big HAED piece. I picked up my Blackwork Journey piece instead and finished the first block. The stitching is so fine it's hard to get a pic of the whole thing that also shows the designs well, I think I may do a slideshow of the individual blocks at the end.

After that I picked up a gift piece I've been working on for a few months now but I'm not showing that off yet so progress pics may be scarce for a bit.

I see your true colours shining through...

Jo-Anns Craft's 20% off coupon + 30% off sewing baskets + cute black cat pattern means of course that Papa's got a brand new ba... sket.

I've really needed something I could use as a project basket; I have a giant utility basket for materials/tools storage and a smaller essentials/travel kit in a Cadbury tin, but nothing I could functionally work a PROJECT out of while sitting on the couch or hanging at a Stitch and Bitch. It has a nice big open bottom and a plastic top tray with a little pincushion and pocket attached to the lid.
Also Black Cat, which is very important as I have one, and I luuuuuuuurve him.
Not that I don't also love my other two cats, but he's my heartcat.

*cough*and.i.also.got.some.aida.cloth.and.a.bunch.of.DMC.floss.and.a.halloween.patterns.magazine*cough*

Speaking of DMC floss, I got a practical lesson in dye lots today!
Thankfully one that didn't come to light in the middle of a piece as that's usually how it goes for me.

I went looking for a pale silvery-grey colour to do a sort of tone on tone piece and grabbed a handful of this DMC 3024 Very Light Brown Gray (which is totally NOT what I'd name the colour).

I thought at first that someone had mixed colours together as one half of the skeins had a cooler shift and the other had a slightly greener shift but the skeins all had the same code on them. THEN I thought I was being kind of crazy about it until I checked the dye lots.

I separated them by the apparent colour and sure enough every single one of the cooler skeins had the # 6609036Q on it, while the rest of them were split between about three other numbers - leading me to believe that that Q lot was the off one.

Hopefully you can see the difference in the pics above. It was pretty subtle so I don't think it would be an issue on a multi-colour piece, but I wanted these specifically to do an all one colour piece so I'm REALLY glad I checked.

I also picked up some brass stretching tacks and an octopus needle minder at a local Needlepoint shop called Ladybug Stitches, so I'm all set to get a planned project going. I was hoping to find fabric but the shop isn't really stocked for cross stitch stuff. Jane the owner(? I think?) was however super nice and actually remembered me from the last time I was in, which had to have been at least six years prior.

I now have more needle minders than I could possibly ever use in my life (with one more on the way) and I'm perfectly okay with that because octopus and pumpkin and spider (and mystery thing TBA because I know some seriously cool crafters).

And if you go chasing rabbits...

Sorry I've been MIA lately, it's busy season at my job and I'm moving to a new apartment at the end of this month so I'm a TETCH overwhelmed lately. I have a BUNCH of backlogged pictures and posts I have about two thirds written out, but no time to get it all organized and pretty enough to post.

On the plus side in less than a month's time I'll be in a place with lots of natural light for pictures and the perfect opportunity to re-organize my stuff so that I can hopefully get more use out of all the neat things I've picked up (and subsequently lost in the various corners of my bathroom).

The big beauty news for me at the moment is that I finally went white!

I absolutely adore it and I'm planning to keep it up for as long as I possibly can.

clicky this picture for detail

It took about four lightenings (well, three and a half technically) a lot of toning experiments (which is where that half comes in), a cast iron scalp, and an exceedingly committed stylist to get here; but it's PERFECT.

I'm currently looking for a discussion board of some sort for people with dyed white hair because I want to make sure I can keep this in tip-top shape. If you have a link please drop it here.

Nail Art Challenge #19 Harvest

A skittle manicure in the colours of the North Eastern fall.

This manicure was inspired by crunchy leaves and festive knobbly decorative gourds. I wasn't 100% sure that the colours were going to work together (or look at all good on me) until I finished, but in the end I was extremely happy with the transition.

I'm generally way more into cool colours, but I have been playing with bronze tones as neutrals a lot lately as an introduction to warmer colours, and I feel like pulling this off gives me a lot more license to play with warm tones.

Random bonus shot:

Prior to the above mani my nails were possibly the longest they've ever been without the assistance of silk wraps. The polish colour here is two coats of Starlight Polish Phoenix which shows a flame orange sparkle in the bottle and in sunlight but mostly looks like an acid green sparkle in pictures.

I kept them this long through helping someone move, and then broke the last quarter inch off of the ring finger getting out of my car. :/

For the best really as using a smartphone with nails this long is intensely annoying.

Nail Art Challenge #17 - Rock Some White While You Still Can!

A clean and simple manicure in piano-key white to ride out the last week before Labor Day.

I just took this mani off and re-polished my nails last night, so I figured it was high time to post the pic I took over a week ago!

The original plan was to do...something...? with this once the white dried, but it was so clean looking and I was so busy with wedding stuff I decided to leave it alone and let it speak for itself.

This is hands down the best white I've found so far and I achieved great opacity in two coats with a bit of additional touch-up in places though I'm still on the lookout for something that will be 100% opaque in two coats.

I don't know which product is responsible for the current state of my nails but I've been using the Orly Bonder Basecoat with the Gelous coat as a second layer for a while now and it's REALLY REALLY working.

I spent much of Monday moving a friend into a new apartment. At that point my nails were one week's growth longer than the pic above and I packed, lifted and carried all day with pretty much nothing but tip wear and a little bit of cracking/crumbling along the sides to show for it!

Nail Art Challenge #16 - Supermoon

A softly marbled, glow-in -the-dark(!), cling-wrap manicure inspired by the face of the full moon.

It took me a while to figure out what to do for this fortnight's challenge. My original plan had been to do a half-moon manicure but obviously I just did one. I didn't want to go too white because the next challenge is Labor Day/white themed.

I ended up Googling pics of the Moon and realized how beautifully marbled it looked, so I thought that may be something to work with. I'd never done a marbled manicure before so I wasn't sure how to approach it. I knew I'd seen what I was looking for, but all I could think of was sponging, which would be too even. 

img source http://www.oocities.org/~cphilg/astro.html

A bit of nail blog searching later and I stumbled over saran wrap or cling film manicures (link is to a Google image search) and I knew I had it!

I've linked to a tutorial here but basically you do a base layer of one colour which you let dry. In my case this was a dark taupe. I wish I had something a bit cooler grey but you got what you got. Once that layer is really dry you apply a coat of the second colour (white, here) and while it is still wet dab at it with a piece of crumpled plastic wrap until you achieve the desired effect. I ended up going back in a few times with the white as it is very sheer and I wanted a really diffuse uneven effect.

Some people just topcoat it there, but you can also put a coat of something sheer over the top for added depth. I used a yellowy glow-in-the-dark polish to smooth out and soften the design... and also because glow-in-the-dark makes everything better! I couldn't get a pic of the glowing that made any sense, but here is a brief video from my instagram.

I'm beyond psyched at how this came out. I think it is probably the closest I've gotten in any of these challenges to nailing PRECISELY what I had pictured at the outset. This technique was quite easy and also works spectacularly well to make lapis, turquoise, and tarnished copper effects so I will DEFINITELY be revisiting in the future.

I hope you all had a fantastic view of the Supermoon on Sunday, I ended up going out for a late run with my Fiancée and while we usually don't like getting caught out after dusk it was absolutely worth it to watch the moon rise. We even got to catch a small group of bats on the wing.

Review: L'Oréal Mousse Absolue permanent haircolor in 300 - Pure Darkest Brown

About a year ago I decided I wanted dark hair for my wedding and started growing my hair out a bit to open up my style options. I'm used to my hair being extremely dark espresso brown with almost purpley undertones. Not the sexiest colour, but it set of my skin tone fairly well.

I've noticed my hair colour getting lighter and more mousy over the last several years, but now that I'm not growing it long I rarely keep my natural hair colour for more than a few months so I was never terribly fussed. Now that I'm keeping it dark the amount of change in my hair colour has become REALLY OBVIOUS. Suddenly it's kind of... blah with blah undertones?

May 20 2014 - my hair completely virgin with fairly minimal product
This is the day that convinced me it was well past time to tweak the colour

I thought most people get darker hair as they get older (aside from the grey thing) but perhaps I'm just weird like that? Oddly my Fiancee's hair has also gotten lighter as he ages. Though I am sure part of it is due to the hair on the crown of my head being darker than the hair on the edges (the different cuts show off different hair), part of it is very likely due to heat damage, and I even wonder if a bit of it is due to using a tea tree shampoo (lately I go back and forth between Giovanni and a Trader Joe's clone of the same).

I had a really hard time finding a non-permanent hair dye in a colour I liked so I finally bit the bullet and picked up a permanent colour in early July... at which point I promptly banged my head on a shelf hard enough to split my scalp (no stitches or anything, but still no fun), delaying the hair dying for a good week and a half while that healed.

While I do look great in all shades of black hair - from cherry, to soft neutral, to blue black - these shades can look a bit stark on me. They really amp the olive in my skin tone and make me look extra exotic and I always feel sort of "Gypsy-ish" with black hair. I wanted to keep things a bit softer so I opted for a neutral-to-cool toned dark brown - L'Oréal Mousse Absolue permanent haircolor in 300 - Pure Darkest Brown.

Colour aside I chose this brand primarily because it is reusable! With the (notable lack of) length and thickness of my hair, mixing a huge bottle of dye at once is a massive waste. I was really excited to find something I could literally rinse off and put back on the shelf until I was ready to use it again. The reviews weren't particularly awesome, but I'm not worried about covering grey and a bit of damage actually makes my hair more manageable.

There are A LOT of detailed descriptions of the packaging out there so I'll leave that bit to everyone else, except to say that I think it worked out really well for me and look to see more products like this in the future. It comes out in a mousse texture which was very easy to work with and didn't drip in the slightest. It was also a comfortable size for my hands and the dispensing button was easy to use through gloves and with long nails. The packaging was easy both to setup and to breakdown for cleaning and storage.

I've used it twice now and probably have enough left in the bottle for a third application, so I definitely got my money's worth. The colour is EXACTLY the "just this side of burned" roasted coffee bean colour I had wanted and my hair feels noticeably thicker. It seemed to fade a bit fast but I wasn't doing anything in particular to preserve the colour and also spent a lot of time in the sun this last month. I'd rather have something that faded fast then something that left a fakey regrowth line.

Day after dying - blow dried with only a Carol's Daughter heat protecting leave-in applied

Caveat: this is the weirdest smelling hair dye I've ever used.

I always wonder why hair dyes are so perfumey and now I know. This literally smelled like something that liquified in the bottom of a vegetable crisper. While I personally can tolerate that better than the massive perfume aisle stink bomb I'm used to with hair dye your mileage may vary. No one else has mentioned this in reviews so maybe I got a weird bottle?

The provided conditioner did a good job of neutralizing this dye smell without (again) the usual massive perfume aisle stink bomb effect. I think I would call the scent fairly similar to lilac but not at all overpowering.

Pros: 
cheap - about $11.00 at Target
multiple applications in one bottle with shorter hair or root touch-ups
multiple sets of (nicer than usual black nitrile) gloves provided
no annoying mad science mixing and shaking with your finger over that hole in the end of the bottle
no wasted mixing bottle packaging
I liked the resultant colour
easy to use mousse texture
faded naturally (no fakey line of regrowth)
no horrible flower smell (however: see cons)
thickened my hair up a bit
nice shine
plenty of provided conditioner
did not piss off my sensitive scalp

Cons:
Smells like hot garbage: literally
seemed to fade fast (with the caveat that I did NOTHING to prevent this)
slightly long developing time
I imagine the mousse texture would make it harder to pinpoint greys for root touch ups if you were doing it without assistance

Disclosure: I purchased this product and all other mentioned products with my own money and this review was not sought or compensated for by L'Oréal Paris or any other entity.

Nail Art Challenge #15 - Creature Feature

An ultra vampy and completely freehand retro half moon gel manicure in shades of glittering starlet gold and sugar-sweet fake blood.

I went to an outdoor festival from Thursday of last week to Tuesday, and I knew it was going to involve a lot of stress on my nails. I've done this trip every year for about fourteen years and I usually I chop my nails off beforehand for simplicity's sake, but they were sooooooo long this time I just couldn't bear to. I opted instead to do a home gel manicure and hope for the best.

I had not yet used the gold glitter so I knew I wanted to do something with that, and when I saw the cherry color next to it I thought immediately of those ultra vampy 60s & 70s Dracula's Bride types, walking the line between menacing and seducing the protagonist with their long almond shaped nails practically dripping with blood.

The Iconic Vampira

The length is somewhat annoying (especially with my touchscreen smartphone) but they held up like champs despite a lot of wet and mud and physical labor. In fact I'm STILL trying to decide whether to trim them down! I love having the Red Carpet Manicure home set for exactly this sort of situation, but be forewarned, doing home gels takes a LOT of time, patience, and fussy attention to detail.

It probably wouldn't have taken something like two hours if I hadn't opted to do it completely freehand, but I'm never happy with the moon shape I achieve using stickers to mask it off. This method does have the very large advantage of having every layer completely cured before you move on to the next, so its easier to fix mistakes without messing up the base colour. The wine colour is VERY translucent though, so it took many layers to build up the depth of colour to my liking which caused a bump I'm not terribly fond of at the edge of the moon shapes.

Nail Art Challenge #13 - Under the Sea

A carefully matched Ombre Manicure in increasingly deep aqua/jade tones.

I guess it's pretty clear I have a thing about this colour! I don't think you could buy a set that close all at once.

I love wearing manis like these and it came out better than I could have hoped, but I'm not looking forward to the upkeep on these fussy satins! I've had the two darkest satin colours *over a decade* and boy was that obvious when I started using it. That dark jade colour fought me every moment. The only polish here under a year old is the glittery accent colour.

I'm glad I got back to these posts, the odd thing is that I actually DID the last two manis but didn't get a chance to take pics of them before they got too messed up.

My clothes really are quite cool

In order to set up my last post I spent several days looking intently at pics of what I actually wear, and I thought it would be neat to figure out if there was a unifying pattern behind my preferred colours.

This is a small swatch of nearly every non black/white/grey piece of clothing I've shown in pics here so far.

My "favorite" changes every once in a while but I've always been drawn to extremely vivid cool colours. Peacock, turquoise, and aqua have been in regular rotation near the top my whole life, but violet was undisputed Queen of my Tweens. I had a brief peridot green phase in college and a bluish-crimson phase in my late twenties. Purchases in the shades between fuchsia and violet have been very common for me lately - I have three separate shirts, a dress, and a pashmina featuring that orchid on the left and don't get me started on my growing collection of fuchsia shoes. I am noticing that I am *especially* drawn to the combo of a slatey navy + either kelly or orchid right now.

Yes, Pantone Color of the Year for 2014 Radiant Orchid as a matter of fact, but I called it first!

I had been trying to find a colour wheel with a breakdown of how colours are normally paired to see if there were patterns in what I was doing, but there was just something lacking.

RYB color chart from George Field's 1841 Chromatography; or, A treatise on colours and pigments: and of their powers in painting
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I found myself looking at how the colours I wear relate to the primary colours we all learn sometime around preschool (red, yellow, blue) and the rainbow of secondary colours we get from them but I just couldn't work out the pattern. Everything I found looked like the Crayola 8 box to me while my wardrobe looks more like an Easter egg hunt at a saltwater aquarium.

Never understood why it wasn't ROY-G-BIV +1

I started yet another Google search of colour theory images and this time something caught my eye. Here was an image featuring MY colours. Intense scintillating shades of grass green, cobalt, vibrant magenta, lemon, and aqua.

Oh, and red. Red is pretty enough, but I just haven't been into it at all lately.

What's the difference? This more vibrant wheel is is the primary (red blue green) and secondary (cyan, yellow, magenta) set of colours used for colour theory as it pertains to LIGHT. Unlike the strangely blah ROY-G-BIV pigment colours, which are what we typically learn as kids, I am ALL OVER this palette.

Break the blue/green side of this down into tertiaries and you get almost exactly the same palette as the one derived from my clothing above.

What does this mean for how I use colour? I don't know yet, though it is pretty neat!

I feel as a first step I may benefit from having a closer look into my heavy use of analogous colours, which are those next to each other on the colour wheel. I normally think of my jeans as neutral but in given my heavy use of cool tones they are clearly adding to this overall cool feel to my wardrobe.

Due to some revelations I have recently had about my skin tone I have been experimenting with slightly warmer colours in makeup. It may be fun to take this a bit further and seek out other small ways to add some warm pops in, such as with accessories and jewelry. I love stark contrast and this may be a great way to play that up.

It feels very simple in concept, and yet I feel like I've been given a whole new way to look at my wardrobe!