Monday Monday - Behind the scenes week

The vast majority of my energy this week went toward finishing my tattoo Wednesday and the subsequent loooooong slow healing process.

I've been using this organic cocoa butter based Redemption stuff for aftercare instead of the usual ointments and this is hands down the fastest heal I have ever experienced.

It's also pretty amazing as a moisturizing butter, so I may get more to use as a cuticle and scar butter down the line, but it is a bit on the spendy side for that.

Courtesy John Lally at Masquerade Tattoo NY
Click through to @jlallyart on instagram for a few detail shots

That made it really hard to move my right arm so I reacted to this by... hanging lots of pictures! I also set up that little Aero garden which has wee bebeh basil seedlings after only three days. Which is good because I could seriously eat all of the basil.

We have a slightly staggering amount of art which has pretty much never seen the light of day and I am resolved to jettisoning the poster tubes and getting it all up. Framing is spendy so for now I'm focusing on the already framed stuff. It'll be a slow process to get it ALL up to be sure, but so worth it to actually see all of the art we've been getting for each other over the years.

We are amassing a serious pile of stuff from Mondo and Angry Blue, especially - I also have the added complication of planning everything around a reprint of an original Frankenstein bus poster which is literally taller than I am (he lives behind the couch).

And I get to tetris it all into our tiny tiny tiny apartment! Hence the 1840s bat plate/Muppet movie melange up there. Whatever, it makes me happy.

Sometimes fancy crafting requires unfancy ingredients.

My other major project this week was to make a PVC lap stand for embroidery! I based it on this design and while my clothes and porch (and probably my lungs) were covered in PVC dust the whole thing took all of $20 and maybe an hour to put together.

I haven't gotten a chance to really test it out yet but I'm very hopeful... if I can keep the kitten from eating the rubber bands currently holding it together! It does have a bit of a tendency to explode.

It's not glued so I can break it down as needed and sub in pieces of different lengths to fit a multitude of other projects. Currently it is set up to hold my usual scroll frame over my lap while I am sitting cross legged but it will also hold a 8x11 Qsnap with a few piece changes.

The Badasscrossstitch yearofstitch project is moving along nicely and this weeks entry Fly Stitch may not be the sexiest but it's still new to me!

Monday Monday - almost missed posting on time due to DST!

I generally deal with DST by trashing my sleep schedule so hard that weekend that I barely tell anything is different on Monday. Works like a charm.

I got most of this written out earlier, got distracted by things, and suddenly realized it was almost midnight, oopsie!

Not much motion on the big stitching projects but I did finally start the Badass Crosstitch #yearofstitch and post the first week on Wednesday.

I have the second done as well but am not sure when I want to start posting them. I'm thinking maybe I'll post them Friday to split up the week a little bit.

The biggest thing that I did this week was finally rearrange my apartment. We moved in early July but the space never settled into a good functional flow and so many things never really seemed to find a proper place. We switched two of the rooms so that we now have the worlds tiniest great room and a separated office/craft/workout space.

Operation "be able to take a single picture in my home and not see a random cardboard storage box" is moving along nicely, but there's a lot left to do.

One of the projects I really want to tackle is a makeup and beauty product re-org. I literally have a box full of subscription boxes full of stuff that hasn't been sorted.

So of course I bought more beauty stuff on Thursday.

I stopped in at Ulta after my hair appointment to pick up the Tarte facial oil on the far right and see if I could get my brows done at the Benefit Brow bar (could and did!). I'd been stalking that particular NYX liquid Suede lip colour for a while so I grabbed that and another red. The third red was entirely accidental as I was comparing them to a color I knew I liked and simply forgot to put it down. Still haven't decided whether to keep or swap it. 

I really like a long sweeping liner brush so I'm enjoying going back to a true liquid liner but I would prefer it to be even more matte. I'm also looking forward to trying that silicone brush with a gel liner as I'm not a big fan of the usual suggested firm angle brush and I feel like I've lost the ability to do things I used to do daily on a moving train with liquid (I commuted to college and grad school).

I've gone back to dark blue hair as I grow out the white and it's like hanging out with an old friend. Note also my freshly waxed brow line! Even without filling them in (I always break out less if they don't fill them after) I haven't had brows that crisp since Halloween!

My nails were pretty trashed so I repainted them on a shade I hope will stand up to the blue hair dye. 

The more I use that gold flake polish the more I want to. Not to mention that I saw both a macro gold flake indie polish and a gold foil enhanced mani tutorial vid on instagram within the last day that I'm trying not to think too hard about. Following Sveta_Sanders is kind of a problem as it's Russian language so I can't even read her posts much less buy those polishes, and she post some AMAZING polishes.

My other main beauty related move this week is to drink lots and lots and lots of water. It's so trite but it really works and I hate that I forget that. 

I haven't used lip balm in days and I could probably apply a lip stain right now with no prep whatsoever. I was noticing my skin looking pretty grumpy lately (for example that pic collage above, eek) and this has immediately perked it right up.

What was sundered and undone shall be whole

...The two made one.

By which I mean I finally merged my two main blogs. This blog and my crafting blog will now live here as a broader lifestyle type dealy, hopefully in harmony.

The posts from the craft blog have been merged here (filterable via the Craft Posts Only link on the navigation bar above) and that blog will be going away in short order.

I'm also strongly considering merging my old craft livejournal into this blog as there's a LOT of good stuff in there, but those will be backdated archived posts and will likely be a long term project.

What else am I up to?

Edit: this idea has been nixed, everything is all in one place now, Huzzah!

I've looked at what it would take to run a broader topic blog the way I'd like and it basically involves writing my own code. I'm going to stick with Blogger for the time being so this is how I'm breaking it up instead...

I've started up a blog specifically for crafty and more lifestyley stuff:

Click image above to check out the new blog

So that whole plan of having one multi topic space? Completely abandoned for the moment. :(

Maybe someday I'll combine into one lifestyle blog, sadly today is not that day.

This page will continue pretty much as usual: hair, makeup, skin, clothing, accessories.
Other topic pages are linked on that navigation bar on the top of my page.

Lifestyles of The ItsyBitsy

I am a woman of many (many) interests and I'm finding this beauty specific space to be limiting, so I'm working on ways to shake things up.

Basically what I would like to do is set up a few separate topic pages here on The Itsy Bitsy so that I can post what I like when I like, and recast this as a broader lifestyle blog.

A weirder, craftier, fussier, Itsy-er, Bitsy-er, lifestyle blog.

My goal is to make it so that people who want to come look at the blog for a specific topic will be able to find it easily as it will all be archived by topic (beyond just by tagging, that is), but if they are interested in the other stuff I do they won't have to go far.

The beauty stuff will of course stay but I'm really trying to get back into fitness and crafting in a big way and I want to talk about those sides of me without having to maintain a whole passel of separate spaces.

I'll be playing around with page layouts in the coming days but I don't expect this to be terribly intrusive, more as I get things hammered out!

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.

Were you been all my life iCarousel Nail Polish Book App?

Inadvertent dupes. I think we've all done it.

You're in the drugstore, there's a polish you've been kind of stalking for a while but that brand is never on sale except just this once it's buy one get one 50% off.

You snatch up the holo glitter laden object of your affection and spy another shade that's pretty snazzy now-that-you-mention-it and finally you get it home to realize it's SO snazzy.....

...that you already had one just like it (but maybe even a better formulation) and now you have a dupe. If you pulled the labels off your swatch sticks you'd be hard pressed to match them back up correctly but it probably wouldn't matter anyway, they're that close.

Wah wah.

I've been doing swatch sticks for all of my polishes which has helped identify holes pretty well, but that doesn't really help when you're at the store staring at those polish racks thinking "that's right I needed a different teal" but trying to remember if you have THE ONE PARTICULAR variation of teal you have in front of you. Heck, I recently ended up with two bottles of the same shade of Superman blue. Thankfully it was a cheapie (Sinful Colors Endless Blue, in particular) but still a waste, and also not the first time I've done it.

Luckily as a problem solving hominid with an exorbitant mobile phone bill which I might as well get the most out of I have cataloging tools at my disposal the likes of which the world has never seen! I did a search for IOS nail polish apps and immediately found Nail Polish Book which has pretty handily solved the entire issue.

These images ganked from the app's iTunes listing

If you like me are into fussy levels of organization this may well be the perfect tool for you. Well, except for the laborious data entry part. That kind of stinks and I'm only about halfway done, but I figure that's my penance for having so much polish. The data entry is pretty easy, you can add your own notes, and get in to individual entries after the fact to edit with ease. Sorting is easy by any number of parameters, and results show both visual and text. Bonus: it searches in notes so you could set up a whole extra keyword system if you like. I really like that you can add your own entries to the shades listing, For example I felt the need to add "effect topcoats", "flakies" "multicolour glitters" and "crellies" as groupings as I find those items really don't group well by overall colour.

This is a screenshot from my phone, even here those two polishes are grouped together!

OH, AND BY THE WAY IT'S FREE*

I can only think of a few features to add.
First and foremost while I appreciate that it natively groups "shades" together I really like to see my stuff in carefully curated rainbow order so tweakable item ordering would be AWESOME. That said, this app is super handy for note keeping and shopping, but for actual in the moment "what colour am I going to use today" decisions I will probably continue using my swatch sticks, which I already keep on binder rings in rainbow order so that's not THAT big of a deal.
I just figure if I'm going to be fussy I might as well go all out. 

It would seem I really like cool pinks and aquas.

It would be cool to have some kind of pre-filled reference-able database because lazy and because sometimes my pics don't come out quite right. You can however add pics from your photo album, so if I found a better pic online I'd just have to save it to my phone first. 

Finally I am slightly concerned over what would happen to my data if I lost/traded in this phone because entering my collection has been a fairly big time sink and I can't tell if this is data backed up anywhere other than locally on my phone.

So yeah, if you have too much nail polish, a fussy personality, and an IOS friendly device, get on that. I don't see a direct Android version but there seems to be a similar product. I haven't tried that one out though so caveat emptor.


*I am not being compensated in any way for this review. Stumbled on this one on my own.