I take thee hammer: adventures in diy

My introduction to fixing things and diy.

Today I bought a little pink portable nail polish dryer. It’s quite adorable but as it only cost $10 it’s not the most well make piece of craftsmanship in the universe. It wasn’t exactly made in the alps by blind virgin monks in solid gold castles.

So after taking it out of the box I noticed an annoying knocking sound when the fan turned.

I got out my tools and set to work. Yay for floral tool sets!
Fixing things has never been a talent of mine but after half an house or so of tinkering my little dryer work brilliantly!The only problem is that after gloating and rubbing my awesome talents in James’ face I noticed that I have 3 screws left over…Oh well! No one needs to know!After all that hard work I decided to have some fun and deco the little guy. Who doesn’t love Decoden?Meet my deco’d finger eater, NOM NOM NOM NOM!Unfortunately I ran out of jewels half way through, I’ll post some photos once I get around to placing another Strapya order.

Decoden Pill Box

As part of James’ Christmas present to me he placed an order to Strapya World for decoden supplies.

It arrived the day before Christmas Eve and I was ecstatic! The biggest part of the order was the 2008 Pink Girly Lucky Pack and sweet bajebus was it full of awesome!

So after spending a while just enjoying opening and sorting all the tiny packets of decoden jewels (the best part I think!) I decided to put my new toys to use!

This originally was my boring old pill box, now it’s much prettier!


I showed it to James’ Mum and she thought that my pretty green Advil were part of the decoration. That’s right, even my medication is pretty, beat that! XD

Nail Art Style- Black and White Nautical Pirates

This week’s nail art style is nautical.

I love this style so much! Credit where it’s due I copied the idea it from these nails. She has such fantastic ideas and style! If I wore stick on nails I would have ordered from her several times over by now!

Apologies for the small photo.

I’ve always been in love with pirates and nautical themes so this seemed perfect for me. The thumbs have anchors, the middle have wheels and the pinkies have compass points. I tell you what, putting that many tiny balls on there was a pain but they are so cute!

Doing fun nail art designs like this makes me want to order some more supplies so I can do fancy designs more often. 

Nail Art Style- Pink Princess

Here is my nail art for this week.

It’s a simple pink cute princess style with lots of glitter and shine.
This is one of my favorite nail art styles so far. I love how elegant it is while still being completely over the top. You can’t get much more girly than 2 shades of pink with glitter, pearls and diamantes!

These ones took quite a long time to do because each layer had to completely dry before I could start the next one. The pink polish was a present from James and while I LOVE the colour, it takes quite a long time to dry so I managed to mess it up a few times and had to start again. Also I accidentally fell asleep at one point so surprisingly I had to redo that coat XD

I’m slowly progressing in nail art and while it’s probably going to be a long journey, I think it will be worth it!

Nail Art Style- Red Hearts

This nail art style was from around a month or so ago.

It was the first time I had ever tried doing my own acrylic nails and I loved it! The design is a plain red with pink diamante hearts and tears on either side so it kind of looks a bit like CLAMP style wings. I’ve been pretty obsessed with nails for a long time now but I’ve only had acrylics once before and they were done at a salon. They are really short compared to a lot of people’s nails but I’m still getting used to the idea of longer nails so I thought this was a good length to start with.

Here is some other nail art I’ve done.

I have been a nail biter since before I can conceivably remember and having acrylics are great to combat that because I can fiddle with them all I want but they’re not going anywhere! So yay for nail art!

Hime Gyaru Simple Lace Flower Tutorial

Awesome over the top shoes with lace flowers are a staple of Hime Gyaru fashion. Now I’m not saying that you should ditch those Jesus Diamante pumps in favor of my cheap lacy flowers but here is a slightly less expensive option.

For Christmas this year I was given some cute wedge shoes that I wanted to doll up a bit, with no money left over after the holiday season here is what I came up with.

Simple Lace Flowers Tutorial

Materials needed for lace flowers:

Violet’s special tip #1:
I would suggest that you buy nicer lace than I’ve used here, this is just what I had on hand at the time.

Ok so now that you’ve gathered all your materials together it’s time to get started!

Step 1. Thread your needle


Step 2: Starting at the scalloped edge on one end of the lace use a running stitch to stitch down the edge. Gather it so the end of the lace is dragged to a point as above in the photo.

Step 3:
Now continuing your running stitch, turn the corner and stitch all the way along the straight edge side of the lace and up the other side again. When you’re finished the line of stitching you’ve made should look like a big long “U” shape and the only side that is left unstitched should be the scalloped edge.


Step 4:
Pull the thread carefully so that you end up with nice ruffle as seen above.


Step 5:
Tie your thread off but don’t cut it yet.

Step 6: Now hold the end of the gathered edge and start rolling. In the photo above, the white line represents how the edge should be curled around itself in a spiral.

Step 7: Now start stitching around the spiral to hold it all together. It should look something like the above picture with the white line representing the spiral and the green lines representing the stitches. When you’re sure that it’s secure tie off your thread.

Step 8: Keep a good hold of the rose and glue your badge back in place. Be careful not to burn yourself with the hot glue!

Step 9: Once the glue is secure open up the pins on the badges.

Step 10: Cut out 2 small circles of felt, the diameter should be slightly smaller than the width of your badge backs. Now glue them over the open badge back so they cover all the glue and leave a nice finished look.


Step 11: Turn it upside down and spread the “petals” out. here is a finished flower! Now if you want you could make a second and attach them to your shoes.

Here are the shoes I got for christmas, what do you think? Tadaa!

Violet’s special tip #2:
Obviously you could use the lace flowers on things rather than shoes such as a corsage or a hair piece.

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