Posts Tagged ‘Fun’

Cancan hats are another trend that seems to be everywhere right now. Of course they’ve been around for practically forever with various names… straw boater, basher, skimmer, katie, senni etc. Here in Aus they are actually part of a lot of private school uniforms. I’ve always loved them because the remind me of picnics in the park with a nice cup of tea!

Anyway whatever you call it what I’m talking about is this:

Image courtesy of google, full credit to the owner.

Because they’re popular now they are quite expensive. So I decided to DIY my own ^_^

What you need:

• Round top straw sun hat
• Scissors
• Needle and thread
• Glue Gun
• Ribbon and lace for decoration if your hat isn’t decorated already.

You can easily pick up a big wide brim rounded straw sun hat for $2 from a thrift store and if you check out junk stores you can probably find one new for not much more than that! I happened to have one from back in my Country Lolita days that I had decorated with ribbon and lace but I’ve never actually worn it because the shape looked silly on me… time to make it all flat and pretty

Ok let’s get started!

At the top of the hat you will notice that the whole thing is made of a big spiral of straw which it stitches together. Carefully wedge your scissors into the top of the spiral and cut a few of the stitches.

Gently pull it apart, continue cutting stitches if you need to.

Start unraveling the sprial and cutting the stitches as you go ^_^

Keep going until you get to around this point:

When you get to here there are two options depending on the type of hat you started with. Some of these sun hats have very straight sides and some of them are basically a gigantic dome.

If you’re lucky enough to have one with straight sides then you can skip the next few steps.

If you have one with curved sides (like me) you will need to continue unraveling the hat until you to get to a point where the part that’s left is completely straight. This point might be different for you hat but mine was just above the ribbon band here:

Now you should get your needle ready and thread it.

Ok now it’s time to put it back together so the sides are straight and the top is flat!

Because the straw has been in a curved position for so long you will most likely need to bend it straight before you put it back together. Make sure to be gentle when you do this so you don’t damage it. I straightened it by putting it flat on the floor and gently bending it the other way.

Now you need to start winding the straw back into place. You can either do it the right way and stitch it in place or the quick way and hot glue it in place. Either way secure it as you go around.

You can see that the way I’ve put it back in place is much more vertical than the original pattern.

Keep going until you think your hat is tall enough and then do one more rotation around the top to make sure it is flat enough for the top of the hat not to be on an angle!

When you’re finished you should cut the excess straw off and secure the ends. I am going to cover the straw end with more decoration at the end so it doesn’t show.

Now let’s make the top! Get your left over straw and arrange it on a flat surface in a spiral.

You should measure the spiral to make sure it fits the top of your hat exactly and pin it in place.

Now stitch or glue your top in place.

Continue until it is the right shape and diameter. You should stitch the end of the straw around so it forms a circle like this:

Cut off the excess and this is what you get:

Do make sure that it fits the top of the hat before you cut the ends so you don’t have a gaping hole in your hat!

At this point I cut off the elastic string which holds the hat on your head because it was pointless and in the way.

Now on the inside of your hat, glue/stitch the top in place

You should get something like this:

Hurray it has a flat top!!

Now we’ve made the top shorter and flatter the large brim looks a bit silly! So let’s make it shorter

Find the edge and snip the stitches. It should come apart very easily.

I pulled out maybe 3 or 4 rows of it. Now secure the edge back in place.

And you get this…

Last step is decoration! I wanted a nice big rosette style thing on my hat so I cut off the long tulle tail…

And added another one of top. This also covers the join around the hat. Again hot glue or sewing is fine here.

TAADAA!

And there you have it, an adorable cancan hat that cost me nothing And I have another cute hat to add to my arsenal of bad-hair-day-hiding-tools

What do you guys think?

The way we get to the end of this story is a little long and rambling but it ends in nail art so I’m sure you won’t mind

A few months ago my Mum went on holiday to the Gold Coast and discovered a shop called “Del Sol” which makes products that change colour in the sun. Very 1990′s right? Well that was my attitude until she mentioned that they made nail polished that change colour in the sun!

She brought me home 4 of their polishes to try out. I was a bit skeptical at first but they actually change surprisingly well!

These are the colours in normal inside light:
Red with silver glitter
Blue with a pearly finish
Clear with silver glitter
Pink with a pearly finish

In outside light they change to:
Purple pearl finish
Red glitter
Purple glitter
Green pearl finish

I couldn’t remember the order I had them in while I was taking the outside photos so here are the photos matched up to their outside colours!

How freaking cool is that?

So back to the nail art story, I’ve been wanting to do some Alice in Wonderland themed nail art for years now but I’ve never been able to think of a design that would do it justice. Now that everyone is talking about Alice again I thought it was high time to try it out and the first thing that came to mind was colour change. You can’t get more Alice than that!

This is them inside:

This was also my first attempt at doing 3D acrylic. To be honest I’m not really happy with how these turned out, the idea was so much cooler in my head. Also I think that if I had spent more time practicing my skills I would like the end result better. I’m all out of the acrylic liquid now but I’m going to get some more and try again! Practice, practice, practice! The 3D parts are the Heart and Club card suits, the playing card and the White Rabbit on the thumb. I didn’t have coloured acrylic so I used clear and painted them after.

And outside:

I really loved the idea of the colour change polish but I don’t think I used as well as I could have. It works great on the index nail that says “Alice” because it looks plain until it’s in the sun but the other little details like the Cheshire Cat turning red-purple weren’t as obvious.

Another problem I had when taking the photos

Comparison between the two:

A close up of the hat and rabbit on the thumbs. The hat band changes from red-purple but because it was over the black it’s hard to see. The background of the rabbit also goes from silver glitter-red I am really proud of my White Rabbit though! My first 3D thing that actually looks like it’s supposed to

So conclusions:
-I currently suck at 3D acrylics but I will practice and get much better!
-These Alice nails weren’t great but I now have ideas for even more spectacular ones.
-Colour change polish is completely pointless but also very cool.

Also on a side note the adorable Momoberi gave me a mention on her blog too and I didn’t find out until I’d already written that last post! She was inspired by one of my hair tutorials ^_^

Have a great weekend everyone!

Evening everyone! Ok so tonight I’ve just got a couple of things to take care of before we get back to regular posting tomorrow.

• Firstly remember I did a review on Skin MD moisturiser a few months back? A lot of you had questions about where it was available and if it would be available in Australia any time soon. Well they currently don’t have plans to stock in physical stores in Australia but they do ship internationally. The only thing with this is that a bottle costs $18 and the shipping is another $9.95 which is not exactly cheap when you haven’t used the product before

Violet to the rescue of your bank balances!

If you want to order and you enter the promotional code “VIOLET” you will receive 20% off your order!

I know I’m going to be stocking up

• Secondly my blog has also been featured on lots of other blogs lately !

I did an interview with Pretty Wonderland about blogging.

I was featured on All Women Stalk in the post 7 Great Fashion Blogs.

I was featured in a “blogs we love” post on The Beauty Stop.

Tabby over at Life of Mine wrote this adorable post about me.

I’ve also been receiving some lovely emails from you all and I just wanted to say thank you all for continuing to read my blog. I hope I can make it even better in the future!

• Following on from that in an effort to make things even better around here I’m going to be making a couple of changes. Nothing major, just a few things here and there so please don’t mind as I tinker with the site. If something doesn’t work please let me know and I will fix it up! If there is something that you want to see on the website I’ll be putting up a little poll so you can have your say ^_^

• There is also a competition coming up for you all to look forward to!

Lots of love!