by VioletLeBeaux | Aug 15, 2011 | Beauty, Beauty-Tutorials, Craft, Tutorial
Eyelashes, I love them. I love them in all shapes and forms, crazy or little I don’t care, I just love them 😀 and you all know I like making things… so of course it follows I wanted to make my own lashes!
For my first attempt I went for something crazy, long and spindly, now that I’ve got the hang of it I want to make so many other kinds too! The result…
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What you need to make your own false lashes:
- Fabric, something thin and easy to take apart, I’m using organza which is perfect
- Small scissors
- Hair Straightener
So first thing’s first you need to cut a rectangle of the organza, the easiest way to do these is to use the selvage (finished edge that comes off the machine when the fabric is made) as the base. To prevent the organza from fraying and coming apart the side edges are finished like this:
So cut most of the selvage off but leave around a 1-2mm edge on the bottom, this will form the band of the lashes which will eventually hold the glue! Make sure you leave enough there that it doesn’t completely unravel.
You will need the rectangle to be as wide as you want the lashes then as tall as you want the longest part of the lashes. Better to leave them a bit longer than you think because you can always trim down later.
This is where it gets a bit tedious! What you need to do is slowly pull out all of the horizontal bits of thread in the fabric. You can use a pin to pry them free a couple at a time, nice and easy but very boring.
What you’ll end up with is something along these lines and a bunch of little threads all over your work space:
Getting there but they don’t fit the shape of your eye yet so gently pull and coax the base into a semi circle. It should have a little bit of give to it so it will hold shape. You can see the before and after below.
I made mine very wide because I didn’t know how long I wanted them to be, here’s one of my other lashes beside it.
So trim them down to the correct width.
Use the little scissors to cut the lash threads into whatever shape/length you want. I wanted them to be small in the middle then wing out. I also wanted to make the lengths more natural so I make sure not to cut straight across but instead by pointing inwards and snipping in small strokes.
Snip snip…
Taadaaa. Awesome but they don’t curl like lashes should so if you were to wear them now they would look pretty silly!!
To curl them we need heat but not too much heat because it’s effectively made of plastic and we don’t want to melt them!
The first thing I tried was to smooth the lashes carefully (VERY CAREFUL SO YOU DON’T BURN YOURSELF) over the curved edge of my straightener.
While indeed that did work, it wasn’t the smooth curve that I was looking for.
What came to the rescue in the end was my laptop tray table’s metal legs! Perfectly curved and conducts heat well. You can use anything this shape which conducts heat without melting (so no plastic!).
I held the lash on.
Covered it with a piece of fabric to hold in place and avoid burning fingers…
And used the heat of the straightener!
Bam lashes!
Gigantic lashes 😀 Spindly, long and fun to wear!
These are the kind of lashes that make me want to make smouldering faces XD
SMOULDER!!
So there you have it! My first attempt at making lashes went pretty well, I’m happy with them and I want to make a heap more of them in different styles 😀 I kind of want to try it with patterned fabric too and make some multi coloured ones, so many possibilities!
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by VioletLeBeaux | Aug 14, 2011 | Life
First thank you for your lovely comments on James’ post, you’ve all given him a swelled head and now he thinks he can take my laptop whenever he likes!! I’m still really tired from going to Adelaide yesterday but I’ll make sure he replies to all of you soon and I will definitely take all of your lovely comments into consideration XD
Anyway, more on that and Adelaide soon!
Snapshots ahoy and this time let’s start off with purikura ^_^ Not so sure why James’ head is in a cake in the top right but who cares, we’re riding an alpaca! James says it’s because he’s yummy and delicious and best served with Betty Crocker icing.
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This month started off with eating donuts from Walkers and pretty much only involved eating donuts from Walkers… a lot of donuts.
I love it there because they play swing music and James loves it because they sell America soft drinks and have $1 jam donuts XD
Before anyone asks: don’t worry it’s just a wig 🙂
There was a bit of shopping, well not real shopping more like walking through shops on the way to get to more boring destinations…
But even that resulted in this -_-‘
James spotted a blue version of the Valliant he just sold and was nostalgic.
I giggled inappropriately at the suggestive instructive pictures on these kitchen kitchen sponges.
I almost bought this cake decorating toy on sale but changed my mind last minute because the cupcake version looked so much cooler but wasn’t available. Completely pointless but so cute! I want to bake tiny cakes!
I discovered how awesome the idea of heat up slippers is and then realised our apartment is so warm we never turn the heading on anyway so it’s probably overkill.
I also stopped myself from buying pretty stickers because even though I love stickers I have no idea what to do with them…
I also didn’t buy this cute rainbow yarn, this snapshots sure seems to be full of a lot of things I didn’t buy XD That can be this week’s theme!
I thought about buying a bonsai tree and then remembered that between James and I we have killed several of them.
We ate a lot of delicious food court food on the way to other boring places.
Architecture break:
Random photo where we’re both actually in shot break:
Pretty floral break:
Some poor guy’s bicycle break… literally…
One more architecture break because I really like this clock!
We were invited to Games Night at Kim’s place. The rule is that new people have to win before they are allowed to be regular members of the group, I was paranoid but I won first time YAY! That’s an achievement because I really suck at games. And in case you saw the Pictionary post and were wondering, I didn’t beat James with a notebook at all this time so fun was had by all.
Speaking of Pictionary, now that the competition is over and the winners have been announced I can tel you all that James’ drawing was A SNAKE CHARMER! Good on the 3 of you that actually got that right! Though some of the other responses were much funnier than anything I thought of so I suggest you guys go back and read the other comments for a good giggle!
Kim has an awesome wall painted to be a white board so this was the night’s menu:
The reason it was pending a taste test was because we didn’t know how it was going to taste. So if it came out well it was mine and if it tasted terrible it’s was james’.
Celeste tested making curly fries with her new machine too 😀
The first game we played was Monopoly Deal which is basically a card game version of Monopoly but very confusing.
As always, I was a very classy winner. And I definitely did NOT throw my cards in the air and bathe in the game money I collected.
Too late guys, I won the first game, you can’t un-invite me now!!
After that we played chocolate Monopoly which was basically just an excuse to eat chocolate.
And then it was dinner time! We had cheese fondue which was a first for me. Very yummy!
Though towards the end the burner wasn’t working properly and we were pretty much just eating lumps of cheese and making suggestive comments about how it looked… my friends are all super mature just like me 😉
Awesome dinner spread!
So it was a wonderful night 😀
And I’ll leave you with our rules board which may be slightly biased to a certain member who is much better at strategising than everyone else XD
Hope you all had a great weekend, I can’t wait to show you all the stuff I got up to in Adelaide as soon as I can sift through all the video/footage!
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by VioletLeBeaux | Aug 12, 2011 | Life
Hello readers of Violet! It’s me, Jimmy! I know you were expecting some kind of miracle craft from Violet where she turns a cue tip, some old lace and a dollar store plastic flower into the best tasting doughnuts ever (wait, am I dating Macgyver?) but instead I have locked her away. HA HA HA!
Image credit: Listal.
You see, many people don’t know this but Violet used to work from 10am to 10pm and then spent the night replying to e-mails, comments, writing blog posts, taking pictures, thinking up new ideas, contacting companies and worrying if people liked it. Then we discovered how funny YouTube actually was. Between blogging and working on photography/graphic design/video work for clients we were already using up all of our peak-time internet, so we have to watch YouTube during the off-peak (2am-8am). So now Violet works from 12pm to 2am. That’s a 14 hour day, every day of the week. And she doesn’t stop for anything, I do the cooking and she eats at her desk. She used to break for Judge Judy, but then they cancelled it!!!
Finally enough was enough and I decided to force her to take a day off. I told her she is sleeping in, she can get up and have a shower, but then it’s straight back to the bedroom for breakfast in bed.
She was really worried about all of you, so I said I’d handle today’s post, then she got REALLY worried. But she can relax, we’re having fun, right? Right!
I then gave her a list of my top 10 Jimmy approved activities:
1. Read poorly written romantic novels and critique/poke fun at them (a guilty pleasure of hers)
2. Deco something (but no photos, she’s not going to sneakily turn something into a blog post on MY watch!)
3. Do nails
4. Bake something (again, no pictures)
5. Beat me at arm wrestling (my list was sounding a little chauvinistic)
6. Do some Japanese lessons
7. Tell me what to get her for lunch/dinner
8. Clean up the icons on her desktop (ooooohhhh how it bugs me)
9. Watch some TV/Movies
10. STRIPPEROBICS!
Image credit: Ioffer.
Did I get a punch in the tummy for that last one? You bet I did! I also suggested Terraria, but she thinks games that don’t have an end are pointless. Which I guess is true in a literal sense, but it’s so freaking addictive!!! If you haven’t played it yet, don’t. I played it once and now I play it almost every night for ages. I started to get bored with it, then I started from scratch with a new world and I love it again. Damn you Terraria!!!
Me being awesome in Terraria.
This is starting to get a little long, but maybe you guys could settle some bets for us? I say that while I’m sure you guys appreciate all the effort that goes into tutorials and reviews, sometimes you would just like Violet to post about more general stuff like what she did that day or what she has planned for her next day off in 2013. You know, general personal stuff. She says it would seem conceited and boring. So if you guys agree with me, sing it loud and sing it proud in the comments below! Violet will read the comments, but I will be answering them this time. Also I think there should be more of me here because I am clearly awesome! Vote 1 Jimmy!
Ah crap I forgot we are going to Adelaide tomorrow, maybe I should let her out so she can tell me what to pack? That doesn’t sound very relaxing though.
One last thing before I go, a plug.
ha HA! Plug. No but really, Violet has told me that I should post everyday to on MY blog which is about photography for beginners on a budget, so now I’m posting Monday-Friday. Trying to anyway, I forgot yesterday, even though I had actually written the post, I just forgot to post it. www.JimmyAmerica.com and if you have any photography related questions you can ask me here in the comments or on my blog. Maybe I’ll turn your questions into a post because it’s really hard thinking of 5 posts in a row. BYE!!!
Oh damn, she does some kind of code thing at the end here to make it only show the first picture and some text. I must have watched her do this a million times, why don’t I know how to do this? Uhhhh…tell you what, just pretend you only saw the first picture and some text, then you clicked a link and now you see the whole thing. There, I fixed it.
