MUFE Pink Beige

Here's me, wearing MUFE's Pink Beige and UD's Sin Primer. As you can see, it's a very work safe look, but it makes me look younger, and I'm at an age where I definitely appreciate all the help I can get!

Beads, beads and more beads!

Some pictures of the haul from our trip to the Intergalactic Bead Show last weekend. Out of all the shows we go to, Intergalactic is probably my favorite, since it has a variety of sellers offering more than just strung beads. My seed bead lady Laura of The Bead Room is always at Intergalactic, and she usually has a special new color for me to admire. She and her husband are also Terry Pratchett fans, which is always a sign of good taste. :D

On to the haul!

See the skull beads in there? We're ready to make many more Sugar Skulls and Sugar Skulls II necklaces!

I talked Joey into picking up some of the Mookite beads for a necklace of his own. They're the soft autumn leaf shade beads on the right. There are also some soft ivory and green mother-of-pearl beads in two sizes.

There are some wonderful heat treated blue quartz pebble beads in that haul, and even though I got them at half price thanks to a great deal from a new seller, the price still made me gulp. I still had to have them. Now if I could just figure out what I want to do with them...

Adorable glass chili pepper beads!

Seed Beads from the Bead Room. Even after all my restocking, Laura still had plenty of new things to catch my eye.

Does anything catch your eye?

Think Pink

Saturday's trip to Sephora was a success. I picked up Make Up Forever Aqua Cream in shade 16 Pink Beige. It's a gorgeously pigmented medium pink shade that's very flattering. It was love at first sight. I also snagged Benefit's Creaseless Cream Eyeshadow in Flatter Me. Flatter Me is more toasted and less mauve than it shows on the website, but it's a beautiful neutral shade for those days when pink won't do.

After exchanging my DDF moisturizer, I still had a dollar's worth of credit left, so I decided to pick up LipFusion's Lip InFATuation in First Crush, a soft pink nude. I have a sample of Lip InFATuation in the In The Flesh shade, and my quibbles with the brush applicator aside, I really liked it. I tend to go for the deep berry shades or classic red lip colors, but In The Flesh really sold me on the soft nude shades, and I think they'll be great for quick springtime looks. Because in case you missed me mentioning it, I am incredibly lazy when I first get up in the morning. Having some gorgeous go-to flattering pinks and neutrals will definitely help me go out the door feeling more like a human being and less like an extra on Shaun of the Dead, but if you see me in the morning and tell me "You've got red on you." I'll try to make sure I smile at you.

Watching TV With Your Feet

When I was a kid, I could never figure out why my father would switch the television over to an old movie, settle into his easy chair and then promptly fall asleep. Of course, if you even thought about changing the channel, Dad would wake up and grumble "I was watching that!" We called it "watching TV with your feet" because that was the only thing even remotely pointed at the television when Dad got his nap on. I could swear that my dad's toes had 20/20 vision.

When I was child, I understood childish things. Now that I'm older and cranky without a nap, I see, and understand.

My path toward nap enlightenment started with a very comfy club chair and a microfleece throw I picked up as part of a gift basket I won at a professional development event. It was cozy, but not very generously sized, and I ended up fighting the cats for a corner of the blanket while those ungrateful moggies snored in my ear. Then I picked up two Mink to Fur Reversible Blankets on sale, one for my chair, and one for the couch.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have achieved Napvana. Give me my club chair, my new furry blanket, a few episodes of NCIS or Criminal Minds that I've seen before and I'm out like a light. At least until Joey tries to change the channel...

Good Advices

I'm probably way late on this, but I was pointed in the direction of Arcade Fire's viral video The Wilderness Downtown (which I must point out, takes Google Chrome to run properly and is a freaky mess of conflicting windows in an "I went to Art School and Film School and you didn't" kind of way).

The video uses Google Maps to show you the address you specify, which is supposed to be the house you grew up in as a child. Which it does, and I can even see my Dad's truck parked outside the house where I grew up and the pathetic mess the house across the road has turned into over the years. So, for coolness factor, it's pretty neat, even if I don't really get all the fuss about Arcade Fire. I think I'm supposed to, as a mid-thirties New Wave kid who likes her share of current hipster bands and old school irony, but I never really got all the fuss about Joy Division or Kate Bush in the '80s and '90s, either. *cough* I digress.

At the end of the video(s) (still not sure about that one, since there were like 10 separate Chrome windows doing their thing at one time all on top of one another - it was a browser love-in of massive proportions), you're supposed to write a postcard to your younger self, the self that grew up in that house address you plugged in five minutes earlier and said "Wow! Mr. Harrison needs to mow his damn lawn!" about. So, I thought about it, and I decided to tell the younger me the one thing that all kids need to hear growing up, and few ever do:

Don't worry about what other people think of you. Just be yourself, as hard as you possibly can, because you're awesome.

Even if it isn't always true, it damned well ought to be.

DDF vs Stila

Tomorrow, I'm heading out to my local Sephora to exchange an unopened tube of DDF Mattifying Oil Control UV Moisturizer SPF 15 for cream eyeshadows I've had my eye on trying.

The DDF moisturizer has been my daily moisturizer for about a year now, and I have no complaints about how it works for me. It did exactly what it promised it would do - controlled the daily outbreak of oily skin on my face and gave me some sun protection. The texture is smooth and somewhat thin, making it easy to apply, and with once daily use (I use a moisturizing serum at night), a tube will last you about three months, making it $14 a month, which to me was a reasonable price to pay for not having oily skin. So, this is not an idictment against the DDF product, but a comparison of my old solution versus the new one I'd found.

After two weeks of using Stila's Sheer Color Tinted Oil Free Moisturizer SPF 30, with very pleasing results, I decided to use the itty bitty bit of DDF I had left from the opened tube with L'Oreal's Studio Secrets Magic Perfecting Base under my mineral foundation to see how it compared.

Bottom line, for me, Stila wins.

Even though the Stila moisturizer is much thicker than DDF's, it does apply smoothly and gives me a lovely wash of color before I apply my foundation. Not only that, but it acts as a mild concealer, covering my red and troubled areas with just enough tint to hide them easily. I did not get this result from DDF + primer. My makeup is still on and my skin is still mostly matte, but it's lacking that little bitty bit of smoothness and pretty "Your skin but better" look I've gotten used to by wearing Stila + mineral foundation. And, let's be honest, two steps versus three steps is another vote in Stila's favor here, especially when you're as lazy as I am when I first get up in the morning.

Serendipity and Shiny, Shiny Beads

One afternoon in the recent past, I was casually admiring the necklace worn by a co-worker and idly considering how I could work stationed designs into my own work. I was still pondering this new design direction when I decided to hold a pre-Valentine's Day sale in our Etsy shop so I could buy myself a pair of very pretty sequined Dansko clogs for Valentine's Day. Well, what should arrive in my Etsy convo inbox but a request from a very clever customer asking me if it would be possible to make a stationed "Y" shape necklace ending in a spiral pendant and crystal dangles. Clear and concise mock-up artwork was included, which as any designer of anything will tell you is a HUGE help. I looked over the design my very clever customer had in mind, went through the internal specs/materials checklist and decided that not only would the design work, but that I could not wait to get started on it. It was as if my very clever customer was reading my mind and had made my idea ten times better. Behold the result!

Bigger picture version here!

As with every customer-driven design (of which there are many, and for which I am exceedingly grateful), the customer gets input on the naming of the item if I decide to offer the item in the shop. Since this particular customer already has a totally gorgeous spiral necklace named in her honor, we settled on naming the latest joint creation "The Charming Miss M." I hope you love it as much as we both do.