There and Back to Nails

During some of my forays into the craftier side of the interwebs, I stumbled upon people who turn books into purses.  These things are so cool!  I love the idea of taking an old or destroyed book and giving it new life.  Instead of looking for an appropriate book, I'm taking a sorta-shortcut and making a book cover for a fictional book because, why not?

This week's inspiration is from J. R. R. Tolkien.  Bilbo Baggins writes a book called "There and Back again", about his Gandalf-fueled adventures.  I'm making my own version of his book and turning that into a purse.  

There's been a lot of problems to solve.  One of them is what kind of handles I'm putting on the book purse.  You can find some very nice purse handles for sale, but they didn't inspire me as much as I'd like.  I also had a whole bunch of pages and I didn't want to throw them away, but no idea what to do with them.  Then it hit me... glue them together and make handles from the pages of the book!  

I love the idea of having the handles relating somehow to the purse itself.  It has that artsy self-referential element that makes my outer geeky girl squee. Of course, that leaves me with the problem of how to attach them to the purse... and for that I'm recycling the hardware from a purse that's seen the end of its days.  So far, I'm hopeful that it will work, but I've never done this before, so it's all a guess.

Girly Nail Art Time

So for now, here's a simple manicure that I did recently.  It's very easy to do and pretty versatile by mixing colors.  Using black, white, silver, and gold will have a very different look from one done with pastels or neon colors.  Use what you have on hand and play with the density of dots.

If you don't have dotting tools, which are needed for this look, grab some household items.  Anything that comes to a point will work... pencils, pens, bobby pins, and toothpicks all make great dotting tools.  

I've also seen dotting tools and other nail art tools available in drugstores around here, so they're mercifully easier to find for 10 bucks or so.  If you plan on doing a lot of nail art, they're very useful to have around, especially since I use them for some sculpting jobs, too.

Materials

Base coat

Nail Polish (minimum 3 colors.  I'm using lilac, blue, black, and white, mostly from the Sinful Colors brand)

Dotting tools with a small and large diameter.

Painting

File your nails and apply base coat.  Once dry, paint your nails in your background color.  I opted for something simple and used lilac on all 10 nails.

Use your large dotting tool and place dots with wide spacing on all of your nails.  I'm using white so that the other colors will pop more on them.  This is important when using a dark background color.  

 Place a 2nd color dot just slightly off of the white dots so that the white also shows.

 I used a smaller diameter dotting tool to make smaller dots in the spaces between my large dots.

I added black to some of the blue dots as well as some small black dots in the spaces left.

Finish with topcoat and let dry.