DIY brush guards! Make your own brush guards! Cheap Brush guard tutorial! (Big brushes, tiny brushes and a angled eye liner brush!)

Brush guards are great - after washing your brushes you can really get the water out of them by placing your brushes upside down while keeping the shape intact. They're also great for travel too, so your brushes don't get squished in transit. I'm too cheap to buy brush guards, particularly with the amount of brushes I have, so I DIY them. You can buy the mesh on Ebay for extremely cheap, I think I ordered 1m from China for 99p, so it took a month but hey, it arrived.

I don't think I'm the first to do this - if someone else has done it then by all means go for it. A quickie post on how I did it and that's all from me folks!

You'll need thread, a needle, scissors and the brushes you wanna make guards for. If you only want to use guards for big brushes, then you won't need anything but scissors and you can slide your brushes through straight away.

I've used the mesh on a variety of brush sizes, the DIY will cover how I made a guard for a tiny tiny eco tools eye brush, and a zoeva angled liner brush.

The angled eye liner brush, due to to it's shape, will be cut differently and won't be as tight as other brush guards, further explanation below.

1.  Cut enough mesh to cover the head of the brush.

2. Cut the mesh at an angle, so the largest part will be the part covering the brush head.

3. Get sewing! Doesn't have to be nice or neat, just poke the needles through the mesh holes and bind the mesh together firmly so the mesh doesn't come apart and can take a brush being pushed through.

 4. You end up with a thing that looks like this.

5. Slide the brush into the mesh starting from the bottom of the brush, and there you have it. The angled brush shouldn't be squished up and should be able to be placed upside down for drying without the brush falling through. If it does fall through, it means you need to sew it tighter. Better tighter than looser when sewing these - if it's too tight then you can just stretch the mesh a little.

6. Leftover mesh? 

7. Make a tiny brush guard!

8. See how thin it is in comparison to the brush? (Travel sized tiny brush by the way.)

9. But it fits perfectly cause of the stretchy - ness! With normal brushes you can just make the guards as tight as possible - the angled brush is an exception because it's flat, so you don't want to squish up the sizes and deform the brush! That's why I made the guard flatter and a little bit looser than my other guards. 

10. Ta da! Perfect for putting your brushes in to dry after washing!

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Easy Nail Art - purple dots

I love simple nail designs. Mainly because I haven't got the time or skill (as of yet! I'll get it one day ;3) to do anything difficult on my nails. I recently bought nail art brushes, and I wanted to try out the dotting tool (easier to clean than a brush, lazy old me didn't fancy cleaning at this time of night) it's soo tiny I wanted to see how well it would do. It was also the first time using acrylic paint on my nails - not too bad for a first attempt, but I do want to use nail varnish sometime, as acrylic dries really quick.

Here's the brand of acrylic paint that I used. If you live in the UK it's super cheap for the pack, around £2.99? Any acrylic paint will do, I don't think this kind of paint is expensive anywhere.





Nail varnishes and tools:
- Avon revitacool base coat
- Sally Hansen Hard as Nails ( in White Tip)
- Sally Hansen Insta-Dri top coat
- Violet acrylic paint
- Dotting tool from nail brush set (from Ebay, just look for the 15 brush set with brushes that all have white handles. It's also one of the cheapest sets on Ebay, so it's not too hard to find.  )





Super easy! Complete beginner's nail art.






Here's a 6 step quickie guide:
1. Apply base coat, wait till dry.
2. Apply white nail polish, wait till completely dry. (Make sure it's dry, otherwise smudging will ruin it.)
3. Squirt a small amount of paint out and take the dotting tool. Try making a few practice dots on a spare surface.
4. Once you get the hang of making dots on the spare surface, make some on your nails in a line. (If you mess up, the paint does tend to stain the nail. Wipe off the paint with a tissue or cotton bud/pad then you can add a thin layer of white nail varnish to cover the staining.)
5. When all nails are done, wait for the paint to dry.
6. Apply top coat, wait till all nails are dry.

And you're done! Hope this was fun to do, practice makes perfect guys, and trust me, I messed up a lot. x3

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Easy Nail Art - Super easy polka dot nails (ALL CREDIT to Small Good Things.com!)

Hey guys - since I paint my nails quite often I might as well start posting about them right? I'm no nail guru, I always sticks to easy design but maybe one day I'll start doing more difficult designs. I often browse the web for nice and easy tutorials and this one is credit to Small Good Things, check it out! (I understand that I've posted the same design before, just I've vastly improved with the tutorial help.)

http://www.small-good-things.com/archives/1542

And here's my attempt! Not too bad for a first try using a toothpick right?

Small Good Things is a great site, some nice and easy designs mixed in with some more difficult ones. Pretty please with this first attempt though, a thing to note is that when using a toothpick you might want to cut the end off to make it blunt for slightly bigger dots. Poke the dots gently, and never EVER rush. I messed up more than once on one nail because I didn't space the dots properly. A few extra seconds to consider the placement makes a MASSIVE difference!

Here's the stuff I used by the way, with a mini review next to each one in case you're thinking of buying them.

 2 Revlon nail varnishes, one in a very light blue and one in a bright silver. Neither are dark, but all you need are 2 contrasting colours.

The nail polishes are both from the Revlon's older collection, but you can still get them online I'm sure for much cheaper than drugstore price!

710 Cloud is a thin nail polish, but is in the "top speed" range, so dries really quick. 2 or 3 coats don't take long on each nail. I think with lighter colours you tend to find them to be thinner.

918 Silver Screen is a thick nail polish, a nice bright solid silver. 1 coat is enough of this stuff, so it's nice for doing dots.

Best top coat ever. Not cheap here in the UK, but Ebay is my best friend! I reccommend after painting your nails wait till they are DEFINITELY DRY then add a coat or to of this. Be very patient, even though it says insta-dri it's something that should be left along for a few minutes to be safe. 5 minutes is what I tend to wait - just watch a Youtube video while it's drying. Oh, when they said anti-chip they're not joking. A good week of wear will always lead to the tip of the nail wearing away, but with this it's very minimal, I could probably keep a manicure decent for 2 weeks if I was good with this.

And finally, the wonderful toothpick. A strong pointed toothpick is good, I cut the end off mine and filed it down with a nail file to get it even. Worked pretty well, but be patient with the actual dotting and don't start until the nail is decently dry.

 Well, that's all from me for today ^^ see you all later! 

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DIY - How to make lace edged/trimmed cropped leggings/shorts

Hey guys, I was scouring Ebay for some lace trimmed shorts, when I realised that I could easily do it myself! I happened to have some 3/4 leggings sitting in my drawer and after a short trip to get some lace, I ended making some pretty decent leggings. Leggings nowadays can be pretty cheap, and a metre of lace isn't expensive either. Both of these together are much cheaper than the £7+ leggings on Ebay.

What you need:

• Leggings
• Pins
• Sewing machine (or you could hand sew) with appropriate thread colour matching the leggings
• Lace (1m or more, my leggings are  a size small, so it may be safer toe go with 2m)
• Ruler/measuring tape
• Pen/chalk to mark your clothing
• Scissors

Spread out the leggings so there are no folds or overlaps.

Take your pen/chalk and mark a straight line across both legs where you want your leggings to be cut. 

(Bear in mind that these will be folded up and sewn later on, so you may want to make it 3/4cm longer.) 

Taking your pins, pin across the line of each leg.

Make sure to pin through both layers of each leg.

Take your scissors and cut along the line ( don't worry if you cut a cm or two under)

Your leggings should look like this once both cut.

Remove the pins

Make sure the ends are straight, if you've cut a bit wonky you can straighten them up with scissors here.

Now turn the leggings inside out.

Take your pen again, and measure 2/3cm above the edge. Then draw a straight line of that height above the cut across the leg. Do this to both legs.

Using the lines you have drawn as a guideline, fold up each hem of each leg and pin the edges down.(Only pin through one layer, and pin all the way around each leg.)

To make sure that both legs are even, fold the leggings like this - if they match it means they are even. If they aren't even, you can adjusts the folds of each leg.

Take your leggings and sew up the hems you've just made with a sewing machine or by hand. Remove pins as you go along.

You should end up with legs that look like this.

Both hems sewn up.

 Check to make sure both legs are even.

Taking your lace (or even ribbon, whichever you prefer to attach)

 Pin the edge of the lace to the edge of the leggings. (You don't need to measure the lace, you can just sew until the lace meets where you started sewing.)

When using the sewing maching press the foot down to clamp the lace and the legging.

Do this step quite slowly, making sure the edge of the lace is sewn to the edge of the hem throughout.

 When the lace meets where you started, you can sew both lace edges together.

After sewing both legs, the hems should look similar like this.

Turn your leggings inside out, and you're done.

Many thanks for reading guys!

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