Posts Tagged &quot;DIY&quot;

Thakoon + NARS polish collection

DIY nails: The Watermelon Manicure

Posted by ruth on Mar 6, 2012 in 2012, Art, Beauty | 0 comments

Have fun you guys!

Colours used are Sally Hansen’s Jumpin Jade & Sonic Bloom (Insta-dri), China Glaze’s For Audrey and Missha’s Black

OPI's Summer Collections - Minnie Mouse & Spiderman!

Every Cloud has its Silver Lining

A World of Ribbons – Ribbonesia

Posted by ruth on Feb 15, 2012 in 2012, Art, Crafting | 0 comments

Recently, whilst browsing on Pinterest, I chanced upon the ribbons and gift packaging by Ribbonesia. It definitely brings gift wrapping to a whole new level!

Given the limitations of the chosen material, creating realistic images is slightly harder, but it’s still pretty amazing. I absolutely love their gift wrapping!

My favourite ones would definitely be the bumblebees on the honeycomb and the circus seal. I’ll have to admit though, that if I received any one of these, I would be unable to bear the thought of actually opening the present, it’s so pretty!

I think it would be fun to pick up a few colourful ribbons and have an attempt at creating maybe one of these – the trouble is, none of them look easy and I have no idea what techniques they use, so it might be quite a battle there.

They look cute even as wall decorations! I’m particularly fond of the lion in the centre :) It’s a pity I don’t live in Tokyo, Japan, since the people of Ribbonesia even hold workshops to teach others (and raise funds for charity!) the art of creative ribbon making.

What creative ideas have inspired you lately?

Japanese Fashion [Part One]

Traipsing Around Tokyo - Mt. Fuji & Hakone Tour

It’s Gift Wrapping Time!

Posted by ruth on Dec 20, 2011 in 2011, Crafting | 0 comments

It’s that time of the year again and I just spent the entire weekend wrapping tons and tons of goodies! Granted, each of them is just a small little token, but I decided to make them a little more festive :) It’s not about the quantity, it’s about the thought that counts!

So tada! I made candy crackers! cracker shaped presents chock full with yummy goodies :)

The materials I used were:

Transparency
Pretty Ribbons
Wrapping Paper
Scissors
Scotch Tape
stuffings – e.g. chocolate, candy etc!

I absolutely loved the ribbons i got from watsons. cheap and pretty! But on hindsight, using cloth ribbons would’ve made for a neater and more presentable end product. The transparencies I got from my bf who found them while clearing out his room, but you can get any plastic or hard card-like paper. It definitely needs to be stiff material if you’re intending to use something else to substitute.

I used 1 Dove chocolate, 1 Mint Chocolate & either 1 snickers/twix for each of the candy crackers :)

Step 1: Create a circular Tube.

I basically cut the transparency into half (a5 size) and then using the scotch tape, taped it to become a circular tube. Of course, I had to make sure that my combination of goodies could nicely fit in. If you’re planning on using a substitute material, do use a stiffer material won’t crease. This ensures that the body of your candy cracker holds up nicely when you wrap it and won’t lose shape. I highly recommend hard plastic!

Step 2: Cut the wrapping paper.

To wrap it properly, you need to ensure the following-

The width of the wrapping paper can adequately wrap all around the tube without revealing its contents.
The length of the wrapping paper is in excess of at least 5cm on both sides – this is so that it’ll be easy to scrunch up the wrapping paper on both sides to get the effect

So here’s an example of about how much wrapping paper I used for one of the candy crackers. You really don’t need to be so precise, but do be generous with the length. I had a few candy crackers where I had cut the wrapping paper too short, & in the end they looked kinda weird. haha.

Step 3: Roll it!

Paste scotch tape on one end of the wrapping paper, making sure that half of the sticky side is protruding out.

Stick that part onto the circular plastic tube, so that it won’t move around.

Roll!

Once you’ve rolled it all the way (it’s a good idea to look at both ends of the wrapping paper to ensure that you’re not rolling in the wrong direction. keep the ends parallel!), use another scotch tape to secure the wrapping paper.

Step 4: It’s scrunching time!

Take out all the goodies (if you’ve got any) from inside the circular tube. Tilt the tube upwards and use your fingers to feel for where the tube starts underneath the wrapping.

At the tip of the tube, use your fingers to press down on the wrapping.

Do the same all around the tube until you see the line of the plastic. It’s a good idea to crease your wrapping paper in this fashion all around – this will help it to scrunch up prettier.

Step 5: Pinch it!

Now that you’ve scrunched up properly and know where you want to tie your ribbon, pinch the wrapping paper together to make it easier to tie your ribbon.

Arrange the top part of the wrapping paper i.e. you can open it up more, or make sure that the flares are more regular etc.

it’s a good idea to pinch it all around – this kinda makes sure that the creases are regular and it looks more cracker like?

Step 6: Tie the Ribbon

Tie the ribbon where you’ve pinched and scrunched. always use double knots! Once you’ve done tying the ribbon, fill your candy cracker up with goodies before doing steps 4-6 on the other side :)

Have a great Christmas everyone!!

Procrastination, thou art the Devil

Posted by ruth on Oct 23, 2011 in 2011, Crafting, Fashion, Home, Life | 2 comments

Lately posts have been slow coz knowing how to get that work-life balance doesn’t seem as easy as it should be. The concept seems easy enough, but with a long work day that’s exhausted you physically & mentally, a work-life balance kinda seems impossible. particularly because my work involves quite a bit of writing, sometimes i just mentally shut down without thinking & stuff like this happens:

At the end of it all, procrastination is way easier than getting up to have a social life :( & it’s an addictive method of time wasting, i assure you.

so I look for interesting things that could spice up my life. Projects that aren’t that hard to accomplish & ones that could be really fun to do, you know?

Tada! An insanely simple way of making a pretty wrap that could be perfect for the office. The sleeves are missing, but getting a nice printed wrap could really spice up a muted work outfit, particularly if you’re meeting friends for a girl’s night out! :D Especially if most of your work clothes (like mine) are mostly made of muted colours or monochromatic ensembles. Here are a few prints I wouldn’t mind getting for this project:

Geometric prints, animal prints, polka dots & flower prints.. these are a few of my favourite things! Too bad most of my work wardrobe doesn’t consist of such prints – so having a colourful & fun wrap would really brighten up my day :)

Another thing I’ve been thinking of doing is re-look at my eating habits. i.e. Eat more “negative calorie” foods, which are basically foods that take more energy & calories to digest than the amount of calories inside them! Smart way to diet without sacrificing on amount, eh?

Besides, looking at this list, I really do love quite alot of these foods, so it wouldn’t be a struggle to eat them, but I do have to make a more conscious effort / choice to eat healthily.

I love hush puppy shoes because they’re so damn comfortable, but the colours available are so bleah. I know it seems like a crime to vandalise a pair of $100 + pumps, but I’m seriously contemplating pulling a fairy godmother stunt to turn a plain pair of pumps into really pretty sparkly shoes

check out the glitter shoes tutorial on Pixie on Pump’s blog!

She used cheap shoes so I’m thinking I might practice my skills on a cheap throwable pair before trying it out on a pair of hush puppies. haha.

so yep! those are the few things I’m planning on doing! :D It’s always great to find inspiration. I just hope that I don’t end up like this:

HAHA. have a great week ahead everyone!!

DIY Project: Reusing a Cute Plastic Bag!

Posted by ruth on May 4, 2011 in 2011, Crafting | 0 comments

I made a pact to be nicer to Mother Earth and every once in awhile, I keep reminding myself to look around and see what I can do to meet the three magic words: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle!

Korean stationary store ArtBoxis one of my favourite go-to places, mostly because the stationary there is oh-so-cute and teasingly functional (I say teasingly because it inspires fantasies of how useful it could be when in reality its usefulness can hardly ever come into practical play). After a trip there recently, I couldn’t help but stare at the plastic bag they gave me. It was ridiculously cute. I mean, I know it’s part of marketing and all, but what would happen to it after my shopping trip that day ended?

Thinking about leaving this cute plastic bag to collect dust made me feel sad, so I decided to put my hands to work and fully exploit its cuteness instead :) My weapons of choice? My trusty pair of gigantic scissors and a Scotch permanent glue stick.

When it comes to glue, I’ll freely admit that I do have a greater inclination towards liquid glue. It’s messier but so much more effective when it comes to filling up cracks and holes and its bonding power is really much stronger. However, given that I was using plastic, I decided to go with a glue stick instead, which would be strong enough. Scotch is a brand I swear by, & the stick retails at popular for approx $1.25.

Seeing that the illustrations of the plastic bag were so cute, I decided to cut them out and then place them throughout the notebook I just purchased from Artfriend ($3.90) and on its cover:

*snip snip snip* It took me an hour to snip out all the doodles that I thought were pretty and worth keeping (you’d notice I kept none of the doodles that included the girls…) & I really liked how they stood out against the paper inside the notebook and the cover. Setting aside a few for the cover, I pasted 1 plastic cut-out every 2 pages of the notebook.

I’m not really one who’s into uniformity so I experimented and played around with putting the doodles at various places throughout the notebook. After sticking the plastic doodles on the cover and on the pages, I only had one doodle left afterwards, which I placed on the back cover.

Tada! The final product :) I managed to use everything I got from Artfriend, except for the receipt lol.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

It’s not a difficult thing to do :)

It's Gift Wrapping Time!

Rested, Refreshed and Rejuvenated

Posted by ruth on Apr 18, 2011 in 2011, Accessories, Life, Work | 0 comments

It’s Monday! I hope all of you emerge from your weekends well rested, refreshed and rejuvenated. The important 3 Rs that are always essential in my weekend plans :) This weekend, I really caught up on my sleep debt and was really thankful for the “metime” to just sit back and relax – though I’ll admit that my love for time management games caused me some healthy frustration. haha.

& just in case you’re into stressful time management games like me (hey! the satisfaction of completing a level efficiently is very rejuvenating, ok!), here’s what I’ve been into lately, Burger Queen. It’s not listed on the “Top 25″ of the iTunes list, but this app by Korean company Crecat Soft is well worth its $0.99 value. It’s been 3 days and I’m still addicted. The characters and animation are very comical and cute!

Of course, I didn’t just spend my entire weekend tapping away at my ipod touch (not converting yet to iphone! I’m still happily playing with my android phone whilst having my itouch lol) – I also looked for more decorations and additions for my still-rather-empty office space.

Tada! More flowers for my desk! :) We headed to IKEA with the intention of killing time before going to a friend’s house for mahjong, but I ended up going insane over the new range of pretty flowers there. This time, I was going for a different look and chose a long, elegant, transparent vase for my flowers – I only put four stalks in the vase as I wanted this to be more simple. I also picked two stalks of orchids – one purple and one white (as shown) so I can rotate the vase to suit my mood during the day :) For the vase, I accessorized with a black and gold chanel ribbon that has been lying around my desk forever (I stole it from my mom’s chanel perfume muhaha).

Here are closeups of the flowers

Besides the vase and flowers ($2.90 – $4.90 per stalk), I also bought a pink A4 sized photoframe to place my photos. Plus I also got this incredibly fuzzy pink pillow from Spotlight – slightly expensive at $24.95 (after 20% off) but it was a gift from the bf to indulge my girly insanity :D Pictures of those soon when I’ve placed them at my desk!

Going crazy with Scrapblog

Posted by ruth on Apr 11, 2011 in 2011, Work | 2 comments

A few years back, a friend introduced the free online software Scrapblog, a scrapblogging service where you can import your pictures from various places such as Facebook, Flickr etc. I promptly became obsessed with it and ended up spending hours on it in a single day haha.

Here’re some examples of the works I’ve done with Scrapblog!

As you can see, Scrapblog has a pretty varied number of “stickers” or add ons to your images, plus you can choose very pretty backgrounds! If you’re the type who’s more tech-inclined than one who loves messing around with stickers, glue and paper, this is really a great option. Moreover, all you have to do is save the image to your com before bringing it to the photo shop to print, so you do get glossy photos as part of the end result! :)

Right now, here’s the lone flower basket that’s at my desk

but I’m really proud of my creation! it’s so pretty! it really brightens up my desk loads and I absolutely love the tin container I got. It makes everything look less dull :D

Here’s how empty (but neat) my desk is. I really like the white-ness of it all and most of all, appreciate the different sections they’ve set for files, paper, and even an extended shelf so you can put more stuff :)

Unfortunately, in comparison to my colleagues who have hello kitty collectibles and loads of stuffed toys and photographs all over their desks, mine is truly sad and lonely in comparison. So in the next few weeks I’ll be scrapblogging like mad so I can put up some lovely personalized photographs up all around my workspace as well!

It's Gift Wrapping Time!

DIY Flower Arrangement

Posted by ruth on Apr 6, 2011 in 2011, Crafting, Home, Life | 0 comments

Feeling rather jealous of my colleagues’ beautiful desk decorations, I dropped by Nex after dinner last night to do some shopping. To my delight, furniture store King & King Wong (which I have oft admired for their gorgeous fake-flower decorations) was having a 50% off sale for an entire flower section! Obviously I was over the moon and began picking out my flowers – the total cost, including the pretty tin container came up to about $27. Not insanely cheap, but for gorgeous flowers that are gonna last me quite a while, I felt it was quite worth it.

So here’s a DIY tutorial on how I created a beautiful flower arrangement for my desk :)

In picking your flowers for this task, it’s important to know several things:

The size of your vase/container
the colour scheme you’re inclined towards
Decide on Dominant Colours vs Supporting Colours + Accents (explained later in the tutorial)

For me, I was personally very inclined towards a pink-white-purple colour scheme, but decided that my main centrepiece would be this beautiful red gerbera flower. You may choose to use a sticky base – some like to use wax, or even sand, or glue, or you can just go without any of these bases so that you can change your flower positions anytime you like :) For this tutorial, I go without the base.

Alongside the red gerbera flower, I had purple and white roses to form the bouquet. Ideally, with “supporting”/”secondary” flowers, their colours should be less loud and softer, leaning more towards pastels.

Arrange your “secondary” flowers in the container/vase to your pleasure. Because you don’t want these flowers to outshine the main “star”, so you should put them at the borders of your chosen container. To give a more natural look, “layer” these flowers on – i.e. don’t put all the purple flowers, then the white flowers. Put a few purple, then a few white, etc until you’ve finished using all the flowers. This ensures that the flowers are equally visible – though I’ll admit I had far more purple flowers than white ones! Remember to leave a significant space for your centerpiece, where none of the flowers will interfere with the main flower’s petals.

Place the main centerpiece into the container and tweak everything such that the main centerpiece stands out and has uninterrupted petals. You may choose to adjust the height of the main flower such that it stands out slightly, or is the same height as the rest of the flowers

Next up, the flower accents! I chose tiny pink flowers and several green leaves from stems I’d chopped off other flowers. Ideally, choose one complimentary accent to fill up “gaps” and one contrasting accent to bring out the colours of the flowers.

Insert these accents into your flower arrangement and tadah! A beautiful flower arrangement is completed :) I’ll be bringing this in a paperbag to office to brighten up my desk in the morning!