The Budget Fashionista has a great little breakdown on how to apply something many of us ladies like to wear around costume season: false eyelashes. I’ve made (and added on) a step-by-step based off of their super informative “how to” on fake fringe:

You will need: False eyelash kit, eyelash curler, cotton swabs, a mirror, patience.

1. Purchase a kit (preferably one with extra glue and remover).

2. Standing in front of a mirror, curl your own lashes with an eyelash curler

3. Carefully remove false eyelashes from the kit and measure to your lash line. If the lashes are too long, trim them with a pair of small eyebrow/grooming scissors before you bond them– don’t risk cutting your own lashes!

4. Use the enclosed applicator to place the lashes while applying a thin line of glue. Give the adhesive a minute to get tacky. Once the glue is ready, apply the lashes to your upper eyelid.

5. Let them set for a minute (don’t touch them except to adjust them on your lash line), and then cover any exposed adhesive or awkward lines with with eyeliner. The Budget Fashionista recommends liquid liner.

Be sure to remove them before bed (especially if you wear contacts!), or you will have your hands full in the morning. I feel asleep with them on once and couldn’t open my left eye for a few minutes. Not fun. If you take them off within hours after wear, the lashes will peel off easily. Most pairs of false lashes are good to wear two times. Enjoy!

All of this can be summed up in a single sentence I shouted to my room-mate, “This is like some effed up game where you climb through wood and screws on your hands and knees… and if you don’t hurt yourself, you get a shelf.”

 

Hey DIY/ETSY kids, remember that post I did a week or two back about Atomic Catwalk? Well, if you haven’t been in touch with Kim-Thao or anyone from B.A.N.G., this is your chance to connect and be a part of the Philly Fringe Festival! I recieved an email reminder about the first meet up:

This Thursday, the 20th, we will have our first design meetup at the PNA office, from 6PM-8PM. We are located at 251 South Camac Street, 19107 (between 12th and 13th on Spruce).

Bring your ideas, crafts materials, and your most outlandish accessories– be ready to create! Remember, we will provide the actual clothing. Bring your friends– we have a shortage on male models!

We have also just signed on to GreenFest Philly for Sunday, September 13. PNA will have a booth there, and will also be participating in the GreenFest fashion show. Additionally, for all interested artists, select works will be featured in the AxD gallery for a 2010 show.

I hope to see you all there!

After attempting to sing this in the shower, I realized that… I, um, don’t know all the lyrics. So, like any tune-savvy girl scout, I found the video on youtube (because, sadly, I don’t own this musical masterpiece…) and then watched the video 5 times straight.

Watching this again and again has NOTHING to with memorizing lyrics at this point; it has EVERYTHING to do with being hypnotized by her totally insane hair and makeup in the video. I think I’m high from the waves of Aqua Net wofting around her crown of wavy polymer hairpieces as she’s shakin’ it in her shoulder pads. Have I mentioned I think her eyeshadow resembles every nerf gun and pool toy I owned in elementary school? Jesus, I need some sunglasses: this woman is entirely out of control in her rainbowbrite get-up and it’s not pretty.

Good lord, Whitney– I don’t care about the coke: it’s this that makes me want to shake you… and then hug you… because you totally rule.  

Yeah, I’d dance with you.

Philly local, Kim-Thao Nguyen of B.A.N.G, had an interesting idea. She wondered what you would get if you mixed a platform on nuclear awareness with couture/costumes/ wearable art.

Well, what do you get? A new form of activism, perhaps? Throw in local sponsors Philly AIDS Thrift and the answer happens to be pretty cool.

You get the Atomic Catwalk at the Philly Fringe Festival! More deets to come and hopefully an interview soon about this budding project.. check out the copy from the press release below: 

“Livening up age-old tactics of tee-shirts and political buttons, BANG is taking fashion activism to a new level in their interactive performance, “The Atomic Catwalk.” Working with a collection of young artists, guided by nuclear experts from mother organization Project for Nuclear Awareness, BANG youth advocates will display customized “disarmament couture”…

Ban All Nukes Generation leader Kim-Thao Nguyen explains, “By combing art and theatre with policy, we hope that this unusual association will capture the vital attention that is needed in the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.”

I’m excited. I’m entering a piece or two, actually… and for all you ETSY/DIY folk, if you’d like to enter a piece too, or would like to find out more info,
email Kim-Thao at ban.all.nukes@gmail.com

There are some craft projects that make me go “Whoa!” and some craft projects that make me go “Nice!” But there are very few craft projects that make me go “YEAAAAH!” This is one of that last kind.

I’m not usually so much a coaster girl (I’m more of a ‘all horizontal surfaces of my furniture have at least one light circle’ girl), but this project, done by Jeanne Lombardo over at the Philly Makes blog, is utterly Boss.

Having coasters that feature young Bruce Springsteen’s ass would probably increase party coaster usage at least 300%, and just think what a delight it would be to put the set back together at the end of the night.

Some other albums I thought might work well as jigsaw-type coasters:

My personal preference would be one in which each individual square had a lot of teeny details that a coaster holder may not have noticed when observing the cover as a whole. The Rolling Stones’ “Some Girls” is a good one for that, as are Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” and Architecture in Helsinki’s “Places Like This.” I mean, good god, just look how awesome every single individual square of “Dangerous” is on its own!

Or something super EPIC in that fantasy/metal way:

Or you could go for one like Lemon Jelly’s Lost Horizons (which has helped me get innumerable papers done over the years, thanks, Lemon Jelly!) in which each square could be its own little painting, although your chances of coming across this in the vinyl section of a thrift store are low:

And finally, Roxy Music’s “Country Life,” because who doesn’t like boobs?

HINT: It involved a lot of cardboard!

Cardboard Day #1:

If you lurk in the tweesphere, you may have already seen a video of me dressed up in a 6-ft tall cardboard nuclear weapon hanging out in the gayborhood… But in case you haven’t, I’m going to toot the horns of Kim-Thao Nguyen and Emily Gleason of BANG (Ban All Nukes Generation), the youth outreach program of the Project for Nuclear Awareness, for their dedication and imagination in creating this cinematic gem:

I dressed up, yet again, as cardboard Nukette this past Friday. If you’d like some info to come to the next one in two weeks from now, be sure to check out the website here. This is a picture from a few weeks ago, but this past week’s was equally awesome.

Cardboard Day #2: Oh, once I find my camera’s USB cable, you will be seeing many, many more images of this (I promise)… but incase you were lame and skipped this event, you seriously missed out on an awesome time. What the heck am I talking about? Um, just the first event of Philly’s newly established Cardboard Tube Fighting League! Ravin Pierre from Seattle is responsible for creating TubeDuel.com and he held quite a rumble in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Saturday afternoon.

I was fortunate enough to co-host the event with friends from local hackerspace Hive76 and Geekadelphia. Needless to say, there was plenty of cardboard to be had.

Shouts to Caroline for taking this picture of a cardboard Comcast Building handing me mine (G3Ek shield and all). After many single duels and a melee, the cardboard Comcast Building (complete with her 2-year contract shield) was actually the event’s winner!

Cardboard Day #3: I took my recycling to my building’s basement. True story.

DIRIGIBLES was the word of the week at my house a few weeks ago (I was sort of confused about it, my boyfriend says it had something to do with this website DRGBLZ, which is of LOLblimps? Yeah, I’m still a little confused about it).

I’ve been looking for the perfect thing to go in the space over the TV for a good… 10 months, and I finally found the perfect-sized landscape painting in a thrift store the other day. However, it was prety hokey and clearly needed a little something extra.

But what to do? Dinosaurs? A giant person? A Neko Case-style tornado? A giant satellite dish? A katamari? Oh wait, someone already did that:

But I finally opted for dirigibles, as they are much easier to paint than everything but the katamari and the katamari was already taken. I’ve also always loved the back cover of the Talking Heads album Remain in Light:

…and kind of wanted to do a tribute to it. So red dirigibles it was!

I’m sure other people have doctored up old thrift-store landscapes, but it’s rough to google for it. What did/would you pop into the scene?

A few things that led up to the Bowie bust:

1. I cannot not buy crappy busts in thrift stores if they are under $5. I love them.

2. Since I continue to buy them, the whole “spraypaint it a bright color!” thing is getting a little overdone in my apartment.

3. When I moved into my apartment, I turned a large portion of one of the living room walls into a giant chalkboard for calendar/grocery list purposes. Every time I have a party, the chalkboard tends to get covered in crudely drawn penises. Like so:

4. To see if we could avoid the wall o’ dicks at the party we had a couple of weeks ago, my boyfriend came up with this idea, which is harder than you’d think:

5. The crappily drawn (I can say it, I drew it) cover of Aladdin Sane (far left, middle row) has therefore been staring at me for about two weeks now (I’ve found myself humming Ziggy Stardust while making dinner for no reason several times), so the obvious thing to do was glam old Napoleon up.

Materials:

1 crappy thrift-store bust

White spraypaint

Pink/lavender, red, blue and black paint (nail polish would probably work, too)

1 picture of Aladdin Sane (here, I’ll just give you one)

So if you did Warhammer as a kid… this would be the time to pull out the old teensy paintbrush. I do not have one; in fact, I have never even heard of Warhammer. I ended up using my smallest paintbrush and a needle for the detail work.

First you take that sucker and spraypaint it white. Be patient and use two or three thin coats, giving them time to dry in between, otherwise it’ll get goopy and drippy. Then get out whatever you’re using as paints:

First, give the whole face a light-pink/lavender coat, then shade in the cheekbones and eyes etc. with a darker pink. THEN comes the big lightning bolt, and save the black for last.

At first I was going to leave his eyes open, but it was too creepy and I just painted eyelids over them.

I was fortunate enough to have won a set of iridescent paints at Art for the Cash Poor last weekend, and they were perfect as a top coat. I’m sure glitter nail polish would work, too.

And now Napoleon Stardust may take his place amongst the other tchotchkes on the Anal-Retentive Bookshelf of Happiness!

P.S. Extra special bonus points if you can identify all the albums:

So I tend to go out of town every once in a while during the summer. Unfortunately, not watering your plants for four days to a week and a half is not good for them at all.

There are a variety of self-watering planters for sale, but they either tend to be too small to hold big veggies or too expensive for me to get more than one. But the internet always provides.

There’s a royal ton of schematics for self-watering planters out there from various local-farming advocates, so I sort of cobbled a few of them together based on what what I already had and what I could get for free (I’m friends with a lot of science people who have an infinite supply of 5-gallon buckets and people who buy the big plastic bins of kitty litter, for example, so those are what I used. If you have a lot of plastic rectangle storage bins left over from college, I would use those).

I couldn’t find a step-by-step picture book-type explanation for idiots, though, because I do best with projects when I’m not left to improvise, so I decided to make one. It’s a slightly more complicated than “one bucket in another bucket,” but that’s the basis. It’s eventually gonna look like this (if it were made of of crappy neon lines):

The bottom bucket’s job is to hold water. It has a drainage hole in the side so that the water level never rises above the soil in the top bucket, cuz that will drown the roots. The wicking cup (just a classic red solo cup cut full of holes, in my case) is full of soil and is a bridge between the top and bottom buckets. Physics (or something) will slowly draw the water up from the bottom bucket through the cup as the top dries out, so you can leave it unwatered for a few days and it’ll be fine, plus you can’t overwater it. You refill the reservoir through the watering tube sticking out the top. Simple enough? Well, here’s how you do it.

YOU WILL NEED:

• two five-gallon containers (five gallons is pretty much the minimum for growing big veggies like tomatoes)
• a drill OR a nail and a lot of patience
• about two feet of rubber tubing about an inch in diameter
• EITHER a piece of copper tube about an inch in diameter (you can get these in the plumbing section of the hardware store) OR a 1″ hole saw drill bit
• a plastic cup with a base diameter of about 2″
• EITHER a piece of copper tube about two inches in diamter OR a 2″ hole saw drill bit
• A plastic garbage bag
• an exacto knife or scissors
• potting mix
• seeds or seedlings

OK, so you've got a top bucket and a bottom bucket. The top bucket's base is going to get one big hole for the solo cup wicking device, one medium hole for the watering tube and a whole bunch of small holes for drainage. The bottom bucket only gets one small hole in its side for drainage. I'm painting my bottom buckets yellow, but this is only necessary if they're visible and you have pissy neighbors

For the top bucket: the copper tube gets heated up to poke a hole for the water tube

Stack your buckets, then measure how long the tube needs to be to reach the bottom

Unstack the buckets, and start heating up the large copper tube to make the large hole in the middle of the top bucket for the solo cup wicking thing

Now drill the base of the top bucket full of lots of evenly-spaced holes.

OK, top bucket, you're done for the moment.

Stack the buckets again, because you need to figure out where the top bucket's base is resting so you can drill a little drainage hole in the bottom bucket right below that so the soil won't actually ever be IN the water, just sucking it up through a plastic cup. It occurs to me now that it would be easier to just stick a ruler in the big hole. But what I did was measure how much of the top bucket was sticking out...

...then measure that distance minus about a quarter inch up from the base to mark the spot

This picture was taken before I located my drill under some stuff in the broom closet. I recommend using a drill, as poking a bunch of holes in plastic buckets with nails heated over a burner takes a really long time, makes your apartment smell really bad and probably also gives you cancer.

Solo cup, my old friend

Cut four vertical slits around the cup

Yup, four.

Pokin' some holes, pokin' some holes

Cut through the top brim of the cup and curl it up so it's more tube-ish than cup-ish

Tuck the cup into the hole so the base of the cup touches the bottom of the outside bucket

Dirt time! Take them wherever you want to keep them, they are going to be heavy

Pack the cup full of dirt first, then fill up the bucket and plant your seedling

Water it from the top this one time to get everything in order, but after this just pour water into the tube with a funnel

Happy plants!

One thing I forgot to take pictures of: cut a piece of garbage bag a little bigger than the circumference of the top bucket. Cut an X for the plant to fit through and an X for the water tube to fit through, then fasten the plastic around the top like a lid with the seedling and water tube poking out. This prevent the water from evaporating as quickly and keeps bad bugs out.

OK, I didn’t just forget to take pictures. I forgot to do it. But I recommend that you do it.