Terrific Tuesday
Courtesy of Self.com
We heard that a certain famous Victoria’s Secret model straightens her hair with embalming fluid. Sorry, we’re still absorbing this information. Apparently it’s popular in Brazil. Hearing things like this only make us want to see Chris Rock’s Good Hair even more.
On an unrelated note, it looks The Frisky found one of like Marc Jacobs’ has creations – a bracelet with animals charms, that DOESN’T cost an arm and a leg. Nice. NBC10’s Lilliana Vazquez highlight cute shoes from different price ranges.
Self.com lets you guess what the beauty product does as well as highlights the best trends in color for the fall – that’s nail polish, eye shadows and neon headbands. All this while Teen Vouge teaches you how to create looks featured on the website yourself.
Savage Garden: making my big guns
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
Squid gallery
Last post about the giant squid pattern, I swear. From here on out, this post will be updated with pictures of all the different squids people have made. And oh please keep sending them, I get such a kick out of seeing the little ways people tweak the pattern. It’s practically Darwinian.
Cat-loving squid from Mandy, via email
Angry-looking squid from Matthew
Bo Squiddley, by bunsen_h; and it looks like it will be in good company with a couple of other seriously dorky stuffed guys in the background. Also a new adorable 1/10 scale squidlet from bunsen_h!
From Amanda, who also made one as a boyfriend present (with the good idea of filling the ends of the arms with beads or rice)
A squid named Demsela Howard, from Marie; it was her very first sewing project (ambitious!)
Pink squid from Julie K; she says her name is Lumpy.
Amy says: “I made one out of old t-shirts because I had no fabric and an abundance of XL shirts (that were given to me by my robotics coach) that I was never going to wear. So here’s a picture of me and my squid made out of old robotics team t-shirts. I named it Robby.” Hell yeah, science girls.
Another first sewing project! “I thought I’d send a picture of Sir Squidimus (named for Sir Didymus from Labrynth) along for the gallery of squids. Oh, and my sister made a squid, too (she made her own pattern). His name is Carl and he’s the one made with the Yoda fabric.”
Sheik Yerbouti made Cthulhu for a friend for her birthday.
Another squid for a friend (SquEd, made for Ed)… with the addition of googly eyes!
Veronica made this big green guy for her kids.
Squid-Billie, by Nicole. I love the HUGE EYES!
Oh god, this is my favorite one yet: “My name is Billy Arrowsmith. I made my own squid as a present to my wonderful girlfriend Julie, for our one-year anniversary of dating. She was, if I do say so myself, very pleased with it. Even if her parents think I’m a little bit weird.” Well done, sir!
Rappers better run and hide ’cause here comes the Beehive
These comic book step-by-step instructions for giving yourself a beehive kind of make me wish I hadn’t chopped off two feet of hair in a fit of boredom. I’m sorry for throwing you away before I did anything fun with you, hair. I didn’t treat you right.
R Session’s Pin-up girl kit, $21.99, comes with an instruction manual and a whole bunch of stuff so you can give yourself either the beehive or the slightly less voluminous “perfect ponytail” or “super chic bun.” Most of the stuff is pretty normal (brush, bobby pins, clips, elastics, etc.) with the exception of the hair bun, which is the weird macaroni-shaped thing in the top panel that you may have been wondering about. It apparently poofs the whole thing up.
P.S. Queen Bee, why did you have to go and be on Dancing With the Stars like that
Wednes-DIY… milk jug self-watering planter
My spinach is growing up so fast!
I worked on my apartment garden a bit more yesterday, and I made some bigger self-watering containers to hold smaller stuff like herbs for the kitchen (obviously, this will not work for tomatoes or eggplants or pumpkins).
Like I said, I’m not very good at remembering to water plants (or remembering not to overwater plants), so self-watering containers are pretty much my ideal. Cotton strings (only use cotton, btw, synthetics don’t have the same wicking action) act as training-wheel roots, drawing water from the reservoir in the bottom half of the milk jug and distributing it evenly around the top half; all the forgetful gardener has to remember to do is occasionally make sure the reservoir isn’t out of water.
I thought I’d try to illustrate the process of making these supremely useful and almost-free self-watering pots out of old milk jugs with pictures rather than words. Show, don’t tell! OK, here we go:
’70s flashback: bottle vases
You, too, can own two halves of a bottle!
Urban Outfitters, in their aggravating way of selling expensive prefab DIY kits, now has a $58 kit for making votive holders/cups/vases out of glass bottles.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the example they gave of a finished product (see right), which is two bottle halves that frankly look as if one misstep might have you asking “WHY SO SERIOUS?” But I have been wanting to make some bell-jar terrariums for growing herbs lately (that may well be another post), and bell jars are expensive, so if there’s a DIY to make what I need, all the better!
But is the word here really DIY? I usually am a sucker for projects in which you get to use chemicals and fire, and the Urban Outfitters kit has both. But I cannot abide pre-assembled kits that treat the DIY aspect as a bonus that should be priced accordingly, as if the added sex appeal you get from being able to say, “Oh, this half a bottle you’re drinking out of? I cut it myself!” is worth that extra thirty bucks. Dammit, you Do It Yourself to save the money it would take to pay Someone Else to Do It! You’ll never live like common people! You’ll never do what common people do!
Whew, sorry there. So the picture wasn’t appealing, the price wasn’t appealing, but a touch o’ the google and several ways to actually DIY with nothing more than string, rubbing alcohol, matches, a bucket of cold water and sandpaper turned up. I chose this video for its cheerful soundtrack.
I would seriously advise that you make sure you’ve got all-cotton string if you attempt this; five years of girl scouts taught me that string with plastic inside to strengthen it smells real bad when on fire.
The Urban picture was not that appealing, but it seems worth it if I could end up with something like these:
Images ganked from Green Wine Bottles and, uh, Weddingbee.
One man’s trash…
Mismatched chairs create a great, Domino magazine, eclectic chic dining room look. Avoid weekends of flea market shopping and get your set after one quick click to this Craigslist post. The five chairs are only $25!
Bring some cohesiveness to your new mismatched design and recover all five seatpads in a luxe fabric of your choice.
Still have old Sassys lying around?
I exist in piles. Every job, roommate and overnight guest has discovered this. These days, I have a whole wardrobe room for my piles, which is great since it hides my piles from the casual guest.
Lots of these are magazines that I can’t let go of. I only look at them to sift through when trying to throw stuff out, but no matter. Some are just classics, some have articles I admired in them. I’ve thought about razoring out the ads so that they’re thinner, but it’s the ads in old Life magazines that I like most.
Re-nest to the rescue. Learn how to make this table from your old magazines here.
It’s going to rain all weekend anyway, may as well get a little home livin’ done.
Let me brick it down for you…
John Houshmand’s White Brick club chair is featured in September’s Trend Watch in Metropolitan Home magazine.
I’m very drawn to this chair; it’s so Ready Made chic. And although the chair lists for $21, 875 it is a very accessible piece of high design for any of those true DIYers out there. Philadelphia DIYers especially, since a pair of these club chairs would look so fab in a South Philly “backyard” (read: concrete slab). Imagine how charming these would be after a few seasons when moss finally creeps up the sides! My design daydreams are getting the best of me. It’s time for you to get to work and do your lincoln-log best at brick laying your way to a new living room set.