Neat Nails

 Thank you for joining me yet again for the A to Z Blogging Challenge! Today's post is for the letter N, for Neat Nails!

 There is a lot of paint in my home. A LOT. Acrylic paint, glitter paint, miniature paint, oh and paint for nails - nail polish! You might say I collect it. Some of these paints I've had longer than I've known my husband, and most of them still work well.

 I love painting my nails, it's a special bit of me time that I can then show off for a few days (no matter what I try, nail polish usually chips in 2-3 days!) Glitter is a lot of fun, above are some of my newer glitters - purple and green!

 Nail art is a lot of fun! These were both summer nail designs. The yellow suns I made with a small paint brush in yellow nail polish, the black happy faces I used a nail art pen for.

 These flowers were inspired by A Mom In Red High Heels' nail art post, I couldn't help myself!

 I wasn't super happy with my first flowers, so I decided to try it again, to match one of my favorite shirts.

  Can you tell I like green? This was a work of many layers - green, glow in the dark green, black crackle, then silver glitter on top. They glowed between the cracks, it was pretty neat! An idea for Halloween. But I couldn't get a good photo of them glowing.

  Something new came out in the last two years - magnetic nail polish! It's very time consuming, because you can only paint one nail at a time. Paint, place magnet over, wait for design to appear, check, repeat 9 times! But it looks really neat, and is fun to mix colors side by side in.

You can get different magnets too, currently I think I have seven or more colors, and five different magnet designs.

 The idea below I got from an exclusively nail art blog, the idea is Lisa Frank, with a rainbow of colors under black crackle. I wasn't very happy with how mine looked, it was more 80s fashion than I'm a fan of. Lighter colors might have worked better, or different color combinations (most of the nails had three colors)

 I had more fun with glitter above, for the Fourth of July week.

You might notice some of these pictures are better than others - I used to photograph a nail design right away, now I wait till the next day after I've cleaned off the smudges around my fingers. But I can't go back and fix the old photos without re-creating those designs, and there's always something new to try! =)

Below is some more fun nail art! I have a black, a white, and a pink nail art pen, but the black is bleeding a lot and the white is almost dry... I wonder why!

Stars and stripes - always a classic!

 I'd like to try stenciling or stamping, but haven't gotten into it yet. I did try some uv-free gel nail polish and that did NOT end well. So back to traditional polish for now - not like I have a lack of options! I wonder how I'll paint my nails next? Maybe with letters for the A to Z Challenge!

My daughter already loves nail polish too - and she wants the same flowers I put on mine, and always glitter on top!

 Do you have a favorite nail polish or design, or technique? Share in the comments!

I hope you enjoyed another insight into my fun creations and collections! Join me again tomorrow for something that starts with O!

Magnificent Miniatures - A to Z Blogging Challenge Week Three!

 It's time for week three of the A to Z Blogging Challenge! Today's post is for the letter M, and after this we're halfway through the alphabet, and the month! I'm featuring Magnificent Miniatures today, little figurines we assemble and paint for gaming!

I really love miniatures, they've become almost my new Barbies since I started gaming. They come in all different styles, and you can make modifications to them, and paint them however you want! Usually, my miniatures are for individual characters in our roleplaying games. Sometimes, though, they're just for fun! (They can also make great dice bag props!) I love collecting miniatures and painting them, my husband loves them too, as you can see from the following photos!

 

These five (and wolf) are for our current roleplaying game, the two on black bases aren't mine, they belong to two of our players, but the rest I already had before the game. And look one is already painted! Our games are often like this, mostly unpainted, because it takes me a while to actually paint miniatures, with all the other stuff going on. The painted armored guy in the middle has brass balls too, I added those since we started playing, since he got them during a game. Beads and miniatures, yay!

These are some of my favorite female miniatures, not all characters, but most of them were at one point. You can see the strawberry blonde wizardess on the bottom is not fully painted, I have a lot like that!

Star Wars has a roleplaying game too! The miniature on the far left was my pilot, nothing fancy done to her (other than painting striped pants!), and the droid on the far right is a licensed pre-painted miniature. But the two in the middle with lightsabers we modified, the lightsabers are from Clone Wars toys, removed and cut to size, then glued to the hilt of the weapons that were on the miniatures originally. I painted all of the humans here too!

My husband's miniatures, on the other hand, are for table top war games, specifically Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000.

This scary spider is part of the goblin army, he won this in a raffle at a special tournament, assembled and painted by one of the best at the store.

This is a manticore, for his beastmen army, and I'm in the process of painting him. Rawr, I'm a monster!

 Here's another of his beasties I've been painting, he's pretty much finished.

These guys are also for his beastmen army, two special customizations I helped him make - the green parts are called 'green stuff', it's a molding compound you make to put different things together where glue won't work, or add to a miniature - or make it from scratch if you're ambitious! The scary guy on the left is a Ghorgon, I added extra horns to him, changed out the weapons on his right arms - oh and added in an extra right arm! The one-eyed monster on the right is a Cyghor, like a cyclops but more monstrous. I made his eye, gave him extra horns, and molded that rock he's holding. My husband painted these guys.

This was our painting station at our last home, until I needed it more for my sewing machine - now we use a paint tray on tray tables - traylicious! Most of those paints you see are Citadel Paints, from Games Workshop. The paint is perfect for miniatures.

Here are some favorites - the two big miniatures are creations of my husband's, painted by a master from Milwaukee. The girl on the hill is one of mine, painted by me.

Here on the top you can see another miniature with customization: special sword, fan I made with brass! I don't know where she is in the cases or I'd take a better picture, maybe in another post. On the bottom, there are two girls I painted, and one silly miniature we got from a friend of ours.

These girls are some of my favorites. All painted by me! And all former characters, the angel was a winged elf, the catgirl was a half cheetah, the girl with the red cloak was a half dragon - red of course!

And here, we present my husband's grand army collection! There are five armies here, I think. Chaos warriors, chaos daemons, beastmen, dark eldar, space wolves, high elves, and some deathwatch. Okay, seven armies! As you can see, he has a lot of painting to do! This was when he was taking inventory last fall. He hasn't gotten too many new models since. No, we don't have a problem, we have a hobby =)

Thank you for joining me again for the A to Z Blogging Challenge, come back tomorrow for something that starts with N!

Dice and Dungeons & Dragons

 Welcome to day 4 of the A to Z Blogging Challenge! This entry is brought to you by the letter D, for Dice and Dungeons and Dragons.

Dice are great, I love dice! And they come in so many different colors and types. As I have said before, I am a gamer, as is my husband, and our daughter dreams of being one also. I don't play video games (except the occasional Peggle, and My Little Pony on my kindle) but I love watching my husband play games with good stories. What I do play are role playing games, and most of those use dice for determining different actions and events in the games.

Since Dungeons and Dragons also starts with D, how about a twofer today? D&D is one of the most widely known role playing games, don't judge it by the headlines though. It's one we play the most, because there are so many different settings within the same game system, giving dungeon masters and players a lot of different flavors to try of the same system - like flavors of cake, they're all cake, but a lot of different varieties and flavors to choose from.

I happen to have a lot of dice. These are the pretties that sit by my laptop. But that's not all.

These organized machines of probability grace our table every Friday night during our weekly Dungeons and Dragons game. There are your common six sided dice, along with twenty sided, ten sided, twelve sided, eight sided, four sided, and even pairs to make one hundred sided results! Our family has been collecting dice for a while, just like I have been collecting beads for a while! My daughter even has her own dice collection, and my husband, our dungeon master and story teller, has his personal set also.

A selection of six sided dice is presented above, with standard pips (the dots) and also ones with engraved numbers. Aren't all the colors pretty? Many games are centered around these dice alone, in other systems they use them along with other dice. Dungeons and Dragons uses these for ability score rolls and some damage rolls, like short swords, and in multiples, for spells like fireball.

For other polyhedrals, I would like to share the following:

 Four sided dice, a pain to roll because they don't roll, they just drop. Also the most dangerous when dropped on the floor and stepped on! We gamers sometimes call them caltrops, small sharp weapons thrown on the floor to prick feet and trip enemies. In D&D, these are commonly used for dagger damage rolls, and small spells.

 Eight siders, better to roll than four sided, fun to stack in dice towers. Dice are like more complicated bricks sometimes, it's fun to stack them in walls and towers between actions in game. Dungeons and Dragons uses eight sided dice for different weapon damage rolls, especially long swords.

 These are called percentile dice, you roll a matched pair, one looks like a normal ten sided die, the other has the tens place. Rolled together, you get the ten place and the single place, making up a whole two digit number. You can use this set for getting a random number between 1 and 100, sometimes used to get a percentage, sometimes just whole numbers. A pair of ten sided dice of different colors can also be used, if you declare before the roll which is high and which is low. This set of dice is rarely used by players in Dungeons and Dragons, but dungeon masters might use them to determine random encounters, or whether your almost dieing character stabilizes or slides closer to death.

Here we have ten sided dice, also another type of dice some role playing games use exclusively (like Exalted, which the character for my Scarlet Empress costume is from). For Dungeons and Dragons, these are used for weapon damage rolls most commonly.

 Twelve sided dice are fun - you have a powerful weapon if your damage uses this die! There isn't much more to say about this die, other than they roll like a ball almost as good as twenty sided dice.

And here are the most commonly used dice in Dungeons and Dragons - it is a D20 system. Twenty sided dice are rolled to determine the outcome of many actions: attacks, spells,  skills. They also spin pretty nicely!

Dice can also make great jewelry and accessories! These items and more available in my etsy shop, Lizzy's Fancies

These are made with beads in the shape of dice, but soon I will be making jewelry with real dice!

Dice aren't only for math geeks, they're also for gamer geeks! I hope you enjoyed this entry in my A to Z Blogging Challenge, join me again tomorrow for the letter E! It won't be as photo-heavy as the other posts this week.

Beautiful Beads

 Welcome to Day Two of  The A to Z Blogging Challenge! Today's post focuses on something that starts with B!

 As a crafter, one of my biggest passions is for making jewelry. And you know what you can make a lot of jewelry out of? That's right, beads! Beautiful beads, and there are so many different ones to choose from!  

I have been actively making jewelry as gifts and to sell for my business for five years now, and I used to make jewelry long before that. Some of the beads in my collection I've had since I was 13 or 14 years old, and some since I was maybe 8 or 9! I have made a lot of jewelry in those years, but I still have a LOT of beads to work with.

My beads are all in containers on shelves above a tv, since we moved to Virginia I have had to get creative with storage.

Yes, those are all mostly full, and they're all mine! My precious precious beads. Want to take a peek at what's inside?

Two of those cases have some of my jumprings as well, for making chainmaille jewelry, but those don't start with B! My cases are various styles and sizes from buying them at different times, and the small ones are great for taking along for mobile crafting. Below is my 'mobile crafting unit', a plastic shoebox full of jewelry making supplies, and lots of beads! Great for long car rides, especially moving from the Midwest to the East Coast, y'know?

So many beads I have great ideas for, and some I haven't thought of ideas for yet, just waiting for it to happen. But I only have so much time to work with! I still have a lot of green beads, intended for St. Patrick's Day jewelry, but I didn't make those again this year. I hear Emerald is a big color for the year though!

Here are a few special beads - I just love the crystalline briolettes in the top left, and the rainbow iridescent cubes and rondelles and hemetite hearts and stars below. Then on the right I have a lot of Swarovski crystal bicone beads, for birthstone jewelry and other pretties.

And just in case you were wondering, yes I am crazy enough to let my three year old have her own beads too!

There's a full alphabet in there, though she has mixed it up a little...

Do you like beads too? What are your favorite kinds? Join me tomorrow for C! (Hopefully I'll get the post up earlier on day 3...)

And if you want to see some of the stuff I make with beads, head over to my etsy shop, there's a button on the right for it ;) And my facebook page has more photos of things I have made not currently available.