Nail Post! - Leopard Print

Well, it seems I took a short holiday from the blog, after a grand total of three posts. Doing so well already. Apologies for that, first and foremost.

I thought I'd make a post today to showcase some nail art I did last night. I did it to compliment a dress I had planned to wear to a work night out tonight, which incidentally got cancelled this afternoon so now I have time to show you the nails. I love it when a plan comes together (or something.)

I used to be super into nail art, back in the day. At some point my mum bought me a set of nail art pens for Christmas and I loved those things. I don't know why I ever got rid of them, maybe they dried up or something. Anyway, recently I started following some nail art blogs and the love affair was rekindled. I'm slowly stocking up on some bits and pieces for nail art. Luckily today's design only required a black nail art pen, which I've already had for some time.

Without further ado, here are some pictures.

The Supplies

Seche Vite Dry Fast Top Coat, £9.00 at Boots
'Ambitious' by MeMeMe, £4 from their website, though I bought it at Superdrug
'Eagle Street' by Nails Inc, this may be discontinued?
Andrea Fullerton 'Dot and Flick' Black Nail Art pen, £3.99 at Superdrug
Nail Polish Corrector Pen, I forget where I bought this
Small paint brush

The Nails




I started with two coats of Ambitious, then a coat of Seche Vite when those were dry. On my thumb and ring fingers I used the small paint brush to paint some dots in various sizes with Eagle Street, which I outlined in black with the nail art pen. Another coat of Seche Vite was used to seal it. I painted my middle fingers with Eagle Street because I felt it needed something else, then Seche Vite on top of that, too.

I've been using Seche Vite as a top coat for a few months now, after having seen many favourable reviews online. At £9 a bottle I consider it pricey, but it is quite a good product for the money, it dries fast, as you would expect, and is quite tough once dry. Two things that annoy me, however, which I had not come across in reviews before, are 1) it has a tendency to shrink when dry and can pull the colour away from the edges of your nails in the process - you can see this on my index finger in the photos, and 2) it can get a bit 'stringy', by which I mean sometimes there can be very fine, hair-like threads of polish hanging from your brush after you've dipped it in the bottle a couple of times.

I hope you'll excuse the quality of these photos, I'm waiting on a windfall to buy a decent camera, I'm currently using my mum's digital camera and it did not want to focus at all. Also I have no idea how to take a decent blog photo, but presumably I'll learn.

Please also excuse the state of my cuticles and the skin around my nail beds, my hands have been very dry recently, probably because of work, I'm moisturising them but still, it's a little embarrassing to see how bad they are up close in photos. I usually think my nails look ok, but compared to the nail blogs I read these are horrendous! They're also very short right now as they keep breaking :( Sadness.

Anyway, that's enough for this post. More soon. Bye!

Yuki: an introduction

I'm completely knackered tonight so this post is going to be a brief one! I thought tonight I'd introduce you to someone very special: my cat, Yuki.



Here she is in all her sprawling glory. On April 23rd I'll have had her one year, though it seems like she's been with me my whole life. She's around about four years old, I'm counting her adoption day as her birthday, so we'll be having a little party on the 23rd! She came to me from a pretty crappy home, and she was scarily skinny when I first met her, so I've been on a mission this past year to fatten her up and the Vet says she's now at perfect weight :)



Yuki is a moggy, though people seem to think she must be a pedigree since she's pure white and so pretty. Luckily she has no hearing or sight problems that can be associated with white cats (except of course for that selective hearing thing she does when I'm shouting at her to stop clawing the couch, or the bed, or the rug, or my feet.) The first time I met her I expected her to be timid considering her past, but she was all over me straight away. She loves to lie on her back so I can rub her tummy, she's such a weirdo and I love her <3.



Some fun facts about Yuki:
~She refuses to drink water from her bowl and will only drink it from the tap, from the bottom of the sink, from the shower floor, from the toilet (I stopped her when I saw her!) and from my hands.
~She's a bit rubbish at jumping, she tends to try and find a way to walk to where she needs to be rather than try and jump it.
~The tip of her tail is perpetually curled over. The Vet says there's nothing wrong with it, she just holds it like that. When her tail is sticking straight up in the air it looks like a little question mark.

You probably don't really care that much about my cat, so I'll finish off this post now and head to bed. I seem to have a tendency to post around 11pm, I really need to start writing earlier in the evening!



Goodnight from me, and from my baby Yuki!

Which watch is which?

Hello, good evening!

I almost wasn't going to post anything today, it's getting late and I didn't know what to write about, but then I thought maybe I'd introduce you to one of my new babies.

I'm not really one to spend a lot of money on, well, anything, but I saw some Michael Kors watches online recently and fell in love. There's something so chic about them, even though they're so huge and chunky, and although I've never owned anything with a designer label and have never spent more than about £10 on a watch before, I wanted one.

Long story short, I still don't own anything with a designer label, but I did find some affordable knock-offs on eBay and they were slightly more money than I would usually spend on something like this, so I feel like I've been slightly naughty and acquired a lovely new piece of arm candy at the same time.



Granted, my new watch doesn't look exactly the same as its hideously expensive counterpart, but I think it's close enough! I love it anyway, though I have to admit it's difficult to find things to wear with it (I'm very matchy-matchy, blame my mother), but that's ok because next time I get paid I'm thinking of buying one in rose gold, which should be easier to wear every day.

What do you think of this style of watch? Is it something you would wear? Would you fork out the $195 for an authentic MK watch?

That's all for tonight, I'm off to bed, work again in the morning!
Night!

The first step is always the hardest...

Ok, so maybe the title is a little melodramatic, but really, I've been meaning to start this blog for months and I'm still not sure how to go about it! So I thought I'd just wing it and see what happens.

Firstly, hello and welcome to Everything is Chikipuki, your one-stop destination for all the random things that interest me (and hopefully you!), including but not limited to; crochet, crafting, cats, art, books, fashion, food, film, music, dinosaurs (yes), superheroes (really) and being a bit of a geek. I did consider making this a sort of 'specialist blog' about only one of those subjects, but I would probably run out of things to say after about five posts so I've gone with the blog-of-all-trades approach.

As I write this I still have no idea what to say, but maybe an introduction would be the logical next step?



My name is Manda, I'm currently twenty-five years of age, but twenty-six is fast approaching, and then I will no longer be able to class myself as being in my mid-twenties. I have to admit that's kind of a scary prospect considering all the things I have yet to do. I was raised in South-West England but I've lived in South Wales for the past couple of years, which is ok for now, but I don't think I'll stay here long-term. I work in retail, in what I suppose could be termed the beauty industry. This was not my career plan when I left university five years ago, but it's working out alright thus far. I live with my mum and my cat, have a sister who lives relatively nearby, and have a slight tendency to over-share that you might be noticing.

The reason I started this blog was to have somewhere to talk about the things that I'm passionate about but which other people might not know about me, since most of my interests are quite solitary and not things you typically phone your friends to discuss. I expect to be blogging with progress photos of my crochet projects, maybe a few photos of something cute my cat did today, perhaps I'll buy a new bag and be overcome with a need to tell the world about it and how it goes so well with my boots. I don't know yet. But I'll assume that if you're reading it, it's because you want to be, so it's win-win.

This is starting to get a bit rambling, so I'm going to stop now and go to bed as it's 11:37pm and I have work in the morning. Night!