Nail Night 4.0

A few weeks ago I hosted a nail night for my colleagues, and it was a success again. We started chatting, then our dinner arrived, and after that it was time for doing nails. I am so lucky to have a Partner in Crime now, aka Hanne, who is my best apprentice till now (the citations because she is much better than me now), which meant we could share our colleagues between us. Hanne also have a different style than me and is really talented at other techniques than me, which means we could offer many more styles to choose from. Here she works very concentrated on a colleague's hand:

She made a beautiful purple gradient:

Cheers! :)

When making gradients, you have to clean-up afterwards.

She also made a lovely tape manicure in black and purple:

It was funny how we ended in a purple theme without having planned to.

This is what the table looked like:

There were test boards, rhinestones, stamping plates and tools all over. But we also found space for tea, sodas, candy and oranges.

Here is Hanne's tape mani in black and purple:

And here is Hanne's other job, the black and purple gradient:

I stamped, here in pink, with lots of rhinestones:

 

And my other stamped mani with clear rhinestones:

I ended painting Hanne's own nails with a magnetical polish from Barry M that I gave her as a gift the same evening:

It is truly lovely, but it is not easy to photograph when it is ALWAYS DARK! :(

Thank you to all my dear colleagues for a nice evening, and yes, I think we'll do it again. :)

Monroe Monday

Nail Magnet Fun

I have a lot of different things within nail art, but the magnet polishes are one of my favourite nail gadgets. It is super easy and gives a nice result. And if you collect different magnets, then you can vary your magnet polishes endlessly. I searched on Amazon and found these which are both very different and very cheap:

The four at the top are Chinese but for once in a great quality. I have glued match sticks at the top as distance pieces, which makes them easier to use. The below one is from China Glaze, and I am espeically in love with the circle.

Here I have tested five different magnets:

The round magnet from China Glaze is used on the green polish. Unfortunately, the heart magnet was bad, it just looked like a nasty cloud, so I rinsed it off immediately.

Monroe Monday

Buy of the Year 2013

I have previously elected Buy of the Year, and in 2013 I think my iPad was my best buy:

I had sworn I would never let any "apples" into my home, but in January last year I bought an iPad and I have loved it since. I mainly use it to read on, because now I can sit in the sofa in front of the fire place and read my blogs on Bloglovin' and it is super cosy. Much more cosy than to sit alone in my office in front of my computer. The result is that I'm almost never behind with my blogs and never buy magazines any more. I surf on Etsy and keeps an eye on my own shop's statistics. DH uses it for his work when attending committee meetings and son had a hard time understanding he could not steel it with him when he moved. So it has really made a difference.

Monroe Monday

In the Fifties ...

I turned fifty on the 26 November last year, so now I'm officially OLD! Sigh! So I threw a real fifties party, since I am so in love with the style of the fifties.

I decorated the table in an autumn theme:

The apple decorations were super easy to make using an apple core cutter and looked really nice on the table.

This is how the places looked like, I had made singles as table cards:

We got "air drinks", which was a popular drink in the fifties in Denmark, as welcome cocktails:

But how did we look? Here is the gangster boss and his doll, aka DH and I:

I bought the dress in Germany for about 25 dollars last summer. The cape and my clear lucite shoes are from the fifties.

Buddy Holly was also invited, in the shape of son:

My beautiful sister and her husband:

She had bought a new dress and had her hair done by a pro, so she had really completed her look.

My dear parents, who looked exactly like they did in the fifties:

I don't know if dad is forever young, because he was on the dance floor all night. Note that he is wearing his tee shirt reversed. He says it was very modern to do so in the fifties. And the cigaret pack is in his rolled sleeve like it was back then. Mum's dresses were always nipped in with a broad belt in the fities, and she often tells about a red one, which fit around dad's head, so he knew her belt size.

Dolores del Rio and Blues Brothers, in the shape of our very good friends:

My lovely girl friend had bought authentic fifties clothes and looked fabulous:

My cute niece had borrowed a dress and a belt from me and also looked fantastic:

Her boyfriend was in a tailor made suit from Thailand. We have such nice youngsters in the family.

Three of my colleagues, who matched without even having planned to:

I love the "bell dress" with the red dots, as Hanne named it.

Another colleague who looked amazing:

Brotherly love - my brother and I:

I wore my fabulous family jewellery - a parure of garnets.

My brother's gift to me was to play vinyl records all night, so we only listened to vintage vinyl:

I had bought a few old vinyl records in a charity shop to decorate with.

And I got an overwhelming lot of gifts, some even wrapped in fifties style:

I got so many I could neither embrace it nor conceive it, but I will show some of the special ones here:

A vintage purse looking like a folded magazine, supposedly from the late sixties, which my parents had found at the Isle of Moen. I have wanted one for many years, but always thought they were too expensive on the internet, so it was a lovely surprise.

Two lovely vintage pins from one of my dear colleagues, whose granny had had a dress shop in the forties and fifties:

They are New Old Stock and one of them still have the price tag: about 3 dollars, which my dad says equals to a weeks wage in the forties. I truly love them.

And an absolutely fantastic gift from DH:

The king of record players - a Rega RP3. I have wanted the RP1 for many years, and then he surprised me with the RP3, because as he said: "you play records every day". Thank you, darling. :) The very first record I played was Elvis Presley's Moody Blue, which has a fantastic sound.

But how did my nails look, you ask:

They were quite simple. I didn't want just red nails as in the fifties, but found this white gold polish that matched my dress very well: Essie Beyond Cozy. At my ring finger I've made a Danish flag with tape, the white polish is from Depend and the glittering red one is my favourite red: Color Clubs Ruby Slippers.

It was a lovely party, where I had set the flux capacitor to 1956, so we could party in the style I've always loved.

Thank you to all my great guests for a fantastic evening, and special thanks to to sister, who has taken all the photos. :)

Monroe Monday

ALT for Damerne, Number 1, 1955

Happy New Year, to all of you. :)

Yes, I have already scanned from Everything for the Ladies again. This year I will scan in the uneven months, so we'll see some other magazines. I start with number 1 from 1955, which has a lovely wintery cover. You get the knitting pattern (in Danish) later in this post:

And remember that all scans can be enlarged by clicking at them.

You could find Entrust Yourself to Mrs. Nini every week. Here the readers wrote letters, asked questions and also got answers:

Here a reader asks when she should give her daughters "dressing money" (I gave son money for clothes when he was about 14, and it worked great), and there is a letter from the mother who thinks she is unsuccessful in making her home as cosy for her children as her own childhood home was. Well, time changes - and they still do.

You could also find In the binoculars every week where the readers gave good advice and shared their good ideas about this and that:

A great tip is to sort your embroidery yarn in envelopes, and there is also a tip for cutting onions fast (cut up into the onion and then cut slices), and there is also a guide on how to make a long skirt out of a short one, and then change it back to a short one again, if you only need the long one for a night.

Here are great tips for decorating your living room if it needs to be refurnished:

Fur, is what all women dream of!:

I want leopard cape, but I would prefer it to be fake-fur, although I love fur, but not from threathened animals.

And when we have finished drooling over the Balmain suit below, we'll find ideas for dresses with an open top (at the right):

Keep the good New Year resolutions by sewing your own wardrobe and save a lot of money:

The belt is an important detail:

And here is a guide for making some of them yourself.

Here is another little cosy project for January - a dinner mat with a pocket for the napkin. I think it is a nice detail:

And here is the pattern (in Danish) for the nice sweater from the cover, so you can knit it yourself:

And there are patterns for all the family:

On to the ads, because there is an important problem all women have to consider:

And when we have done so, we can smile and be happy:

Here are three small ads in a row:

Vaseline, which is very useful during winter. Sans Égal lipstic, which I remember from my childhood. And a yarnshop that were so nice that they sent out yarn. And that was before the internet.

And a good warming soup is always lovely when King Winter is in his frosty mood: