It’s been a while since I’ve been able to give myself a mani! Our internet has been really awful the past few days, so I decided to take a break and get some paint on these nails.

A few of you may know that I used to be extremely faithful to Orly’s “Blue Collar” as my go-to candy blue nail polish. But I feel like the formula has changed, and the polish dries too dark now to be my favorite.

It has been a long journey to find something to replace it, but that journey is over!

Meet Barry M‘s “Turquoise!”

In sunlight, the polish is much lighter in the bottle, and I was afraid it would be TOO light, but it’s actually perfect and covers in 2 coats.

I’ve also been wanting to try gluing googly eyes on my nails for a little while, but I’ve never gotten the chance…UNTIL NOW!

I never paid much attention to googly eyes before, but I was surprised by how many different sizes there are available at Michael’s! I decided to go with the 5mm. On Twitter, I asked if I could just super glue these suckers on to my nails, but then I was told about NAIL GLUE. OF COURSE THERE IS NAIL GLUE.

I used 2 coats of Barry M Turquoise and then dabbed some nail glue on my nail. The bottle says you’re supposed to glue directly to the nail, so I don’t know how well this will work on top of polish.  Then I carefully placed the googly eyes. You actually have some time to move around and arrange the eyeballs, so don’t freak out too much.

Then I busted out some nail art pens to draw the mouth and some polka dots and hearts. The Sally Hansen nail art pens are more spendy than I’d like, but they make drawing on your nails so darn easy! I finished off my other nails with some Deborah Lippmann “Happy Birthday” and this other glitter from an indie nail polish company that I didn’t really end up liking.

Pardon my strange Jimmy Dean E.T. fingers and horrible cuticles. I have come to terms with not being a hand model for some time now. Also, I am really the complete opposite of ambidextrous, so the heart on my right hand appears to have a leak on the bottom, plus my polka dots have shadows that I could chalk  up to camera blur but I won’t.

If you decide to glue eyes onto your nails, may I suggest making sure that BOTH thumbs get a face, because it’s really fun to watch the googly eyes google when you type on your smart phone.

Here’s a short stupid video I made of the googly eyes in action. Happy Friday!

So heeeeere’s the booth!

I’m sorry I only have bad phone pics! I didn’t take a real camera!

The idea was to create “Twinkie Chan’s House,” and while we sat at the table, it would look like we were sitting in the couch.

Manda sewed the walls out of heavyweight shower curtain liners from Target, and then I outlined the drawings in yellow Sharpie (which the paint didn’t cover up!). I was reminded how sucky of an artist I am, and I couldn’t draw a straight line! I needed Manda to stand back and guide me while I drew, to make sure all the proportions were approximately right. I was like, “HOW DID THE MASTERS DO IT?!?!?” And then she, Ben, and I painted the walls the night before the show at my parents’ house in the driveway. We were painting until like 1 or 2 in the morning. Then I drove home (about a 45 minute drive) to pack up the other booth stuff, take a shower, and then nap for a whole 20 minutes before I had to get up, get dressed, and drive back down to my parents’ house to take apart and pack up the booth because it needed those few hours to completely dry. And then drive back up to the city to get to Fort Mason and set up the whole thing again.

The show started at 11am. I don’t think we were done setting up until like 1pm because we had arrived pretty much an hour or two later than we had planned. C’est la vie. I was freaking out because we were late, the paint was peeling off the walls, we brought the wrong Astroturf for the floor covering, it was 80billion degrees in there, and I felt like everything was going wrong that could possibly go wrong! In the end, it turned out ok, but I am sure the sleep dep was not helping! I had not gotten hardly sleep any week for a few days. I am surprised I could form sentences still!

Our booth was pretty much always busy. A LOT of people came through on Saturday, and by the time we were able to drink the Frappucinos that Hairy had brought us, they had returned to a liquid form.

I hadn’t had any time to plan out the table displays, so we just sort of winged it. One of the legs on our small table ended up being wonky, and we were afraid that it would fall over the whole time. My usual red checkered table cloths were still in LA from Anime Expo, and I didn’t have time to shop for fabric for new ones, hence, blank white wrinkly table cloths!

I did somehow make time to create this odd little holder for the new honey bear coffee cup cozies. Here’s the blog entry about them in case you missed it!

So, we have 10 ft by 10 ft for our booths. My house was 10 ft by 8 ft, leaving 2 ft in the front to create my “garden” or my yard. We had two picket fences and a bunch of fake grass. I had also planned to crochet roses to put in little basket boxes. However, after setting up, and after pushing our house as far back as we could without crushing our neighbors, we still didn’t have that 2 extra feet of clearance. Oh well!

Ok so the mailbox has this weird place in my heart. I had a hard time finding the perfect size. Real mailboxes are humongous, and craft mail boxes are usually tiny. I finally found this paper mache mail box, spray painted it black, and stuck on a plastic mailbox flag. The idea was that I would put my postcard/coupon cards in it for people to take. I also had one of my penpal/fans Gabby send me some decorated envelopes to put in the box as Twinkie Chan’s mail. Her envelopes are SO CUTE. But then I was afraid someone might take one on accident while grabbing a postcard, so I took the envelopes out of the mailbox and displayed them at the table.

I just wanted to show you the funny plant details on the walls. I love my little plant on top of the stove, and Manda painted the ficus, modeled after the ficus in my parent’s house! (She took a photo for reference.) Originally, the windows were going to be actual cut-outs with clear plastic coverings, but, we kinda ran out of time and steam for that….!

Pardon my awful candid photos! Remember. No sleep was had here! Plus, I couldn’t figure out what to wear in the morning, and I think I had perhaps chosen UNWISELY. Anyway, one of the first fun people to visit the booth was Andrea Currie from Craft Wars! Actually, I am way behind on Craft Wars and haven’t seen her episode yet….but it was so cool that she came to say hi! She mentioned that all the Craft Wars contestants are buddies with each other, and they they all loved my re-cap of the first show. This was very delightful and awesome to hear! I hadn’t really planned to recap all of them, but my post got such a great response, that I think I might try.

On the left is me and Kat. She really made my day. She saw me and said, “I can’t believe it’s you! I cannot believe it’s YOU!” She kept saying this over and over and staring at me in disbelief and apologizing.  I was like, “Have you really heard of me or seen me before?” And she said yes, and that this was so amazing. We chatted for a little bit, and then she randomly pet my hair! This was like the cutest moment of my life! In more cuteness is Walter who is Jules’ dog. I think I’ll keep him!

Pardon my very strange facial expression. Here’s me and Angela (I stole this pic from her), whom I’ve known on Livejournal for a while! This is the 2nd time we’ve met at Renegade. Her kids are getting really big and it’s making me feel old!

If you happened to stop by the booth on Saturday after 5:30ish, you would have met Rita and Pierce! Rita is my O.G. crochet elf. She emailed me years and years ago, asking if I wanted to help with crocheting, and I decided I would give it a try. She is the bestest! One day when I make a million dollars, I am shipping her to California and keeping her forever (she lives in Vegas). At first I didn’t think I could vend at Renegade this year because my brother’s 30th birthday dinner was Saturday night, but Rita said she and Pierce might visit SF on that weekend, and she’d be able to cover for me at the booth a little bit on Saturday. YAY! She was also a trooper and packed up all the goodies at the end of the day and dropped them off at my house. I HEART HER!

On Sunday, my mom helped me vend for the first time. So cute, right? We were eating lunch one day and she mentioned she had always wanted to try vending at a show. I had never known this, so I said we would try to work it out at Renegade. It was fun teaching her how to use the Square register on the iPad and teaching her the ropes! Here’s a pic she took of me.

I took a pic of her, too, on her phone, but she didn’t send it to me! 😛

I walked the floor a little bit with my mom while Hairy manned the booth, and I noticed there didn’t seem to be many knit/crochet vendors, and also not much cute/kawaii stuff. I’m wondering if this is due to lack of applicants in these genres or what. Are we a dying breed? I hope not!

All in all, it was a whirlwind show. Met lots of people, saw a lot of smiles. Friends and family pitched in to make my booth happen, and that was really awesome. There was a lot of love inside Twinkie Chan’s house!

Don’t miss it! See you there! Booth #179 🙂

Okay, not so random. Remember when I made these extra short cupcake scarves?

This is where one of them ended up!

I don’t normally make scarves for kiddos, because I like for grown-ups to have the fun, and kiddos get all the good stuff already, but when it’s your cousin’s kiddos, you make exceptions!

Ok I’m gonna go print more photos for my booth!

So we are going to debut these Honey Bear Coffee Cup Cozies at Renegade Craft Fair this weekend. He was going to have a red cap, but then he looked too much like Winnie the Pooh, so now we gets a white cap!

I was afraid nobody would know what he was supposed to be, so Hairy suggested I make packaging for it to make it more clear. However, I can’t put every cozy in a package, because displaying them in the booth might become kinda weird. So I ended up making one little cardboard stand for show. Hehe. Kinda janky but kinda cute. I am going to see if Kinko’s will laminate it for me cuz Manda jammed up her laminator!

I will put this guy next to another cozy on an actual to-go cup.