Hi everyone!

So it really is the last day of 2014, which is pretty cool but also pretty crazy. I know that nearly everybody says this, but honestly, if you had told me last year that I would be here right now, I, well, I probably wouldn't have laughed in your face, but I would have at least given you a nervous laugh and found some excuse to leave the conversation immediately.

I loved 2014. I really did. Some bits got a little sucky and I had a rough patch over the middle, but I still loved it. I feel I have accomplished a lot over this year, more so than usual. Mentally, I progressed from being 'in recovery' from my eating disorder to being 'in remission' - which is an amazing accomplishment and I also have come a lot more to terms with my medication and have also developed a much better self help plan for when I do start spiralling downwards (read more about that here and here). In terms of my nails, I feel I have improved quite a bit from the first nail art I did this year to these and I've been particularly proud of some of my more recent ones, like my Tony Stark/Iron Man nails. My photography is still an on going struggle, but hey, nobody's perfect...

I'm proud of how much I've been learning about coding and stuff and I'm loving being able to understand more about how my blog is set up and customise more of it. I'm also really loving my instagram and having more motivation for blogging and stuff. I got qualified as a nail tech and also as a make-up artist and I'm training for my Cert III in childcare and I adore my job in out of school hours childcare.

Anyway, so these nails I am pretty happy with. Considering I was working on a limited time frame and I was also really tired from working all day, I thought these were a pretty good compromise. The fact that I was using such an amazing multichrome as a base also helps make these look 100x better.

What I Liked About December

Hi there everyone!

Believe it or not, but we have come to the end of 2014... Crazy right? I know its not the last day today, but I'm not sure when I'm going to get my New Year's nails up (or even do them) nor do I know what my schedule is going to be like tomorrow (I've been looking after a couple of kids for this week and their mother's work schedule is very prone to changing so I have no idea how long I'll be there), so I'm getting this post up a day early.

Christmas
I love Christmas, I really do. I love the present buying and the present giving. I love being on holiday, I love spending time with my family, I love the food, I love the palpable excitement in the air, I love the heat, the swimming and the unique Christmas time that we have here in Australia. I just really love it. Although I thought this year was going to be a very trying time, due to having basically my whole family here, it actually went down really well and I really enjoyed it.

Face of Australia Liquid Liner
This isn't by any means a new purchase, but something I've rediscovered. I stopped using liquid liner for a while and instead I was using gel liner, but I recently discovered this liquid liner within my collection and I'd forgotten how good it actually is.

1989
I had been coveting Taylor's latest album for months and finally got it as an early Christmas present! While I've only listened to it a couple of times, I really like it so far. I'm a huge fan of latest style of songs and really hope she keeps making more music like this.

3 Steps To Edit Better Photos

Hi everyone,

So I realised the other day that through my blogging I have gained quite a bit knowledge about photoshop and photography (although my photography is nowhere near as good as I want it...). And actually, a lot of my photography knowledge is based on stuff that's relevant to my particular nails and set-up. But, editing photos is something I am getting fairly good at (I think). Or at least, I have a little routine that I apply to every single photo I edit so I thought I would share my tips with you.

Before (unedited and nothing)

Crop
The first thing I do to any photo is to crop it. No matter how good your photography skills are, your photos will always look better after they have been cropped. Generally, I like to take my photos a little extra further away and then crop them. That way I have more luck in getting every nail in focus.
After cropping, my photo now looks like this:

Gold Glitter Gradient and Christmas Tree Nail Art

Hi lovelies,

Today I'm back to red for my Christmas nail art, as well as Christmas trees. I'm feeling a little repetitive this year...

I was pretty happy with how these turned out, although I think I need to work on my glitter gradients a bit. I used just regular craft glitter for this and I have to admit I was a little stumped on how to put it in a gradient. But after a little trial and error, I discovered the best way was just to apply the red polish as normal and when it had dried to a tacky stage, just press the glitter on with my fingers. Of course, this method did mean placement and gradient was left a lot to chance and luck!

How To Survive The Family Christmas

Hi there everyone!

So, I'm sorry that this post is later than I would have liked, but I went away last weekend and my grandparents arrived from New Zealand and then last week was pretty jam-packed due to it being the last week of school and work and my sister was graduating (from primary school) and then a bunch of relatives arrived on Saturday (also from New Zealand) and it's been a little full on. And so while I'm disappointed about me falling behind a little on my schedule I think it's been justified (unlike some of my absences).

Anyway, all this talk leads me onto the subject of this post - tips to survive the mad rush of the holidays and relatives and family stuff.

While it can be great to have family around, especially over the Christmas and holiday period and especially if you don't get to see them very often but it can certainly become very stressful, very quickly. To be frank, I am really quite glad I only have to go through this every couple of years or so due to the fact that we live in a different country to the rest of the family. But here are my suggestions to help ensure the smoothest, bestest, least-stressful family occasion you can. I think most of them are pretty common sense, but I think it's good to be reminded of them every once in a while!

Avoid Controversial Topics
As boring as it may be to stick to boring, safe topics, please remember that they are safe for a reason. Talk about uni, talk about school, talk about work, talk about the weather, stick to the safe topics. Don't talk about things like whether banning women from wearing burqas in public in Australia is a good idea or not. Equally, if you have elderly or rather conservative relatives, maybe staying away from topics like tattoos and body piercings would also be a good idea. You know, just from personal experience.

Penguins and Snowflake Nail Art AKA Traditional Winter Nail Design

Hi lovelies,

After my last Christmas nail design, I am quite happy to be able to tell you that I like how these pictures turned out. It's actually quite frustrating to me how my photography and photo taking skills seem to be fluctuating so much recently... Never mind, that is a problem for another day. Although actually, today's nail's were also a truly frustrating and irritating endeavour and to be honest, if the photos had come out as bad as the holly ones, I wouldn't have bothered editing and posting them. I was so over them.

Although - how cute are these guys??

First of all, I thought my blue background was going to be too dark, so I did a test run with two different blues on paper first. All was good and I did one hand in that colour. Then I started on the penguins. Now, normally when I do my nails I do all of them at once, through different stages, rather than completing one whole nail before moving on to the next one. However, if I'm not sure how well my design is going to transfer from my head on to my nail, I'll do one whole nail first to seen how it goes. But I was totally confident in my ability to paint penguins.

So I did their little white bodies and then the little black insides and the white eyes and then I was like, hold on a minute. Something looks wrong. A quick google of penguins then proved that yes, I was wrong and they actually have black bodies with white insides (tummys? I dunno what to call it). So I had to redo that entire hand (which was my right hand, because I always do my right hand first and let me tell you that my left hand was not thanking me for that).

Emotional Hangovers: How to Survive and Prevent Them

I came across the term 'emotional hangover' a couple of months ago and I could not believe how apt this description was. I have long known that the morning after an emotional breakdown are terrible, terrible things, but had no clue how to explain this concept to someone that has never experienced one.

In case you don't know, emotional hangovers are what you get when you have a pretty rough, emotion-filled night and the morning after is a horrific ball of pain, fuzzy eyes, foggy heads and sore everything.

For the longest time, I thought all this was something that only happened to me, but then one of my friends mentioned that they always felt the same way and then I came across it happening in a book and it was great! Well, great in the fact that I wasn't the only one that felt like shit the next morning as well as the night before, not that lots of other were going through some shitty times themselves.

The reasons behind having an emotional hangover are varied and mostly depend on individual people. Maybe you were particularly upset the night before. Maybe you'd been around people for a long time (parties, celebrations etc) and suddenly found yourself all alone. Maybe you had just been feeling rather lonely the previous evening. There are so many different things that could contribute to having an emotional hangover. While the first can take you by surprise, after a couple you begin to notice a pattern, whether it be in symptoms or triggers and knowing these can help you to better survive and prevent the next ones. Personally, I only really suffer them after an night of heavy crying (actually sobbing would probably be a more apt description here) and general self-loathing and hopelessness, but then that's just me.

Anyway, after experiencing a particularly vicious one a couple of weeks ago, I thought I would put together a little list of tips and advice on how to get through them and how to prevent them from happening quite as badly the next time.

Holly Berries Nail Art

Hi there everyone,

Big surprise, I'm back with more Christmas nails, although this time at least they aren't overwhelming red like the other two designs I've done. They just are slightly red, which I think shows that I'm branching out a bit in terms of Christmas colours. :)

These turned out so much better than I was expecting. When I started these, I didn't really have a plan in mind so I was pleasantly surprised when these turned out as well as they did. Also, they did look a lot better in real life - I was once again very frustrated at how the photos of these came out.

How To Centre Your Pages in Blogger

Hi everyone,

So, in my complete blog over haul a little while ago, I did a lot of HTML stuff and coding and all sorts because I had a very particular idea about what I wanted my blog to look like. So it meant a lot of customisations and frustration for me.

But, I now feel kind of knowledgeable about some stuff and I thought I'd share my new found knowledge with you! Bear in mind that I'm still not super HTML and CSS savvy, so while you are of course free to ask me any questions that you may have, I may not be able to answer all of them.

Today's tutorial is going to be super easy, but is something that makes a huge difference, in my opinion. As you may have noticed, my blog design has travelled a lot more to the centre since I updated it and today I'm going to show you to centre your page list in Blogger. On that note, my blog is built with Blogger and I have approximately zero knowledge on how to do this stuff on Wordpress or any other blogging platform so please don't ask me on stuff like that. :)

First off you are going to need to save a copy of your current template so that if everything goes belly-up and you think you have wrecked your blog beyond repair, then you can easily restore it to it's previous state (none of which should happen because this is really easy). You can do this by going into Template and clicking on the Back/Up Restore button and selecting Download Full Template.

Christmas Presents Nail Art

Hi there everyone!

So, I'm a little behind schedule on my Christmas nail art designs for this year, so here's my second one. I had hoped to have many more by this time but then I made the decision to completely overhaul my blog's look and layout and name and everything in December. Nice work Dani. (I probably should have thought about how busy that decision was going to make me before I started). Oh well, live and learn.

To be honest, I'm not that enamoured with these nails. I did them late at night, when I was very sleepy and wanted to go to bed but wanted to have polish on my nails more.

Coping by Dissolving

Hi everyone!

Today's post is going to be a little rambly and meandering and not have that much of a point to it. It's basically going to be a little insight into a bit of my life and if that's not really your cup of tea, then I understand and I will not hold a grudge if you don't want to read this one. But, if you do, then grab yourself a nice warm beverage and settle down for a while. :)

Did you know, that for someone that loves reading as much as I do, I don't actually do that much of it.

It's not because I don't have the time and it's not like I don't have any books to read. On average, I probably have about 5-6 unread books on my shelf at all times. Books that I bought because I really wanted to read them. And I don't buy books on a whim - I don't have the space to do that. If I buy a book, it's because I am absolutely, very sure I'm going to love it, because I have others from the same series and I feel the need to own the complete set or because it was only $2. Actually, it's because of that last reason that I ended up with a book called Murder, Mystery and Mayhem: Details of Hollywood's Most Gruesome Murders (what can I say? I'm a fan of murder mysteries and mysteries in general and it was only $2!).

But I'm getting off track.

I used to read a lot. Like, a lot. In primary school I had a deal with the school librarian. We were technically only allowed to borrow two books per week, but she let me take out four. And generally, I'd be back after two or three days to borrow more. That was all I used to do after school. I'd get home and I'd read. And read and read and read. We would also generally go to the public library once a month as well and I'd get out the maximum number of books there as well, which I think was about twelve. I'd generally read them all within two weeks as well.

Then when I got into high school I read less. I still read, but I had less time.

Source

I'd probably call myself a compulsive reader. I read everything. I have to. If there is writing, I must read it. I read the back of cereal boxes, my sisters' homework, even the instructions that come with things that don't need instructions (like shampoo - who needs instructions on how to use shampoo??). I am one of those annoying people that reads over the shoulders of other people on the train. I have no clue what's going on, and they nearly always read too slowly and sometimes they hold the book so I can only see one page and sometimes I'm just starting to get into it when they get off and I'm left alone again, with no clue what the book was even called. It's all very aggravating. And yet, I still do it. I do it when I'm not alone either. I'll be trying to hold a conversation with a friend and yet my eyes will keep drifting over to the book of the person next to me. It always makes me lose my train of thought.

New Domain Name

This is just a super quick post to let you all know that I am going to be changing my domain from lissasteps.blogspot.com to http://polishpluss.com/.

I don't know how long it's going to take me to get everything finalised and for everything to be in working order so if things start not working over the next couple of days, that's probably why. :)

So wish me luck (I've never done anything like this before) and I hope everything goes smoothly and I'll see you on the other side.

Christmas Tree Nail Art

Hi lovelies,

So, it's December and I think it's high time that I start cracking out the Christmas nail art, don't you. Actually, to be honest, I did these in the last week of November, but that was mostly because that's when my goodies from Powder Perfect came in and I was super excited to use them.

Anyway, I kept my first Christmas design of the year pretty simple and purely by coincidence, the same theme as my first design last year - Christmas trees!

I do apologise for the slightly inconsistent lighting in these photos - I found this polish really hard to photograph and my camera was really fighting me that day...

Powder Perfect Christmas Collection Review

Hi everyone!

So just recently I got my first polishes from Powder Perfect and am so excited about them! In case you didn't know, Powder Perfect is an Australian indie brand that's based in Queensland.

While I have known about them for a while, I'd never actually bought anything from them until now. (This was mostly due to my limited amount of disposable income and the fact that indie's are just more expensive than mainstream polishes and also, shipping costs..)

However, when I saw Cassie's review of their Christmas Collection over on the Reluctant Femme, I knew I had to buy at least some of them!

In hindsight, I possibly should have branched out of the red glitters but they were both so pretty and I don't have any red glitters and I wanted them both. So the polishes I ended up with were It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas and Merry Christmas Ya Filthy Animal.

First up is It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas, which is a bright fire-engine red. I know it doesn't look it in these pictures, but it is actually wonderfully sparkly in real life. It's got just the right amount of holo mixed in amongst the glitters to give it an extra lift while still keeping it within the 'glitter polish' range, rather than the 'holo polish' range.