Olivia makes stuff.

A few days ago I posted a picture of a Halloween hairstyle I was practicing for a party. This is the tutorial! Whether you’re going for “sexy devil” or “unholy spawn from the deepest pit of hell” you can make your look even more awesome by skipping the horns-on-a-headband thing and transforming your own hair into a pair of demonic horns. (This hairstyle is also practical for scaring boys away year-round.) 

YOU’LL NEED:

• Wire
• Bobby pins
• A hair brush or comb
• Hair spray

DIRECTIONS:

1. Before you start, you’ll need to create a form for your horns out of wire. I started by making a circular base (seriously just a circle of wire) to sit against my head, and then added a horn shape coming out of it. It doesn’t have to look pretty (mine obviously don’t). You can make the horns whatever size and shape you want, although if you have short hair a huge pair of horns probably isn’t going to work. 
2. Make sure your hair is parted down the center, so you’ll have even amounts of hair in each horn. If you have bangs, you can leave them down or pin them out of the way. 
3. Using a brush or comb, create a part in your hair that runs perpendicular to your center part, starting at your ear and running up to the top of your head. Divide the front sections of hair on either side of your face from the rest of your hair, and pin back the extra hair on the back of your head. 
4. Next, secure your wire forms to your head with your bobby pins. Pin them a little higher than you’d like the horns to sit, as the weight of your hair will pull them down a little. 
5. Brush out the front sections of hair on either side of your face. Begin creating the horns by pulling the hair straight back, keeping it flat against your head. 
6. Bring the hair up behind the horn and then start wrapping it around the wire form. Try to avoid twisting your hair as you wrap or the horn will look lumpy and won’t cover the wire evenly. 
7. Just before you get to the tip of the horn (leave it exposed, you can adjust the hair to cover it later) begin wrapping your hair back down. Once you’ve reached the base of the horn, secure the ends of your hair with a bobby pin. 
8. Gently adjust your hair to cover any places where the wire shows through. Add extra bobby pins to secure your hair if need be, and give your hair a coating of hairspray to make sure your style holds. You’re done! Pick an awesome outfit, impress everyone. 

(Sorry for the shitty quality of my photos! Turns out it’s really hard to take pictures of the top of your head and style your hair at the same time.)

Inspired by my insatiable lust for candy, this polish from Sephora, and hours of ogling photos of lolita nails with pretty 3-d elements.

YOU NEED:

• Base polish in a bright candy color (I used a Sally Hansen polish called Flaminglo)
• Clear nail laquer
• Nonpareil sprinkles

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Paint your nails with one coat of your base color. Allow to dry thoroughly.
2. Fill a small container with some of the nonpareil sprinkles. Paint one nail at a time with a thick coat of clear polish—you need plenty on there so that the sprinkles will stick—and then dip the nail into the sprinkles.
3. Pat down the surface of the nail lightly to distribute the sprinkles so that you have a single layer of sprinkles on the surface of the nail. At this point, you’ll probably need to delicately remove extra sprinkles that are stuck anywhere you don’t want them, or add a few sprinkles to any empty spots. Allow to dry.
4. Gently cover the sprinkles with several coats of clear polish to hold them in place. Give your nails plenty of time to dry, and keep in mind that because you’ve used so much of the clear polish, they’ll take longer to dry than a regular manicure.

Today I found a recipe online for do-it-yourself lipstick made from crayons, so Katy and I decided to try making some. I’ve been coveting lipsticks in cool and unusual colors, and using crayons lets you easily make almost any color imaginable without having to figure out pigments or dyes. The recipe is really simple and it only took a few minutes to make each lipstick. Almost all the ingredients can be found in a drug store (although you might have to look in a health food store for shea butter) and some of the stuff you might already have at home, like crayons and oil (we substituted olive oil for jojoba oil since we already had some on hand). We had a hard time finding zinc oxide until we learned that it’s used to treat diaper rash and sometimes poison ivy—so look in the baby care isle or with other first-aid ointments. Everything should be pretty inexpensive, except for the shea butter which cost us $11 for a jar. However, even a small jar is enough to yield dozens of different lipsticks so it’s definitely worth it.

The crayons we picked were Crayola Metallic FX, which have a really nice fine silver glitter in them. We followed the basic recipe but added Vitamin E and zinc oxide ointment. We also bought a couple of small baking tins for less than $2 which made it easy to melt our ingredients together.

The best part of this project was the containers we used: day-of-the-week pill storage containers. They cost less than a dollar, are just the right size for the amount of lipstick the recipe makes, come in different colors, and are a really cute way to hold a bunch of different colors. They look awesome and are the perfect way to store your new lipsticks. We both thought these would make a good gift, too.

Here’s myself and Katy lookin fine in our new lipstick:

TOTAL BABES. Enjoy!

(Lipstick recipe credit to belsey)

Quick n dirty sewing tutorial. It’ll take all of 20 minutes.

Okay, so these houndstooth-print grandma pants are found in abundance in every thrift store ever and can be obtained for like a dollar. They are seriously unflattering as pants but can be made into cute high waisted shorts with extremely minimal effort.

YOU NEED:

• Pair of ugly pants
• Thread in a coordinating color
• Scissors
• An iron/ironing board
• Straight pins
• Marker/pen/tailor’s chalk

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Try on the pants. On one leg, mark where you’d like the top of the cuff to hit. Then decide how wide you’d like the cuff to be. Multiply that by two and add about a quarter inch for a seam allowance. Mark this distance below the first mark you made.

2. Cut off the pant leg at the second mark you made. Fold the pants in half and use the first leg as a guide to cut the second leg so they’re even.

3. My pants had a weird polyester lining on the inside, which I didn’t want. If your pants have this, you can just cut it out.

4. Fold up your quarter-inch seam allowance and press it flat.

5. Fold up the cuff and iron it flat. Pin in place.

6. Using thread in a color that’ll blend in, sew along the top edge of the cuffs. Make sure to keep your seam straight, since your stitching will be visible. 

(ALTERNATE LAZY PERSON METHOD: Just do a couple of stitches on the very inside tops of the cuffs, near the crotch, and on the outside, where the side seams are, to hold the cuffs in place. It won’t be as sturdy, but if you don’t have a sewing machine/don’t have a ton of time, it’s easier.)

…That’s pretty much all you have to do. A good beginner sewing project.

I really wanted to do something else like the ukulele I painted this past summer, so I got this guitar off Craigslist for $25 and decided to repaint it as a Christmas present for my little brother. I was really happy with how it came out and although it takes a bit of work it’s something anyone could do.

DISCLAIMER: I can’t promise that this will not affect the way your guitar sounds! I used a cheap guitar so it didn’t matter, but you should maybe not do this with your super fancy expensive guitar.

YOU’LL NEED:

• Guitar
• Power sander (you can also sand it by hand if you want to, but it’s going to take 800x longer) with sandpaper in a rough grain—I used 60
• Sandpaper in finer grains
• Painter’s tape
• Exacto knife
• Newspaper
• Spray paint and/or wood stain
• Clear laquer
• Old rags

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Remove all hardware from the guitar. Take off the strings, unscrew the tuning pegs, etc.

2. Sand off the guitar’s original finish. Sand the entire body and neck starting with the roughest sandpaper you have, but be careful around the neck and fretboard—don’t sand these, or it’ll mess up the sound/tuning of the guitar.

(This is my wonderful father helping me with sanding, he insisted that his contributions be noted on tumblr)

3. Once all the finish is removed, wipe down the guitar with a slightly damp rag—this will remove the extra dust and raise the grain of the wood, so you can go back over with a finer sandpaper. **Make sure you sand as evenly/thoroughly as possible, especially if you’re planning to use wood stain rather than spray paint.

4. Before you start preparing to paint, make sure to wipe off all the dust thoroughly. Next, tape off your design using painter’s tape. You can cut out more detailed designs with an exacto knife. Decide whether you’re using spray paint or wood stain or both, and which colors are going where. Make sure you press down the edges of the tape really carefully or the paint will leak under it and you won’t have clean lines.

I decided to do the spray paint first and the wood stain second, so I taped off the triangles where the stain was going to go. In hindsight, I probably could have just stained the entire thing first and spray painted the design over it.

5. Before you start painting, use newspaper/tape to cover up the bridge and fret board. If you’re using more than one color, cover the areas you don’t want painted with newspaper and tape. 

6. You can either paint one area at a time and allow the paint to dry before turning it over, or hang it up so you can paint all the sides at once. I ran a string through one of the holes where the tuning pegs went and hung it up in my garage. Do several thin coats of spray paint rather than applying a lot at once or you’ll get drips.

7. To use wood stain: shake or stir the can of stain. Dip the corner of an old rag in the stain and wipe it across the area you want stained. It’s okay if some of the stain gets on your paint—next you can take a clean rag and wipe off the excess stain, and it should come off the paint just fine. If you get any big drips of stain on your paint, you can also use a tiny bit of paint thinner on a rag to gently wipe it off. If you did an uneven job of sanding the stain may look kind of patchy (although in this case it made nice texture).

8. Once you’ve finished all your painting and staining, coat the entire thing with a clear laquer or gloss (I used spray laquer), except the bridge and fret board—these should still be taped up. Allow to dry.

9. Peel the tape off the bridge and fret board, put all the hardware back on and re-string the guitar. You’re finished!

…Joe was pretty pleased.