Various Adulations About Life, Screencapped

Bleaching From Green, Dyeing Turquoise Hair, DIY toner

There’s a bunch of things going on in this post and I’ll try to explain them in as detailed a manner as possible!

Before anything tho, ja notice how no one EVER has photos of themselves while they dye their hair, it’s always photos of the after?

IT’S COS IT’S FRAKKING HARD TO TAKE PICTURES WHILE DYEING YOUR HAIR :|

Also I look like a potato while bleaching my hair *shrug

Anyway, I had green roots because I wanted a gradient:

Which was kyot for a while but eventually I wanted my roots to match the rest of my hair so I decided to bleach them.

PREPARATION:

Put a new cut-up garbage bag all around my sink so it wouldn’t turn blue.

Wore a shirt I didn’t like and plastic gloves. 5 pesos at any pharmacy. Plastic gloves trump rubber gloves, rubber is hard to remove when wet.

Convenient: Hair Dyeing Apron from Saizen, 5 pcs a pack, P50 during their Banzai! Sale. Yay.

Wore for +10000 Glamour Points [and also so I wouldn’t turn into a smurf]

BLEACHING:Used 40 vol developer, mixed with blue bleach until creamy/pasty consistency, slathered on roots. Used gloves because I am not a masochist.

Mmm, sexy.

Waited 30 minutes. Bitstrips.com is my life. Rinsed.

Hello, orange and banana hair, we meet again.

Didn’t feel like bleaching a second time because we all know how that madness turns out [yeah, I’m looking at you bleach addicts] so I decided to tone my hair to neutralize the brassy yellow.

Brought out my Directions White Toner, but was unimpressed by the super light lavender tint and figured it wouldn’t take on my yellow hair.

Nope.

Sooo, I decided to make a stronger one!

DIY TONER:

Check out my Directions Plum. It’s so dark it’s almost black. In reality it’s a crazy pink-based pigmented purple that will last you forever if you mix it with conditioner.

Dark!

You can make pastel purple, mix it with blue, mix it with pink, or in this case, glop on the conditioner to make a toner.

Added a tiny amount, tip of the spoon scraped across the dye sticking to the lid. That’s how strong this dye is!

Poured in a LOT of conditioner. I eyeballed it.

(If you have super light hair, this mixture will turn your hair lavender if left on long enough. It’ll only last about 2-3 days before it fades into a white on silver on your hair.)

Slathered it on my yellow hair. Because my hair is not bleached to a pale yellow and I have some light oranges hanging around there, the most this will do is neutralize my orange to a dull peach, and the lightest yellows will turn very pale purple. Which is fine since I’m not going for white, I’m neutralizing. No need to be neurotic about the “purple tinge” if you leave toner on for more than 5 minutes.

After around 10 minutes, rinsed the toner off. Voila, no more glaring yellows.

ACTUAL DYEING:

Mixed a little blue into the turquoise dye just to make sure it came out more blue than green. Added conditioner to dilute the color a little bit.

Left dye on for 30 to 40 minutes.

Read Robopocalypse because sci-fi is awesome and it’s coming out as a Spielberg flick, too.

Say Robopocalypse ten times, fast.

After 30 minutes of not managing to get blue fingerprints on my book, rinsed the dye off with mind-numbingly cold water.

Towel dried hair, very gently.

Fluffy.

Blow dried, serum-ed the heck out of it and straightened a little bit for going out.

FINISHED!

Hair adventures under the tag “HAIR” on my blog.

Food Diary: We ♥ DIY SUSHI!

The Boy and I love sushi (rice rolls. No raw fish involved unless you want it!) so we made our own the other night. Sushi is extremely filling—4 rolls are usually enough for me. My favorite part about preparing sushi is that it’s easy and no actual cooking aside from creating the sushi-zu (sushi rice).

This is my DIY sushi recipe, so it’s bound to have shortcuts. Apologies in advance. :P

(I bought EVERYTHING at the NCCC Mall supermarket in Matina.)

Nori (dried seaweed sheets)

2 cups cooked GLUTINOUS rice

(you actually need the glutinous kind, but we didn’t have any. I cheated. If you want authentic sushi, just buy glutinous rice, it’s easier to roll and won’t fall apart as easily.)

1/2 cup rice vinegar

2 tbsps sugar

(photo stolen from the intarnetz because I forgot to take a picture. Also, white is preferred but I didn’t have any. The only difference it makes it that your rice will look sepia. :| )

1 tsp salt

(another stolen photo. Yeah, yeah.)

Soy sauce and wasabi

FILLERS/STUFFERS

In my case I used crab sticks, cucumbers and cheese.

Sort of like a cross between California rolls and Philly rolls.

Philornia rolls. :|

First you need to make the sushi-su (rice + wine mixture)

In a small saucepan, combine the rice vinegar, sugar and salt. Cook over medium heat until the sugar dissolves.

Cool, then stir into the cooked rice. The rice is going to seem pretty wet when you first stir in the mixture, so fold the rice over. Get someone to stand beside you and fan the rice to make it dry faster. If not, just fold the rice until it dries up and absorbs the mixture.

Lay out nori sheets. You need a bamboo mat, but I didn’t have one so I just laid it out on top of foil. Nori sheet needs to be rough side up, shiny side down.

Spread rice evenly onto the nori. Leave a quarter inch space at the bottom uncovered by rice.

Next lay out your fillers. I actually have too much on here, but hey, I like my sushi STUFFED. I don’t recommend this if you’re making sushi for the first time though, since over-stuffing makes it hard to roll everything up.

I used cucumbers sliced into long thin 1/8inch thick strips, cheese, and imitation crab sticks. Because I hate real crab.

Put water in the quarter inch space of nori that you previously left uncovered by rice.

This is the end “flap” that will “glue” everything together when rolled up.

Start rolling! Using a bamboo mat makes this easy, but you can put a dish towel or foil underneath the nori as well.

When you’ve rolled it, squeeze it a little bit to compress everything inside. Not too much though or the fillers will come out of the sides!

Or you can just check out this video to see what I mean.

I’m done rolling!

Pritty.

Now all that’s left is to use the sharpest knife you have and cut everything into slices!

The wasabi, limes and soy sauce are mixed together when you’re ready to serve the sushi.

Enjoy your sushi!

DIY Tutorial: Neon Chain Bracelet (or… YARMPARTY!!!)

It’s been a while since I did a DIY Tutorial sooo I’m excited to share this new one with you folks. It’s crazy easy and cheap too!

In fact, this DIY project cost me… nothing! I already had everything I needed for this. If you do go out and buy the materials though, it will cost you less than P100 for everything! Hail all Cheapsketeers!

You need:
Bright, fluorescent fabric/ribbon/string/yarn

(I had a buttload of fluoro yarn, so I used what I had around the house. Hence the term… Neon Yarmparty! I know, I know… this burden of being a genius is hard sometimes lulz)

You also need chain in any color you like, a tapestry needle if you’re using yarn, and locks for closing the chain up.

STEP 1: Thread yarn through tapestry needle and weave through chain!

STEP 2: Measure how long you want your bracelet to be

STEP 3: Cut off appropriate length of chain (which fits your wrist. I made my chain long enough to double over my wrist!)

STEP 4: Sew yarn through lock findings!

I also added a smaller piece of chain so that I could adjust the length of the bracelet.

STEP 5: Make as many bracelets as you like!

STEP 6: HAVE AN ARMPARTY!

And if your bracelets are 2x long so they double up like mine, they can also moonlight as necklaces!

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial! Check out more of my projects here.

xx Jad

Hey, no problem! :) I love your artwork, please make more! :) Thanks so much for your kind words. heehee.

thanks for following back! i’m a fan of your music, DIY’s and your hair! haha. you’ve got mad skills! :D

DIY TUTORIAL: Make a Galaxy With Bleach and Acrylic Paint

Today’s tutorial is how to create a galaxy “print” on a black shirt with just bleach and acrylic paint. I’ve seen a lot of how-tos on this on the internet, so I came to the conclusion that the “galaxy” look isn’t achieved if the end result:

1. Looks rushed
2. Doesn’t really look anything like a galaxy and more like an abstract painting
3. The materials used aren’t available.

So I thought I’d try doing it my own way! Let’s get right into it.

You’ll need:
1. A spray bottle
2. Liquid bleach (I used a small bottle of zonrox).
3. 1 huge covering for the floor if you’re not working outdoors
4. scissors
5. Acrylic paint
6. NEW kitchen sponge cut up into squares (I used Scotchbrite without the rough side)
7. Old fine tooth comb and toothbrush

HOW TO:

1. Lay out your shirt onto the floor covering. I used an old trashbag and a tank top I sewed myself that turned out too small because this is was first time to try it and I didn’t want to ruin any of my nice shirts!

2. Pour liquid bleach into spray bottle. Add some water. It’s better that your bleach is overly diluted than too strong because you can always add more bleach.

3. Once bleach and water solution is mixed in your spray bottle, test it on a small area of the shirt.

My solution turned out to weak so I added more bleach.

4. Here’s what my shirt looked like after I sprayed/splattered bleach on it. The “nebulas” are created by spraying one spot several times. Then I sprayed in a sort of circle to create a diffused “aura” around the “nebulas”.

Once I had something that looked decent I took the spray head out of the bottle and flicked the “straw” underside onto the shirt to create denser splats.

Bring out your sponge, scissors and acrylic paint. Have a piece of cardboard and a place to pour water and mix paint in. I just mixed and diluted my acrylic paint directly onto my trash bag, I was going to throw it away anyway.

Cut your sponge into cubes. Have one cube per acrylic color you are going to use. I used white, black, blue, yellow and green so I made sure I had at least 5 plus 1 extra for cleanup.

The cubes will have a definitive “square” shape when you press them down onto the fabric so I cut around them in a rough circular shape so it would look more random.

IMPORTANT: Wait for your bleach to dry before applying acrylic paint or else it will just eat all the paint up and when the whole thing dries the paint will be gone. Use a hairdryer if you would like to speed things up.

IMPORTANT: Always dilute your paint with water and never put undiluted paint directly onto your sponge. Always press the sponge TO the diluted paint and then press the sponge to the fabric. This allows you to build color instead of making ugly dense paint marks. The more blended your colors, the more “galaxy-like” the result.

Use a rapid, light dabbing motion to build up color. Imagine your sponge cube is a cotton ball - it helps with the imagery.

Here’s a rough approximation on how I applied and built up the different colors around the bleach nebulas:

I just applied little hints of diluted color around the edges of the nebulas and I tried not to go overboard.

Here’s what we have so far:

IMPORTANT: you can use diluted black acrylic paint to salvage mistakes. Just dab over areas that you want to fix.

Next bring out your old comb and toothbrush. Combs can be dipped in slightly diluted white acrylic paint to make bigger, denser splats, toothbrushes make a fine spray of dots.

I tried to concentrate some white “stars” near the nebulas. I also refrained from going crazy all over the shirt - the white acrylic sprayed all over can mute the previous colors if built up too much.

Wait for everything to dry (about 2 days) then wash.

Note: some people have reported that washing can take some of the vibrancy off the acrylic paints.

Here’s the finished product. Pretty sweet if I do say so myself! <3 What do you think? :)

Have fun making galaxies,
Jad

(Source: jadmontenegro)

Anonymous asked: hi! i just want to ask where did you bought your ear findings from your diy cheater gauges tutorial :)) and love your blog! <3

Hi, thank you! :) I bought them on ebay super cheap! This Chinese seller makes every jewelry finding you can think of, plus a bajillion varieties of beads. Shipping is free if you’re patient like me!

Earring posts http://www.ebay.ph/itm/600pcs-Silver-Plated-Pad-Earring-Posts-Studs-4mm-D4-/150865392042?pt=UK_Crafts_JewelleryMaking_GL&hash=item23204731aa

Earring backs: http://www.ebay.ph/itm/1000pcs-Plastic-earring-backs-stoppers-Finding-4mm-SL1000-4-/160852526183?pt=UK_Crafts_JewelleryMaking_GL&hash=item25738ec467

I also get some findings from this Filipino seller: http://stores.ebay.ph/potofgold77

Hi! I didn’t put a waistband on it at all, cos I hate how pants bunch up under shirts. :) But you can actually put on one if you want to, just search for waistband/cuff tutorials on youtube. Also, I have no trouble wearing my waist-less harem pants, but they do have a slightly unfinished look if you pull up your shirt. It would be more obvious if it wasn’t black. They are also a bit slidy, but I think that’s due to the jersey, not the lack of a band. I’m lazy so I did it the fastest way possible without looking too crappy. hahahaha. :D

Omg, i really love your harem pants tutorial and it’s easy to follow too. the question i have is that did you use an elastic waistband? and did you have any trouble fitting into the pants?

chibilover1

BLOG GIVEAWAY! {Young x Dangerous Clothing}

Hi folks! Before I update my blog about my EP launch I’m going to do a blog giveaway for my tumblr followers for my birthday!

Prizes:
1 Mohawk Cameo Tank Top from Young X Dangerous!

[For residents in the Philippines only]

1 Blue Gray Slouchie from Hats & Things! 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Here’s how you can style this top:

The cool folks over at Young x Dangerous Clothing sent me a Keep Calm and Rock On version of this top!

Black inner tank
YxD Keep Calm & Rock On Cut Up Tank
Cut Off Shorts (thrifted)
Arnold Palmer sneakers

It’s got that rebellious DIY feel that I always look for in my clothes. I took photos wearing it in a fun, casual way like above.

And photos wearing it my preferred way: grungy but goody. Lolz

Denim Vest: I made it! Tutorial here.
YxD Keep Calm & Rock On Cut Up Tank
Harem Pants: I made it! Tutorial here.
Black 8 Eye Doc Martens, 1460

More styling suggestions:

For tips on how to style a beanie, just click on my OUTFITS link on the sidebar, I wear them all the time ! Here’s me wearing a mustard one since it goes better with blue hair lol :D

Grunge is love, xx Jad

DIY TUTORIAL: DIY DENIM VEST

Time for another DIY!

DIY TUTORIAL: POLYMER CLAY CHEATER GAUGES

YAY FINALLY A DIY TUTORIAL AND A BREAK FROM OUTFIT POSTS YAY YAY YAY!

Okay, I know I’m a jerk for not posting a DIY tutorial in so long considering a lot of my followers are DIY enthusiasts, so I’m sorry you guys. Here’s a really cool one to make up for it :D

I’ve been wearing my hot pink cheater gauges and everyone’s been asking me how I made them. My answer is: out of polymer clay and old earring backs!

Disclaimer: these are cheater gauges. They are not for use with real stretched lobes, because polymer clay is a porous material and cannot be used for going THROUGH flesh and staying there for extended periods of time. Also, I plan to stretch my ears soon, so don’t be a dick and say stuff like “Ew poser! Stretched ears are only for those who endure the PAIN!” In no way am I intending to disrespect/circumvent the efforts of people who have stretched lobes. I have tattoos and piercings so I know how it feels to undergo pain for something decorative/symbolic on your body. I’m pretty proud of the fact that I actually figured out a way to see how I look with stretched ears before I stretch them. Which means I can decide to go through with it or not. It’s like stenciling a tattoo design on your arm first and deciding you don’t want it there so you put it on your leg instead. You don’t tattoo it first and then decide it sucks because you can’t change it. Anyway, if you hate cheater gauges so much, there’s a whole host of sellers you can pick fights with on Etsy lol. Also, I am fully aware that “gauge” means “measurement” and I am calling them cheater gauges instead of the offishul “plugs/tunnels/tapers/talons/spirals” because more people call them gauges, thus more google searches using that term. Law of majority.

Anyhoot, onto the tutorial!

Stuff you need:

Polymer clay.

I bought my clay from a seller within Davao City called Angeluz Creatives. She’s a doll! She went to the trouble of explaining to me how to use polymer clay because I’ve never worked with the material before.

I used the hot pink one for these gauges:

This color is called CANDY PINK. The instructions for baking are at the bottom of the clay pack. Too small to see, but it says bake at 130 degrees celsius for 30 minutes per 6mm thickness.

You also need toothpicks:

Earring findings. These work the best. Flat base, round locks.

A flat cutting tool for slicing the clay. I used a big flat cutter.

To make my earrings I only used 1/4 of the whole clay pack. I then cut that 1/4 piece into two, so now I had 2 1/8 pieces. I rolled them into thin cylinders.

I kneaded and smashed and pounded each 1/8 piece into balls for about 10 minutes. If you don’t knead and condition the clay, it will crumble and break apart in your hands the moment you take it out of the oven.

Next I made markings against the first kneaded piece so I could make the 2nd one exactly the same length. The shape I made was round and blunt on one end, tapered on the other. You’ll see why in a bit.

So now that you have two long “worms” of the same size, you can begin to curve and shape them the way you like.

Pick a spot where you would like it to “go through” your ears and cut there with the flat blade.

Poke a hole in the pieces with a toothpick.

In the shorter piece, embed the flat earring with the post sticking out. In the longer piece, embed the earring lock.

Slice little circles out of the clay and smash/blend them on top of the holes you made and where you stuck the earring findings in to give it a nicer finished look.

Looks pretty good to me!

Follow baking instructions and bake according to size. I got tips from my seller though, so I knew that for this size a minute was enough.

Wait for them to cool, wear, and enjoy! :D

Worn on a day out!

I made some black ones too! :) I wore them here:

Hope you enjoy your gauges! Leave a comment if you liked my tutorial! ♥


 More DIY posts here, hair posts here, outfit posts here.

Check out the sidebar for other links, personal journaley stuff on the left, informal bloggery stuff on the right.

I just finished making these:


I’m so pleased with how they turned out that I’m making a DIY tutorial! :) It’s for people who are considering stretching their ears but want to see if gauges suit them first.



All I know is, I like how they look on me! <3