Jewelry without jewelry

For nearly all my adult life wearing jewelry has been pretty much out of the question. Teaching dance, and teaching at the gym means wearing jewelry could be a serious health risk (think of dangly earrings getting wrapped up in somebody else's long hair and what that would do to your ears...), so I've never really got into jewelry in the first place. I do have my wedding and engagement rings, but they are very simple and won't do any damage (I hope) to anyone. And they never come off, so they're more a part of me than a separate thing meant for making someone pretty.

Being a part of Project 333 means jewelry counts, and I reasoned I'd rather be warm and without dangly things than to freeze with a necklace on. So I've left jewelry out of the 33, and have decided (for now) that I'm not wearing any, aside from the two mentioned before (which don't count, for they never come off).

Over the summer I longed for something new to learn, that I could learn from home, and I found a YouTube channel, that teaches basic nail art designs for beginners. I've always wanted to be good at doing nails, and I never previously have learned, having thought it's only for the professionals to know how to do it, and that I wouldn't learn because I'm not that kind of a girl and I'm not even interested in the whole make-up thing. But I figured, having had a look at a couple of tutorials with NO need for extra materials, that I might just give it a go, to try to learn the basic skills for doing nail art, because they look SO cool, they look easy enough to accomplish, it would be something new and you never do know unless you try. Besides, doing one's nails would be like jewelry on one's hands, without them counting towards your 33 items :)

Here's my first tutorial's worth:

The tutorial itself can be found here:

http://youtu.be/eFtkkiV8HrI

And there's plenty more where that came from - she's doing one tutorial per month of the beginners' designs, and number 6 has just come out. This one above is the first of the six. I've also had a go of the third tutorial, but I think I'll re-do them later when the time comes, and just work on these one tutorial at the time.

I've decided to not go over the top with the polishes either. I only have a couple of colours (as one can tell) and that's good enough for me. I thought having 8 bottles would be somehow ideal - it would be scarce enough to not be overflowing and it would mean I'd have to think carefully which colours are the best for me, but it would be enough to do any of the beginner's tutorials for at least another year. There needs to be a top coat (which, if possible, could double as a base coat), a clear glittery polish (like the blue-and-silver I still have some left of which you can see on the bottom and middle pictures), then I'd like to have a coloured polish with glitter bits in it to do very simple nails without much thinking, and that would leave space for 5 different colour polishes.

So there, that's a beginning. Maybe I'll get better, hopefully so. And I hope doing "the other hand" will get easier in time. At least I've already learned a ton of new things, from different designs to different techniques to different materials used. And it's amazing what you can do with a ball point pen and a watercolour brush - things everyone has at home already.

I think I'm falling for nail art - it's a small enough canvas to let one's imagination run wild :)

Anjusha