a friend of mine was talking to me about doing her nails for canada day. she figured that she could probably paint a 3-pronged maple leaf, or worst case do a little red blob (imagine the hypothetical flag of japanada). i figured i could probably make a very small maple leaf stencil. now most of the time i figure i can bang out a craft real quick, i am very wrong. but this time i was right!

so i went to wikipedia, downloaded an svg of the canadian flag, extracted the maple leaf, scaled it to the right size, printed it and cut it out with my trusty x-acto #11.

wait how am i supposed to affix this to the nail? okay lets try that again. this time i printed a few different sizes, to see which would look the best, and cut through the paper onto some painters tape.

we stuck the painters tape on the nails, making sure every part was well adhered.

she then painted the stencil

after the nail polish had partially dried, the tape was removed and voila!

I'm pretty happy with the result. they're a little blobby though, but the internet says you can fix that by using a sponge to apply the nail polish, and removing the tape immediately after to avoid the polish being pulled back off by the tape.

anyway, I kind of want to try to design and cut some more complex, multi-color stencils now.

if you're reading this, then i've finally made a personal website. as a programmer i've always thought that i should have a personal website, but in what form? making a portfolio seemed like a chore, and blogging died before i was capable of forming blog-length thoughts. but the concept of the "personal web", where your website is reflection of your personality, with no creative limits really appealed to me. unfortunately all i've come up with so far is a beige portfolio/blog.

growing up in a web 2.0 world, i default to thinking about websites as multi-user applications. in doing so, i try to model a domain as simple and generic as possible. a site is for x to do y. well, this site is for me to do everything. there is no singular uniting idea that it's modeled around, other, than that it's mine.

i hope that by freeing myself of the restriction of designing for the general case i can come up with some real fun stuff. but for now, enjoy my little beige blog.