Must-Have Products of Season 8 - The Ellen DeGeneres Show

I laughed so hard I cried watching this. I love Ellen.

Must-Have Products of Season 8 - The Ellen DeGeneres Show

Opportunity for Free Beauty Violence!

Violent Lips that is! If you haven't heard of these yet, they are basically like temporary tattoos for your lips, allowing you to achieve crazy lip designs that you have never even dreamed of, and saving you the time of painstakingly painting tiny designs on your lips :P



Right now Violent Lips is having a contest on their blog giving samples of their lip tattoos to 100 lucky girls across the country to try out and hand out to friends and those who ask about their wild lips! Click HERE for details.

I sent in my info yesterday as soon as I saw the post and got a response almost right away! I am lucky enough to be going to L.A. Memorial Day weekend, so I'm sure I'll have plenty of opportunities to rock the crazy lip tattoos and hand them out!



I'll be sure to post on my Facebook and Twitter pages photos wearing them!

It was an exciting start to my weekend. I hope you all are enjoying your weekends!

Stay Spooky,
Gothcupcake

MTcoffinz Cosmetics Review!

My friend Jinx of MTCoffinz has her own professional lab brand of cosmetics. She has the say in colors, names, ingredients and packaging and her first batch of colors are not only paraben free and cruelty-free, but are vegan too!

I couldn't resist trying out her "Wicked" pressed eyeshadow and "Under the Rainbow" vegan eye primer! The color was slightly bluer than what I saw on the website (which is most likely due to every monitor being different!) but the color is crazy beautiful and goes great with my current blue hair!

Today was day 3 of testing out the color. I didn't bother posting my first 2 days of testing, as they were trial and error getting used to the primer. Every eye primer I have ever used has varied in texture, packaging, and how much or how little you need to apply to make the eyeshadow stick, so usually the first few tries are to figure it out. Day 1 I applied the Under the Rainbow primer and eyeshadow whilst in the car in transit to see a movie and I used too much primer and had creases almost instantly (I have oily lids). Day 2 I went too sparse and got creases a few hours later because there was barely any primer on. Today though, I got closer, I think I just need to blend it further up on my lid.

Above photo right after doing my makeup this morning. Under the Rainbow eye primer and Wicked eyeshadow (sparkle liner and mascara not by MTcoffinz).

Picture above taken about 10 hours later--without touchups. The eyeshadow compacts have a secret eyeshadow sponge brush BUILT-IN for touchups throughout the day. Had I packed it with me to work I would have had a flawless look all day long and saved room in my makeup bag! :D

Overall I am really impressed with this line of products and can't wait to try more colors! MTcoffinz is about to release 3 new colors so be sure to keep an eye out (har har) on their website and facebook fan page for cosmetic updates, news and other great MTcoffinz creations!

Stay Spooky,
Gothcupcake

Scary Photo Op!

I took this picture late at night after the RAW:PHX fashion show, and I felt like being silly since my hair reminded me a little of Edward Scissorhands. I took the image into Picasa and played around with it until this happened. I might have to do more with this in other media :D

Stay Spooky,
Gothcupcake

Recycled Toilet Paper Wrist Cuff!

How To Make A Cuff Bracelet From A Recycled Toilet Paper Roll Tube

This post is a tutorial for today's Simon Says task on AttackoftheCraft.com In one of the previous challenges I made a set of Wonder Woman wrist cuffs and wore them to work for Earth Day, so since I am on a recycled jewelry kick, this tutorial is how you can make your own pair!

To start you will need:

A toilet paper roll tube, a pair of scissors, a scrap of aluminum foil (this one is left over from me dying my hair Saturday), and some tape (I prefer electrical tape, but most should work just fine).


Use your scissors to cut a vertical slice up one side of the toilet paper tube.


Open tube into a rectangle and cut a slice horizontally across the rectangle.


Place one half of the tube in the center of a piece of aluminum foil.


Fold the aluminum foil over the shorter sides of the cardboard.


Then fold the top and bottom portions of aluminum foil over the cardboard and overlapping slightly in the center.


Your tube should look like this.


Cut a piece of tape the length of your rectangle and use your tape to cover the rough edges where the foil overlaps.


Reshape your tube so it's rounded again. Repeat above steps with your remaining materials for a second cuff.


Rock your new recycled wrist cuffs!

Stay Spooky,
Gothcupcake

Monster Hiking

A couple weekends ago Scott and I went hiking at Lost Dutchman Park. We had a picnic lunch and enjoyed the beautiful weather and crazy winds while we hiked! I was compelled to bring Draculaura along for the journey...

Here is Scott at the entrance to the park taking a picture of me taking his picture :P
Draculaura strapped in for the journey!

Scott and I being silly.

Pretty wild flowers :)

My arse, and Draculaura. Now, before you think me cruel for subjecting a vampire to a day in the desert sun, keep in mind she uses spf 666.

Draculaura striking a pose...
...and enjoying the view below.
On our way out of the park we saw the Ghost Town and mining areas. There were a few crazy little shops and this one seemed like a cool place to stop. Brian Pulido or Rob Zombie need to use this in one of their next horror films, I mean, you didn't even see the inside. Retro soda machines out front and a toilet seat sign, can't beat that ;P

All in all it was a pretty sweet day, and I can't wait to go on more hiking adventures in new locales.

I hope everyone is enjoying their Mother's Day and weekend.

Stay Spooky,

Gothcupcake

Zombie Cupcakes!

I was inspired by the shirt I picked up from shirt.woot.com a week or so ago, to bake a batch of vegan "zombie" cupcakes.

For those who missed that shirt post, here's a pic of the shirt image:

And here are the cupcakes:

This was them before going into the oven...

Close up of the green zombie ooze batter! These were a basic vanilla vegan cupcake recipe, made with white rice flour to make them gluten-free and with a little coconut extract for subtle flavor as well as mini chocolate chips simply because I love chocolate. :)

Finished product (the lazy version, next time I will pipe that frosting on!) complete with spider sprinkles:
If I can get my cupcake tower mailed to me I will attempt to recreate the zombie cupcake tower image from the shirt :D I think it would be super fun!

I hope you all had a great week and have an even better weekend!

Stay Spooky,

Gothcupcake

Trash to Treasure- Size Sticker Hair Flowers

When I'm getting my Clark Kent on, by day I work in retail. I work all over the store, but generally I spend most of my time working in the clothing department. When new product comes in, old product is removed from tables and is unfolded and hung to be moved onto racks. Before folded shirts can be hung, all of the size stickers down the fronts of the shirts have to be removed. Typically we can have anywhere from 15-200 shirts to hang at any given time, so the piles of stickers can really grow if you have a lot of shirts to hang. Everytime I see the piles of size stickers I wish I could make something with them, since it seems such a waste to throw them away. So, this week I collected the stickers as I hung shirts and brought them home with me to recycle them and get crafty. For this craft all I needed were the shirt size stickers, a pair of scissors and a hot glue gun.

My coworker Alison asked me if I knew what I was going to make with them, and I told her I had a lot of ideas but hadn't picked one just yet. Then she suggested I make flowers out of them. The first thing that came to mind were those zipper flowers! I hopped on YouTube and searched for some ribbon flower tutorials and after playing around until close to midnight last night, finally got the hang of this one...
The tutorials all use ribbon, so I had to take the size stickers and attach them end to end in a long strip, roughly 24" long. However, since these are stickers I made 2 strips 24" long and then stuck them together, so that I had a design on both sides. Essentially making my own size sticker ribbon. I then used the scissors to clean up the ends and edges. I wrapped the strips into flowers and used some light weight cardboard from my recycling bin as a base to glue the hair clip on.
I picked this one out for myself. Here, I used the tail of the size strip to make leaves. Some of the hot glue popped out since the size stickers don't absorb the glue like ribbon would, but I'll just say the little glue globs are "dew" haha I made a couple for my coworkers and still have strips leftover if I get any requests. Now I want to try making these with other recycled materials!

Stay crafty and Stay Spooky,

Gothcupcake

Vegans!

Update, finally! Well, Scott and I are happy to be making friends with another vegan couple. I feel like such a dork for being excited about it, but it's awesome. Tracy and her husband James are the vegan couple I'm talking about and we were able to meet up with them this past weekend for lunch at Pita Jungle. I had no idea they had a brunch menu and had never had the opportunity to try it, so I had to take advantage of vegan pancakes, especially since they were highly recommended by Tracy :)

Three lovely protein pancakes served with blueberry sauce, bananas and strawberries. They also don't skimp on the strawberries--look to the right of the plate, they even included the top of the strawberry. I guess you have to put some greens in there somewhere.
Here are James and Tracy, super cute! Look at the AMAZING mound of yumminess that Tracy has in front of her! I forget the name of the menu item off-hand but it's a salad of sorts. Scott is camera shy so I wasn't able to get a shot of him with his falafel wrap, but Tracy shot me eating my yummy pancakes...
Please take this opportunity to note the painting in the above left corner of the photo, we were trying to figure out what the subjects were doing, it can actually be interpreted in quite a few different ways.

Anywho, it was a lovely brunch with lots of witty banter, enough laughter to make my cheeks hurt and plans for a forthcoming vegan pizza tv night :D

All in all it was a great experience and I can't wait to hang out with our new friends again!

Stay tuned for my forthcoming zombie cupcake post!!

Stay Spooky,

Gothcupcake