Erin Condren covers

(poinsettias, of course)

I showed some of my Erin Condren covers before and I even did a list of all of them (at the bottom of the entry here) but I didn't actually have pictures of all of them, so here are pictures of most of them, or links to the ones I already showed.

Fleur Feliz - I chose my own colors for this one but I don't remember exactly what they were. (I'm pretty sure the darker one is Iris.) This pattern is discontinued but it's the one that comes on all of Eric Condren's shipping boxes - see here.

Halloween cover #1 - this one is also discontinued, unfortunately

I love the bones. But this one is so damaged the layers are starting to come apart, which is why there's another Halloween one below.

(This is one of the separating corners.)

new Halloween cover:

Day of the Dead

Floral Stitches 

Mid-century Circles (reminds me of a quilt pattern)

Moroccan tile - I haven't seen this one lately so I assume it's also discontinued. This is probably the one of these that I've used the least, honestly.

Follow the links for the pictures of these two:

Flamingos

Floral Ink 

and for the last two you currently have to look at EC's website:

paisley with white background

paisley with dark background

My two paisley ones are "retired" (meaning they live on my past-year planners, not that they're discontinued) because I battered them so badly that they're too much of a mess to actually use any more. I noticed that the planner covers I had the first year tended to end up damaged, and I think that was primarily because I had the second half of 2015 and all of 2016 in the same book and since there were so many more pages the covers tended to want to pop off or otherwise get bent-up.

Nail polish stickers & other planner stickers

Look, nail polish stickers!

These are very tiny, I don't know if you can tell - each little bottle is well under an inch. (Added: it eventually occurred to me that I have a ruler - the little bottles are about 5/8".) They are from Peanut Butter Taco, an Etsy shop that seems to specialize in the offbeat - like the F*ck It List. I also bought coffee stickers from her:

I have some books of Eric Condren stickers that I meant to take some pictures of, but I didn't remember to do those in time. But I do have a few things. On the left here is an Eric Condren sticker page that you can buy separately for many of her more popular designs:

(the things are the bottom are a type of sticker also - they're sort of like those "sign here" flags that people use to show where you have to sign. The thing on the right is just a memo pad, it's not sticky.)

I showed the picture below before, but here on the left is a similar page in the poinsettia pattern, and on the right are post-it-type stickers in the Floral Ink pattern. They come on a plastic backing that snaps into your planner, very handy!

Oh, and since we're discussing stickers, this one was supposed to be on my car, but when I couldn't get it on straight, I stuck it in my planner (luckily they had sent me two, the other one of which is now on my car):

KL Fall in the City

I bought three polishes from the new fall KL Polish collection, which is called Fall in the City:

I have separate pictures which I'll post below, but here they are all in a row: Cafe Disco, Jane (like Jane the Virgin, Kathleen said), and Yzma (pronounced EEZ-ma, the character from The Emperor's New Groove).

Cafe Disco:

I don't really know why I bought this - it's much too neutral to really be my thing. But yet it has shimmer in it.... I'm wearing it now and I'm not blown away, that's all I can say, really. (Updated: I wore it for a day, and then I put Shine Of The Times over it, and now I actually like it. Taupey-tan shimmer + mega-flakies - that's more my thing. But if you're into taupey-tan shimmers, this one may totally be your thing.)

Jane:

This is a sort of a grayed out rose color, which is kinda cool. I didn't feel like I had a pink just like this.

Yzma:

I think Yzma is easily my favorite, really - dark purple metallic, what's not to like?

NOTD: Spaced Out

This is KBShimmer Spaced Out, and I think you can see in this picture that I did get the magnets working properly. Most of these new magnetics are not meant to make patterns the way the old ones did - stripes etc - but instead you turn them in different directions and it just makes abstract patterns. It's much simpler and I like it more.

Spaced Out is a teal green, with purple shift which you only see at certain angles - thus the pictures below.

It doesn't really have as much tip-wear as it looks like it does. I'm not sure why it looks like that.

I just took it off today, and most of the week it looked really good. Only the last couple of days did it start to really chip.

NOTD: Call In Slick

This is POP Polish Call In Slick:

This is a blue-and-green "oil slick" duochrome. I'm not sure how well this shows up, but this actually has multiple shades in it. More than just blue and green, but all I could ever really see was the shades of blue, blue-green, & green. The Etsy listing for this says it also has "tertiary shades" of gold and violet - I may have seen the violet now and again, I'm not sure.

I talked about this before here.

I was saying I might buy more of these, and I might, if they're still around later on, but in the mean time I've bought some KL Polish and a Rogue Lacquer and... I want to say something else, too, but if so I've completely forgotten what. So additional Oil Slicks will have to wait a bit.

Sew Psyched

This is Essie Sew Psyched:

If you were paying attention to what I said last week - and depending on exactly what you're seeing on your monitor right now - you may be thinking "but she said she was done with gray polishes!" I think of this as a gray-green but as you can see I swatched it with the greens. I would say it's a very unusual color but I think really it's not, so much. It's army-ish camo green, I don't think it's really as unusual as my brain wants to think it is. Besides, I even have another polish that's really close to the same color, and I'll show you that below. (I checked, and I swatched them together a couple of years ago, that's here.) Also that entry reminded me that this polish has some shimmer to it, which I'd forgotten about. It doesn't show up very well in this picture, for sure.

If you clicked over to that other entry above, it says that this is a current color, but apparently that is no longer true - I checked Essie's website. However, this is an older polish that was around for years and I suspect you might be able to find it around & about. (That is much less likely to be true of the one below.)

This is Square Hue Na Prikope:

Looks lighter than Sew Psyched, in this picture, but that wasn't true two years ago and unless one color or the other has faded or darkened since then, it's probably just the lighting being slightly different. (I may have to go dig these out and check!) This is from the Square Hue Prague collection, which was maybe four years ago, so that's why I think this one is likely to be more difficult to find. (And I think the name is the a street in the Prague shopping district - as I recall, I kept looking up the street names in these 2014 "Passport" collections from SH, and they were all places where you could shop, near as I could figure out.)

Old Ipsy postcards

Ha, I found this forgotten in draft mode - it's scans of an Ipsy postcard I found on my computer at work:

That one seems to have been from January 2015. I also found a physical postcard in my nail polish stuff that was even older, so I took pictures of that one:

(I always feel like I'm supposed to know who these women are, on these postcards. I suspect it's because I don't spend enough time on Instagram.) I think that this was one of the first months of Ipsy I got which was NOPI Guys & Galaxies, a silver glitter polish, so very apropos to the theme. I do highly approve of the glitter theme in general - here's the back:

I quit Ipsy when Sephora Play started and have never gone back, although occasionally I'm tempted. Now I have quit Sephora Play as well (too many repeats of the same stuff - basically the same reason I quit Ipsy). I've been playing with Boxycharm off & on this year, instead.

Planner haul, pt.3

As you might guess from the title, this is a continuation of these previous entries:

part 1 - part 2

Erin Condren products come in these very cute boxes with stickers and stuff inside:

Everything I've gotten from them in the past couple of years, at least, is in a container with this same pattern on it. Boxes of various sizes, flat envelopes, whatever - this is their branding, I guess. Very feminine - not to say I don't like that fine, but if you're somebody who doesn't like this kind of thing, I guess you have to go to Franklin Covey or somewhere for your planner needs. (Is Franklin Covey still around? When I worked in an office that was what we all had, but I never hear anybody talk about it any more.) (Apparently the answer to that is yes, it's still around.)

The thing with the poinsettias is the very expensive notebook that I talked myself into buying. ($20, I think? but it may have been 15% off, I've lost track of what parts of all this were marked down). It's a bound notebook but I have to say I do like it so far. I'm always making lists and that's what I'm using it for. I'm not sure I will ever buy another one of these, I think it's too expensive for just a notebook, especially when I already had a bunch of Field Notes sitting around unused. And then the clear thing sitting on top of it is a ruler/bookmark, and some sticky page-tab things on the right.

I've never liked the EC pens in the past, but these are new (or at least new-ish) and somebody on YouTube said they liked them so hey, I decided to give them a try. They are basically Sharpie-type markers with a fine point and a thicker one, and I do actually like them, a bit to my surprise.

Oh, and I almost forgot - I actually bought some personalized notepads - I never buy things like this, normally, this is why I started out saying I went kind of nuts. That's them on the right above, they are the Floral Ink pattern, like the new planner.

And I haven't actually shown that new planner, so here it is:

Again, with the sticker covering up my name. I really like this design (Floral Ink) so we'll see how long it actually stays before I start switching covers out. (But I have plenty of other cover options if I get tired of it.)

(The Floral Stitches cover that came on the planner for 2018 stayed on all the way through August before I finally changed it out, which is a record for me.)

And one more matching thing for that pattern: sticky notes that snap into the planner.

Oh, and that's a sheet of poinsettia stickers on the left, I keep forgetting I bought that one. (I kind of went all-in on the poinsettia thing, too - I do like the pattern but I wish I had gotten something else on that notebook.)

Actually there may be one more non-EC planner haul - a small one - because I bought some more stickers on Etsy, and one of them is even nail-polish related!

Planner haul, pt.2

Continuing from part one... One thing I noticed lately is that Erin Condren's shipments have gotten where they come noticeably faster than they used to. I knew that EC had opened a retail store in Austin (they're based in California, so I was a bit surprised about that) but actually it turns out that they opened a whole distribution center in Austin as well. Which I guess explains why my shipping has been so fast - they're physically only 100-odd miles away from me now. It might not help quite as much if you live on, say, the east coast.

I wanted to show a little bit of the actual guts of the planner, so here's a page that I just set up lately. This is about the most decorating I do ahead of time on a planner page, unless it's a holiday or something. (I do have a weakness for holiday stickers.)

I've seen people who pretty much cover up the whole page with stickers, but I actually like to be able to write on mine. I always put washi tape across the top, pretty much - this washi is Floral Ink, which matches my new planner cover for 2019. And I've gotten fond of the seasonal date stickers that you can see there - I don't use them all the time, but I think they're cute and they don't cost much, so I usually buy several months' worth a year. (Planner stickers of one kind or another seem to be a huge thing on Etsy and various craft-supply websites. There are tons.)

(Basically what I mean about writing on the planner is that I put in appointments and work hours and such ahead of time, but to a large extent I just use the daily columns to take notes on - the top section is before work: what time did I get up, did I drive through Starbucks and what did I eat for lunch? The second section is notes on what I did at work - or what I did during my "work hours" on the other days - and the third one is what did I do after I got home. So it's sort of a diary, in the end. And I just don't really see the point of writing on stickers when there's perfectly good paper already there.)

Another reason to get the planner direct from EC is because you can choose your format and color scheme. This is the vertical format, which I think is the most popular. You can also get an hourly format and a horizontal one. I've flirted around with the idea of getting the horizontal one but really I think vertical is best for the way I use it. And then you can choose whether you get the colored version, which changes colors month to month, or you can get a neutral one. (Some of the people who use a whole lot of stickers seem to prefer the neutral one just because they don't have to worry about whether the stickers match the color that's already there.)

my current cover

Let's talk about covers. The covers on most EC planners - unless you buy a hard-bound or otherwise perma-bound one - are perforated so that they can be changed out, which just gives you another thing to spend money on. I mentioned before that I had covers in the paisley pattern I showed before, but I actually have quite a bunch of planner covers - I'm not even sure how many. Less than a dozen, but maybe not much less.* Counting my new 2019 one, I'm on my fourth planner; one cover comes with each planner, of course, plus I have quite a few more... I'm now on my second Halloween cover, because the first one (which I utterly loved) is now falling apart. I always retire the most battered cover each year to stay on the past year's planner, so I think the old Halloween cover is going to have to be the one to be retired this year. I'd like to use it one more year, but it's looking pretty sad, so I bought a new one. (They periodically do a buy one, get one free sale on the covers, so that's the time to buy your extras. From the most recent one a few weeks ago, I got the new Halloween one, and the poinsettias.)

Because I apparently can't count that high (I couldn't figure out if I had 11 or 12 covers), I'm going to let the computer count the covers for me:

1. July 2015-Dec 2016 planner with paisley cover (white background)
2. Fleur Feliz in Iris
3. Halloween cover with circular design (and bones!)
4. Paisley with dark background
5. Moroccan tile (blues and greens)
6. 2017 planner: Mid-century Circles (multicolor - reminds me of a quilt pattern)
7. Day of the Dead
8. Flamingos
9. 2018 planner: Floral Stitches (bright flowers on black background)
10. Halloween 2: "something wicked this way comes"
11. Poinsettias (ivory background)
12. 2019 planner: Floral Ink

*Not less than a dozen, it seems. Four years of planners, and four BOGOs, I guess.

(For the record, there will be one more part to this, and that will be up tomorrow.)

Various grays and blacks

I'm piling all of these into one post so I can go on and talk about something else next week. I don't seem to have a lot to say about grays and blacks, generally.

First we have Essence Beauty Beats As Long As You Love Me, which apparently is tied to Justin Bieber somehow. I am the wrong generation for Mr. Bieber, but I believe this is one of his song titles, and I seem to remember that he was actually involved in the making of this polish line in some way, as well.

As you can see on the wheel, it's very similar to Wet Cement - maybe a little darker - but it's a shimmer.

This is Black In Mirrors, which is from the famous (or actually sort of infamous) Maybelline Brocades collection. There were other colors in this collection that got a lot more buzz, but this one is my favorite out of the couple that I have.

There was a year or two when all the mainstream companies were making polishes like this - 2013 is when my spreadsheet says I bought this. I think they were trying to compete with indies, it seemed like. Now all the drugstore brands and even the brands like OPI and Zoya seem to have decided they are better off sticking with the tried and true things - red and pink cremes, for example - and have mostly given up on doing this kind of crazy thing. (Although just when I really think that's true they do something interesting again.) Anyway, all that aside, this is antique-ish gold and silver in a jelly base, it's really fun.

I showed Dirty Baby earlier this year when I bought it, and I'm throwing it in here just because it seems to go with this bunch. I still haven't worn it. But it seems like a fall-to-winter color so I imagine I'll get around to it sometime in what's left of this year.

(It seems like a slightly-toned-down version of Black In Mirrors, really - except I don't think it has gold in there, just silver.)

And then, because I actually used it as a base for this whole wheel, and I don't think I've ever actually done a swatch post for it, here is Wild Shine Black Creme:

This is my go-to black for swatching. I have this old bottle, which is maybe on its last legs (the label certainly is), and I also have a couple of the newer bottles. But I don't really wear it on my nails much.

Feifei, Steel Guitar

This is Zoya Feifei, which is still available:

I love Zoya in any case, but I love them extra much for hardly ever discontinuing anything. This polish has been around for years - I bought this bottle in 2012, which is also apparently when it was released (Diva collection, fall 2012, along with other Zoya classics like Daul and Suri and Song.). This is a steel-blue glass fleck, and I'm always a sucker for a good glass-fleck.

Here's Zoya's verbiage: "a medium steel blue base with heavy gold and blue iridescent metallic sparkle. A truly unique sparkling iridescent blue that adds a magical look to the nails." I'm inclined to think "magical" is probably a bit of overstatement, but obviously I really do like this. It looks very gray next to all these blues, but it's pretty much balanced right in between.

And I decided to put Orchid Steel Guitar here as well, because it seems a bit similar:

I don't think this is available any more - and it was a store-brand in the first place, so I doubt that it's easily findable. It has a similar glass-fleck-ish consistency, although it's a straight gray where Feifei is not.

Wet Cement

Here's a plain gray creme, Xtreme Wear Wet Cement:

I keep buying grays but really I don't wear them much, when it comes right down to it. I do like this one a lot, though. It's a fairly cool medium-gray and it really is pretty close to the color of wet cement. I don't think this polish is current but it was around for a long time so it might be findable on Amazon or eBay. Even if it's not, though, this isn't really a unique color and I'm sure there's something similar around.

Erin Condren haul, part 1

I've decided that I'm going to try to schedule the "off-topic" stuff - skincare, makeup, etc. - on the weekends, and keep to polish on the weekdays as much as possible. I don't know if I'll keep to that 100% but it seems like a good goal, anyway. Nail polish is not going to stop being my main thing any time soon. That said, this is even more off-topic than makeup, because it's about planners. I have a huge Erin Condren haul including my 2019 planner, but I have so many pictures I'm going to do it in stages.

So, regarding planners generally - I was having a discussion with somebody one day about whether it's organized people or disorganized people who need planners. All I can say is that I personally fall on the disorganized end of the spectrum, for sure. I don't have a massively complicated schedule, but I have a very poor sense of time and I forget things and having a planner seems to help. And I like Erin Condren's, even if they are kind of expensive. I think you can get them from Staples (here), but I've always ordered mine directly, because then you can get them personalized. Let's see, I think I ordered my first one in the middle of the year in 2015, but I paid extra to get the rest of 2015 and 2016 all in one volume. And then since then I've just done calendar years. The first year I also bought a bunch of extra covers, since they're interchangeable. This year I went especially bananas and bought the planner folio (basically a protective cover) , and also stickers, a notebook, etc etc...

Let's start with the folio, since it's something I haven't tried before:

It's made of neoprene, and the back side is black - or at least that's the only color I've seen - which means the designs with black in them are the natural matches to that. You can get the paisley design in multicolors with black as seen here, or you can pick your own colors. I've had both the dark and white* versions of the cover, and it's really my very favorite design, which is why I decided to get it for the folio.

(*You used to be able to get this design on a planner in multicolors on a white background, which I really liked. - Aha, I just checked and it's still available as as a replacement cover, but that's the only place I saw it.)

The sticker below is covering up my initials, if you're wondering. That's being massively paranoid, I know, but I just wasn't comfortable putting it out there. (Most of my EC things have my full name on them, but this one just has room for initials.)

This is the medium size, which holds a standard-size planner easily and even some more stuff - I have been carrying a bound notebook that's the same size, as well as the planner. (The folio is 9x11" - I checked.) The neoprene stretches a bit, so that gives you some leeway, but there's not a huge amount of extra space. (I don't think there's actually a small size. There's only medium and large - large is 10-1/2x13". The medium size is $25 and large is $35.)

And because it's the same print, I'll also show you the mouse-pad I bought. (I feel like mouse-pads are obsolete, much of the time, but on the surface of my computer desk I seem to need one. And come to think of it, they wouldn't be selling them if nobody bought them, would they?) This is turned sideways because it fits better in the space I have - it also has initials and they're under the mouse, here. I was sorta beating myself up for spending the money on this item, particularly, but it has a really nice surface and I really like it and I know I'll use it until it falls apart in a few years, so really it's totally worth the $12.

(Part 2 coming on Friday)

Added: some pictures of the folio that I didn't post the first time:

This is the interior - it has several pockets and a pen-holder, as you can see. The planner fits underneath this. (Aside: I love this pink pen to a ridiculous degree because it matches the flamingo cover that I'm using now, and also matched the bright floral I was using for all of 2018 up until the last few weeks. And the paisley on the folio, for that matter.)

This is the planner's tabs peeking out from the edge of the folio.

The folio even has a cute EC-themed charm on the zipper: