Light Up Nails!
Today’s little practice involved something completely new, and revisiting aquarium nails.
On the left we have a nail containing an nfc (near field communication) chip, creating a light up nail. It contains a tiny led and a chip that activates with a blue light when near a payment processing signal. So if your’re paying by card, or phone – this nail starts flashing with a blue light. The chip came with a sticky side on the back and it was super thin and small so the nail doesn’t really need to be too built up.
I decided to use a pink Temu builder gel, just to practice really and then added TGB Fresco as the base colour. It took a lot of filing to get the builder gel into a lovely smooth nail shape, and there is a dip in the middle so that the chip wasn’t covered over. I then added a sticker of a moon over the top. The sticker is almost see through, so this doesn’t really work, but that doesn’t really matter, because this was only a test nail to see if I could get it to work.
It even works with the sticker covered in top gel, bonus! Fresco is a new to me colour. It’s very similar to Blue Wave, but a lighter version of it. Very pastel, and really lovely. They had a 3 for 2 deal on their outlet stuff and haven’t ordered for over a year so bunged 10 gels in my basket and checked out. 10 x 20ml TGB gels for £6.70 each, including VAT and delivery. Can’t resist a bargain that good.
On the right, another aquarium nail. This time I used a foil gel for the base – a whimsical sort of cloudy blue and pink swirly number with pink glitter and white glitter. It needed some filing and just as I was right near the end it sprung a leak. I didn’t want to seal it again and have to start filing again, so just top coated it twice and that seems to have done the trick.
This is mainly glitterquarium liquid with a little bubble of baby oil to give it a good flow. At first I managed to have no air bubble, so even with the two non mixing liquids the glitter wouldn’t flow. The leak gave it a couple of tiny air bubbles which has helped the glitter move around much more so it has a much better sparkle. I really need to start incorporating these into a design set and painting the top. Maybe I’ll do that tomorrow.
Sadly, it still doesn’t fit my finger. Although not sure I would wear it anyway. These are deffo for decoration at this point.
In other news today I’ve been trying to get our energy bills down and have bought a couple of solar panels and a really big power bank so that we can use some electricity provided by the sun. The panels came today and they are awesome. So this opens up the door for us to get creative with our bill reduction.
The panels I bought were off Facebook and are second hand, £35 each for 250w power. I got 4 of them, but can only use one with my power battery. So today I spent quite a bit of time moving them round the garden to get the best sun. Morning and late sun seemed to be best today, initially hitting the full 250w output, but then averaging around 147w for the rest of the day. Dense cloud cover reduced it to zero though, so it’s not a complete solution without being able to store the energy for when it dips. It does mean though I can power the fridge and a few other bits and pieces and hopefully more in the future. We managed to charge the unit from 30% to 62% today – the last 10% of that charge came in the last hour before I brought the power bank and cable in. Who knew you could actually harness sun power for free once you bought the bits you need to do so. Amazing.
Notice the cat paw prints. Phil got on it as soon as we got it in the garden. The guy who supplied them delivered them to us and was a really lovely guy. He was very inspirational. He was telling us you can put them anywhere – even on fence panels, which got our brains twitching with the possibilities. Especially at £35 per panel. It looks like the biggest expense will be a larger battery and a good inverter. But I’ll post that as it develops. Looks like I’ll be doing overtime at work to fully get the system up and running.
We do already have panels on the roof but they feed into the grid so we don’t really feel any benefit from them. Without touching that system and creating another one to stand along side should mean we can bring our bills down, hopefully before any shtf and prices climb even higher.
TTFN!
