Blue, Blah, and a Bonus

Day 15: Delicate Print was another pre-Christmas mani I forgot to post. Apparently, I felt so crappy that I lost a few days somewhere. (And I'm now trying to conquer what I'm pretty sure is a sinus infection w/o the doctor or antibiotics. TMI, but there you have it.) 

So, what I was trying to achieve was the look of shiny blue wrapping paper with holo silver designs. This blue, btw, is one I frankened by adding ultramarine blue pigment that I use in my soap-making to a bottle of cheap white polish from the dollar store. I named her Madame Blueberry (from the Veggie Tales show!) and I am in love with this color I made! Not so much with my stamping here. I used bday money from my BFF to get some Kleancolor Metallics and the Color Club silver holo Worth the Risque. I'd seen some fab stamping done with silver holo, and hoped for some of that here. So much for that. I stamped with BM-310, using the really delicate cross-hatch design on most of my nails, with its reverse image on my index. The index isn't so bad. The rest? Psshh...so delicate that, combined with the holo effect, it sometimes actually looked like some of the image didn't transfer. But it WAS there! I wore it this way just long enough to record the failure:

My freebie from Different Dimension, Space Camp, came to my rescue! Ah, that's better. I couldn't stop staring at that gorgeous blue combined with all that silver holo glitter!

And, last but not least, when I took that mani off, I got a wild hare to make a polish celebrating my brother's decision to go to Clemson next year! This is an orange jelly with gold hexes and gold bars and purple teeny glitter. I call it "Go Tigers!"

Christmas cracker!

Cracker being my hubby's "swear" word, I thought it very alliterative for this post's title. Because I just remembered there was a mani between the bday/Xmas one and the Xmas day mani!  It was a last-ditch effort to cram in a bunch of the Christmas manis I never got around to. So, my few-days-before-Christmas mash-up:

Kind of a crappy pic taken with my phone, but I've been forgetting since I got sick to take pics of my art! Left to right: cherry candy cane ('cause the Kleancolor metallic red bled through my white stamping), glitter globe, abstract tree, gingerbread dude on a cookie sheet (his wife was on my left hand ), and purple topped with Chunky Holo Black (which didn't even show its awesomeness here) because of the baby King!

Excuse the grody dry skin/hang nail on my thumb. I cannot seem to get rid of those! Too much mommy-ing: dishes, baths, meal prep, etc. NOT that I'm complaining. If I'd known these digits were going to become canvases, I'd have started taking better care of my hands years ago!

Christmas Day mani(s)

First up, my littlest's Xmas nails! My Kleancolor metallics and my Silly Lily (awesome!) indies arrived just before Christmas, so Kristiana asked me to cram all of them on her little digits. She was especially excited about the turquoise heart that came out of Silly Lily After the Storm onto her thumb!

And for my Christmas mani, I wanted to use the Wet 'n' Wild Shine Wild Card and Sinful Colors Call You Later that Olivia and Ian got for my birthday. I had squeezed in the polishes from Isabella and Kristiana on my birthday/Christmas mash-up, and I wanted the two big kids not to feel left out. So, a softer look for Christmas:

Here's Wild Card stamped with the squiggly tree image from BM-321 using Kleancolor metallic green in a horrendously overexposed flash pic.

Here's the rest of 'em. I used index and middle accent nails in Call You Later topped with After the Storm. This is outdoor shade, no flash.

And outdoors, sunlight.

Indoors, no flash, indirect sun.

Overall, it was a softer look than I would have preferred for Christmas (and I just love bright colors, anyway), and I think I could have gotten much better contrast for the tree stamps with my frankened special green, but I wanted sparkly trees and the color choices made O and Ian feel good, so it was worth it.

Merry Birthday!

I am SO behind on posts! The whole fam got a really nasty cold that has dragged on from a week before Christmas, and yesterday I breathed in something awful while sanding my pallets with no mask (read: idiot!). Anyway, on to the nails!

The 19th was my best friend's bday and our Christmas get-together, so I wore a birthday/Christmas mash-up for her, b/c she always checks to see what I'm wearing on my little canvases!

I won't even bother to list all the polishes it took to do these.  I will say it took me forevah, and that I should have known drawing the balloon strings below with a Sharpie would smear as soon as I top-coated. Oh well. You can't tell in this pic, but the shimmer of the orange totally glistened and shone in the water marble!!

Because of the wonky shape of my nails, the wreath I copied from here looks kind of dumb on me. I was pretty proud of my deep V French Xmas tree and my mistletoe nails!

Message in a Bottle, or Lessons Learned from Lacquer

Warning: No pics, just blather, yammer, yak yak yak, yada yada yada.

So, according to my 12-year-old son, Ian, nail art is a fun but relatively useless hobby. I have to agree. With the 24 hours God gives me each day, I generally need to cram in schooling four kids, taking care of housework (with four nifty helpers!), meals, working very part-time for my BIL, pre-reading assignments so I know what the heckito people are learning the next day on their own, scrapbooking major events for all the kids and my own album, too...a lot of stuff that feels pretty important. For most of my mothering career, I didn't bother with nail polish. I didn't have time for it, or felt the time was better used elsewhere, I couldn't keep it from chipping two hours after I finished, and who the heck was going to see it most days?

Then, about two years ago, it hit me. I was 36 and the clock wasn't going anywhere but rapidly forward. I spent my whole life to that point agonizing about what people think, not just about consequential facets of my life, but really minute details like whether I was too uncool at 16, or 26, or 36 to wear blue nail polish. And I had a revelation: I needed to reserve concern for others' opinions to what really mattered, which was whether my words and actions and choices reflected Christ. No one was likely to consider me a candidate for the hot place because my nails were blurple!

So, I'd polish and enjoy what felt like wild and wacky nail colors for a few months, and then quit. And then pick it up again. It wasn't until my best friend found newspaper nails on Pinterest that I discovered the world (the bright, beautiful world) of nail art. Suddenly, all the art projects in my heart/soul that screamed for creation could economically and (relatively) quickly escape onto 10 little reusable, recyclable canvases! The ideas in my mind that I didn't have $$ to create on a wall, or the talent to put on paper, or the guts to show in a larger medium could explode onto my nails!

Since sometime in the spring this year, I've been avidly reading other bloggers' nail art posts, swatches of new polish collections, tips on care, and tricks for achieving a certain look. I try to make a mani last four days, but sometimes I'm bored after two, or stretch an extra day so that I'll have a fresh look for an evening out. And silly as it may sound (especially to my serious little son), I have learned things through nail art about myself that I never realized or maybe just never absorbed before:

1) I am not the most original person in the world. Creative, yes. I can take someone's idea and find ways to make it more my own. Come up with something "wow" with no catalyst but my own lazy mind? Not so much.

2) It's OK to fail, and to admit failure. All the lovely women out there who have posted pics of smeared stamping, catastrophic color combos, and otherwise abominable art on their digits, admitting for all the world to see/read that their designs aren't always perfect, made me feel it's OK to admit what everyone knows already: I'm not perfect!

3) I would be a bankrupt impulse buyer if not for my husband! Holy crap, I kid you not, my polish stash grew by about 500% from April to October of this year. Now, granted, pretty much ALL of that was $2 and $3 bottles of Sinful Colors, NYC, and Wet 'n' Wild polishes. But still! Every time I stare at the (for now) 120 bottles on my homemade rack, I think, "How could I possibly need more?" And then someone posts swatches of a green nothing like any of mine, or I remember that I do not yet own A SINGLE INDIE POLISH!!! (Thank God for bday and Xmas!) Thankfully, I have to face that man who busts his butt every day with a full-time job plus a full-time business of his own to support us. I have to be able to tell him I didn't blow the grocery budget on polish!

4) And of course, I'm also learning TONS about nail art itself! What the difference is between a shimmer and a micro-glitter, duochrome v. holographic, which combinations of techniques and colors will or won't work, that what works for someone else may not be the best brand or style or method of execution for me.

So, while I will not bring world peace or feed the masses with my new hobby, it HAS provided some benefits. Besides, it's so much more fun than just painting my nails!

Mani Happy Memories

Day 14: Flowers. Hmm, how to fit that into a Christmas mani? Poinsettias, of course. But I was getting a little bored with the bright red and bright green already. I was staring at my bin of green polishes, and it hit me! In the mid-80s, my family lived in Miami for 2 years. Our whole neighborhood was full of stuccoed houses with mica flakes mixed into the stucco so that all the houses sparkled. Very beachy, very...Easter eggish. Our house was mint green. I kid you not. Mint green with sparkles!  OK, there's a point, and I'm getting there! My mom found out that in Miami's sub-tropical climate, you could plant all those lovely poinsettias from coworkers, etc. right in your yard! So, out in front of our minty, glittery house was a flower bed filled with a whole row of bright red poinsettias. Hence, my flower/Christmas mani from a memory of my childhood:

I couldn't capture the glittery silver very well; my photography skills are minimal. For this mani, I used Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Mint Sorbet topped with a nameless silver glitter from The Supply Source. I used acrylic paints to make the poinsettias and leaves (although technically the "flowers" are leaves!) and for the centers I dotted on Supply Source's gold glitter polish with a homemade dotting tool. I really like how this turned out!

What's Up at the Kitchen Table Institute

This is NOT a polish post. I just had some pics of the kids and/or their recent activities that I felt like posting. So, without further ado:

Isabella got 'keets for her 10th birthday! Here she is with Pearl and Jade on their first night at home. She is so in love!

 Olivia did the ropes course at the zoo! She was totally sore the next day, but I know it's one of those things she will always be glad she had the guts to do!

Kristiana curled up in a nest of tissue paper we had tossed in a pile as we unwrapped Christmas ornaments and hung them on the tree. Isn't she the most beautiful, tiny Christmas elf in this outfit?!?!

No pic of the son, just the awesome speaker he made for my Droid out of a TP tube and push pins! It works amazingly well, too! My little builder. 

Birthday Haul Part 1: or, Glittah City!

"We now interrupt your regularly (or not so regularly) scheduled nail art challenge to bring you this random post..."

Yesterday was my birthday! 39...ugh. One more year until I'm flippin' 40 years old. Ack. Barf. On a more cheerful note, my kids all got me awesome polishes, some I'd been coveting for months, some I didn't even know I wanted until I got them! And I didn't just want them because my kids gave them to me; they really are great! Lots of shine, shimmer, and GLITTAAAAAAH! I had to take a break from the nail challenge

Left to right: Olivia got me Wet 'n' Wild Shine Wild Card and SC Superstar, Ian gave me Wet 'n' Wild Shine Bijou Blue and SC Call You Later, Isabella gifted me the long-awaited Notting Hill Blues, and Kristiana gave me Nicole by OPI Rainbow in the S-Kylie, which will forever be known to her and me as "Party in a Bottle". The Different Dimension Space Camp mini is there just b/c I added it over one of my bday skittles, and I hadn't used it yet, and I loooooove it.

Notting Hill Blues on thumb (topped with Call You Later, which I didn't realize 'til it was on that it has green and teeny gold glitters—so much depth!) and ring (+ Rainbow/Party...), Superstar topped w/ Space Camp on index (I love the formula on Superstar: a jelly that stays true to it's "jellyishness" but still leaves no VNL w/ just two coats!), Bijou Blue on my middle and Wild Card on my pinky (both topped with Rainbow/Party...). Wild Card is pretty sheer, and I still had VNL at two coats, but I think a thin third coat would remedy that, and it is a shade and finish I didn't have. The Bijou Blue was thinnish, but a medium 2nd coat was enough to achieve opacity, and although I thought I had something pretty close, it is in fact different enough that I don't have any dupe.  Flash:

Outdoor (overcast)

 I love ALL the polishes my sweeties gave me! Later, I will be posting parts 2 and 3 of my birthday haul, polishes I bought via Amazon.com with gift cards from my best friend and my bestie SIL!

Puppies for Christmas!

Four years ago, my sweet hubby got the kids and I two blue merle Australian cattle dog pups for Christmas. Here are my babies today:

 my baby boy Pizwat (peas what?)

 my sweet girl Po (as in "po-faced") (grainy phone pic)

Such a good big brother! (another low-quality pic—thank you, Android)

For Day 13: Animal Print I decided to do an honorary mani for my pups! I coated three fingers with a red Sally Girl mini (812084) and two with Orly Decades of Dysfunction (3 coats before I got rid of all the bald spots). I used Sinful Colors San Francisco to freehand ribbon bows on my thumbs, and a coat of Different Dimension Social Suicide (my first indie polish EVAH!) on my ring and pinky fingers to represent Pizwat and Po's black and white mottled coloring. On my index and middle fingers I stamped with China Glaze Mahogany Magic and BM-306, carefully removing the hydrant in the middle of the design with cotton swab dipped in acetone. Into that blank space I stamped the pup-dog face from Mash-27 and Konad Special Black. Ever since I got Decades of Dysfunction, it's reminded me of the color of carpeting that people without kids have, and the brown bones and paw prints (there's my "animal print", btw) are the mess my pups leave behind them:

flash

outdoor (overcast)

 indoor, no flash

(You can actually see Pizwat's blurry front paws in the background at the top of this pic.)

polishes used (oops, forgot to turn San Francisco around the right way)

I have to say, I'm pretty stinkin' pleased with this one. Not that it would have taken much, after the "wrapping paper nails" fiasco.

Beware: User Error!

Day 12: Stripes
Let me clarify a few things straight off:
     1) The utter and complete ickiness of this main is completely due to my inexperience and not a reflection of polish quality.
     2) I wanted to do this nail art challenge to break myself out of the mold of just imitating others' good ideas, but I have found the added benefit: I am learning SO much about what does and doesn't work in nail art!
     3) I'm trying to stick w/ the 31 Day Challenge and do only Christmas/winter nail art for all of December, so sometimes I have to really s-t-r-e-t-c-h to encompass both of those ideas.

I was so excited to receive in the mail Floam from Ninja Polish--my first from them!

 
 I desperately wanted to use it right away, so I convinced myself that I could use it as a base for striped "wrapping paper" nails. Really, I should have used a base color, then just one coat of Floam, because to get as much opacity as I wanted, I had to use 3 coats of my precious Floam. This is a thicker polish, plus there's the sandy texture of the glitter...

I was not about to try freehanding stripes—not up for that yet! I couldn't find a stamping image that had stripes I was happy with, so I told myself that plaid is just stripes in two directions! Hence, Mash plate 39 and Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Silver Sweep. I will only subject the world to one pic of this awful mani:

I wasn't as careful as I should have been with the Floam application, so I had teeny glitters all around my nail that clung to my skin no matter what methods I resorted to in order to clean them up. The beauty of the Floam was hidden by the stamping, and even with two coats of top coat, the surface was visibly bumpy. I could lie and tell myself it's reminiscent of some funky, imported, textured wrapping paper from World Market, but...not so much. Oh well, another lesson learned.

Xmas polka dots

Day 11 of the 31 Day Challenge (which I am stretching to about a hundred days...) is polka dots. I was pretty happy with my results for this one! I still need to practice my dot gradient, but since this was my first try, I'm OK w/ it. I used Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Red Carpet as my base color, and dotted on  Pure Ice Free Spirit and Finger Paints Well-Cultured Pearl (jacked up w/ some extra Glow powder from Sheer Miracle) with dotting tools I made by pushing ball-headed straight pins of different sizes into the eraser end of a few pencils.

Merry merry!

My future pallet furniture

I do love a good pallet! I've already used a few to create a shoe rack and coat/beach towel rack for the sunroom/dining room/schoolroom/mudroom. (I know, right? Who wants to eat in their mudroom? Life in a 67-year-old house...

So, I have a white oak table, 3' x 5', that my sweet hubby bought about 12 years ago. Our family was growing, and we needed to graduate from our little round table that seated just four. It was beautiful, but now it's scratched, stained with paint and markers, and getting a little crowded for our family of six, not to mention trying to squeeze guests in. I saw this pallet table on homedit.com on Pinterest and an idea began to grow:

I'm going to attach the three pallets from the pic at the top of this post to a piece of MDF I found up at the workshop and six Vika Adils legs (black, b/c they were out of silver ) from IKEA, and end up with a table that's a foot longer than my old one, has storage for some of the kids' school books, art supplies, etc. under the tabletop, and has a coolness/industrial chic/upcycling factor of about a zillion! Will post pics when it's finished!

My Not-Favorite Mani

We have this plastic knife/cake cutter/pie server around the house that's listed on the website where we buy our wheat berries as "My Favorite Knife". Only, it's totally not what I thought it was going to be, doesn't do what I'd like it to do, and has been re-christened in our home as My Not-Favorite Knife. Today's mani reminds me of that knife.

Day 10: Gradient Nails. I've done several gradients since I started doing more than just slapping two coats of some loud Sinful Colors shade on my digits and calling it even. I LOVE gradients. But I told myself that everything between Turkey Day and Christmas was going to be Christmas or winter themed. Hence the snowflakes for Day 8. Hmm, I thought, a red and white gradient will look like something bled out on my fingertips. Green and white reminds me of spearmint. I hate spearmint. And red and green mixed, as any artist worth her salt knows, makes...brown. Not so appealing in a gradient mani. Ooh, I thought then, if I painted my nails white and did a red to green GLITTER gradient... That seemed to have a lot of potential.

But, as in the case of My Not-Favorite Knife, it's totally not what I thought it was going to be and didn't do what I'd like it to do.  I think the biggest problems were 1) I didn't realize just how sparse my red glitter polish was, and 2) I hadn't yet tried my green glitter polish, which turned out not having the same size particles as the red. The red has teeny squares. The green? It looks like someone had a pile of minute particles of glitter dust/shards/crapola left over and said, "Hey, let's dump this in bottles and sell it to some fool who thinks she's getting a deal!" Um, that fool would be me. I bought these at The Supply Source. For $1.50 apiece, I really shouldn't complain. But I'm going to, because that's how I roll. They smell weird. The formula of some is thicker than others. The particle size is not uniform! (Base color, btw, is Finger Paints Well-Cultured Pearl.)

So, after much dabbing, blending, layering, and sweating, this is what I ended up with:

sunlight

flash

blurry flash

I know. Not at ALL what imagined in my warped little head. My Not-Favorite Mani.

Metallic, Magnetic Snowflakes

So, skipping back one day in the 31 Day Challenge, here is Day 8: Metallic Nails. I used China Glaze Magnetix in Pull Me Close with their magnet pattern of diagonal stripes as my base color. Not only is the blue sort of metallic-looking, but magnetic polishes have teeny iron filings, ergo they're full of metal! Duh. So, anyway, then I stamped over the pattern, which I chose to represent a cold wind blowing, with the full-nail snowflake image from BM-323 using Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Silver Sweep. This polish has got to be one of the best inexpensive polishes in America for stamping! I added just a couple silver hex glitter pieces from Born Pretty with nail glue, one on the biggest flake in the pattern and a couple just randomly placed on each nail.

One of these days, I'm going to get the hang of flash close-ups of my nails...I hope.

Outdoor lighting, a little better than usual b/c I actually busted out the tripod. (You go, lazy girl!)

I love snow, and I really liked this mani!

did my nails GIVEAWAY!

Elizabeth at did my nails is having a 100th post giveaway here! I love, love, love her blog. Super readable, friendly and helpful when I email her with nail art/nail care questions, and gorgeous nail art and swatch pics!
And the stuff she's giving away is super-cool. From her post:

"...China Glaze It's A Trap-eze!, Color Club Wish Upon A Rock Star, Claire's Candy Shop, 2 Sasatinnie polishes (teal green and FCGL002, the Orly Fowl Play dupe I posted about here, 2 Sasatinnie minis (gold and lt blue shimmer), and OPI Nail Envy Base Coat. Also, in addition to the polishes, I'm including a set of nail art brushes, a pair of dotting tools, and an OPI crystal nail file."

Plus, one of these days, I might actually win one of these giveaways!  Sigh...

Simply thankful

Technically, Day 8 of the 31 Day Challenge was supposed to be metallic nails. But I was ready to move on from the black and white gradient (bottom half of post) two days before Thanksgiving, so since I'm doing this challenge on my own, I decided to do Day 9: Rainbow Nails first! Besides which, sometimes there seems to be a fine line between shimmer and metallic, so some of these might qualify either way. On to the rainbow!

I was daunted by the idea of rainbow nails at first, thinking all my atrophied-by-motherhood brain could come up with was gradients or cutesy little rainbows ending in puffy clouds on each nail. Ack! But then I realized I could do skittles of different autumn-y colors for Thanksgiving, and it would make a pseudo-rainbow of muted jewel tones! LOVE.

Next dilemma: not having exactly the right shades/finishes of some colors I wanted. Playing around with polishes, I had stumbled across the fact that Sinful Colors You Just Wait, which I first took to be a sheer peach shimmer, has a duochrome to green that makes black polish look like green metallic! Oh. my. GOSH! I decided in the end to layer it over NYC Flat Iron Green, instead, just b/c I didn't want any stray black edges showing, although Flat Iron Green is almost black anyway. And the purple I used on my pinkies is almost too dark to differentiate, too, so I layered Sinful Colors Bali Mist over it.

Another issue: Everything but my thumb and ring fingers showed brush strokes. I HATE brush strokes. I'd seen someone's neat trick (on Pinterest, maybe?) of sponging a final, thin layer of the same polish over metallic or shimmery polishes that have brush strokes. Genius, totally worked!

Yet another issue: The shimmer in Sinful Colors Midnight Blue is much finer than all the other colors I used, so while it is just about as perfect as a polish can get (in my book, anyway!), the slightly different texture/finish was glaringly obvious. I decided to sponge on a layer of Pure Ice Calypso...without first painting a layer on...because I'm lazier than the day is long...which is why my ring fingers look a little blotchy with Midnight Blue peeping through at full strenth. But live and learn, now I know I can't cut that corner any more!

sunlight (Check out that coppery shimmer!)

Not so much feeling the love on the indoor light pic, mostly b/c I'm too frickin' lazy to pull out my camera tripod and the pic is fuzzy. That's OK, because...

TADA!! Flash: possibly one of my fave pics of my nails EVAH.

Nina Ultra Pro Brandywine, Sally Hansen Lustre Shine Copperhead, NYC Flat Iron Green snuggled up close to its partner in crime Sinful Colors You Just Wait, SC Midnight Blue paired with Pure Ice Calypso, and Wet 'n' Wild Megalast Disturbia (love the name) in tandem with Sinful Colors Bali Mist

Despite the fact that I'm notorious for not being able to wear my nails w/o some sort of design or art, I loved this one and didn't want to take it off! I could not stop staring at my nails, which in my experience, is not something a log of nail bloggers say about a hand full of cheapo polishes like these. I have a serious love of deep and/or bright colors, so maybe that combined with all the shimmer was love at first sight...and second glance...and...