Galaxy in a Bottle

After about 5 months, I finally used my Kleancolor Chunky Holo Black as it was intended...as a topper for black polish! Such a spectacular effect for so little effort! Here it is over Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Black Out. It seems almost like a galaxy effect in a bottle!

I think I've only used this amazing glitter topper one other time, here on top of purple. You can't even really tell that it's the same polish!

Anywho, this one was a lot of bang for my buck,  in terms of both cost and effort. And I couldn't stop sharing at that shift from green through yellow and orange to red!

My Favorite Nail Art Technique

My chosen technique for the Crumpet's New 31 Day/Slow Nail Art Challenge is stamping. I'm not the swiftest at freehand, tape manis make me nervous (always waiting for half a nail's worth of polish to pull off with the tape...), glitter/jelly/crelly sandwiches by themselves are great when I don't have time for art...but stamping is easy, looks professional if done right, and with just two sets of stamp plates (Bundle Monster 2012 and Mash 26-50), I will never run out of color/design combinations!

For my stamping, I had a few goals: 1) Use pink––I have a lot of pink polishes, but hardly ever use them. 2) Use an untried––this polish is a franken I made called So Sari, a shimmery hot pink with loads of orange, hot pink, and gold glitters. 3) Use a polish I'd never stamped with before––I totally thought Sinful Colors Endless Blue was pigmented enough to hold its own as a stamping polish. I was sort of right; it shows up very well, but is slightly sheer so the base color here tinted it purple. Which was OK, as I was trying to decide between blue or purple stamping! 4) Use a stamp image I'd never tried before––I always think these bold geometrics are not my style, and end up loving the looks on my fingers! This is BM-305, by the way.

I was really happy with how these turned out!

My favorite color?!? You gotta be kidding!

I was supposed to use my favorite polish for Day 19. Agh...too tough to chose! I decided to go with a new polish I got after falling in love with Stephanie's swatch of it at Imperfectly Painted: Sinful Colors Endless Blue. She's right in saying photos don't capture how deeply pigmented this polish is, although rather than cobalt, I might say this polish is something like electric royal blue.

At the same time I bought Endless Blue, I also picked up Hottie. Hate the name, but I've been waffling over buying the polish for quite a while. As royal blue is my favorite color in the whole amazing blue-to-blue-green range, I'd planned to just have Hottie over Endless Blue for this challenge. But I really felt the need for something more. So.

Here's my first horizontal gradient using Endless Blue and FingerPaints Tiffany Imposter, topped with the amazing and (in my case) under-utilized Social Suicide:

Something about this one reminded me of space, the sky, day-to-night science textbook diagrams...I love it and could not stop looking at this one on my fingers!

My oldest untried (AKA stop while you're ahead!)

Day 18: Your Oldest Untried

Seeing as I've been working my way through untrieds and seldom-used polishes through this whole challenge, and I've been finding beautiful swatches on other blogs of new polishes I can't afford and then frankening something similar, I had to really think about what was my oldest untried. I'm pretty sure it's a franken I made before I discovered that Born Pretty store glequins are NOT solvent-resistant. The polish is a black jelly with holographic and red micro glitters and what were supposed to be red glequins. Alas, before I even had time to come up with a cute name, the glequins bled, lending a reddish cast to the jelly (not bad—interesting, in fact!) and bleaching the glequins down to a peach shade.  I had been thinking how devilishly beautiful black and red can appear, and since this was not quite so intense and/or disastrous as the bleed could have been, I named it "It Could Be Worse."

I was careful with application, as those larger glitters could have proved fatal to a nice clean-up. I was surprised by the depth of the polish, and quite pleased. Alas, that's where it all went wrong. I really thought Kleancolor Metallic Red would be strong enough to show up against ICBW, but no. The full nail lips image I stamped using BM-303 isn't even recognizable on my nails. I ended up with it looking sort of like a Saran Wrap mani. OK, I thought, maybe a diagonal tape mani with a thick coat of Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Red Carpet? Uh...no:

Definitely NOT enough contrast.

A close-up of all the glittery goodness beneath the sad screw-ups. 

I will definitely be using ICBW again, but with silver as a topper or just alone to show off the depth.

Day 16 of the New 31 Day/Crumpet's Slow Challenge is color opposites. Lucky me, my two favorite colors are opposites!

That isn't a chip or bald spot on my thumb tip; maybe my nail was reflecting something? I used L'Oreal Notting Hill Blues, Sinful Colors Cloud 9, and my Born Pretty Store loose glitters.  This also could have stood in as Day 17's "new technique", as I hadn't really done a ton of hand-placing of glitter, but I decided not to cheat and did something separate for that one.  The glitter didn't take tooo long, about 30 minutes for both hands, probably would go faster if I wasn't such a newbie. This look was very sparkly and fun!

St. Patrick's Day Nails

Yeah, yeah, everybody else showed off their St. Paddy's looks before the 17th. My manis always get posted days and days after they're on my fingers. There you have it.

Day 9 called for a saran wrap mani. I've had about a 50% success rate with this technique, apparently due to the fact that what is in my head doesn't always translate well into real life. As was the case with this one, of course...

I started with Petites Lime Freeze as my base color. I can't decide what I think of this polish. Far from being lime, the color is such a delicate, shimmery celery green, but it's too sheer for my taste. It wasn't going to matter much here, though. I covered it with a layer of a homemade franken (Verdigris) and then "saran wrapped" it off. So far, so good: good contrast, same color family.

Here is where my RL mani began to deviate from my imagined one. I really wanted to attempt some freehand shamrocks, and I really wanted to stick with the challenge, and I really thought Kleancolor Metallic green would show up against the mottled background. Uh, so much for reality. Let's just say it didn't; let's just say it looked like a leprechaun had pooped on the grass.

 Time to salvage this mani! I ended up doing another layer of saran-wrapping with the Kleancolor, which pretty much hid Verdigris, but I didn't care anymore. I decided to top it with a coat of Sinful Colors Call You Later, a great green and gold glitter topper. Final result:

My fingers look ridiculously red here. Not true to life, not even the way they looked on the computer I used to edit. Whatever.

Close-up of right thumb to see the saran wrapping and glitter a bit better.

In the sun. Man, oh man, is that Kleancolor Metallic Green bright!

I left the look alone for 24 hours, then jacked it up with some black flames from Mash-48, chosen by my elf of an almost-seven-year-old. Pic is blurry because I couldn't be bothered to wait until morning to get an outdoor shot. (If nothing else, I stand a chance of getting some award for Laziest Nail Blogger with the Crappiest Photos!)

My one documented beach mani!

I brought about ten polishes (enough for three manis I had planned) to Hilton Head Island, all untrieds, some of which I frankened. I totally meant to take pics of all my looks, but it's amazing how busy a vacation with hubby and four kids can get! I kept forgetting to take pics when my polish was fresh, and in case you didn't know, picking through a beach full of shells does some serious damage to a manicure pretty stinkin' fast! Sigh...

So, here's the ONE look I managed to get a pic of at the beach:

My ring finger accent is Sally Hansen Lustre Shine Copperhead, a previously untried polish. The base for all the others is a frankened peachy nude I call Never Ever Naked, because I always have polish on! Topping Never Ever Naked is Beggy-Bottomed Bad Boy! WHAT?! My silly son called one of the dogs that, and inspiration was born; I mixed into TKB's Glamour Base black and copper tiny glitters along with small and medium black hexes to represent the colors of my sweet beggy-bottomed bad boy Australian Cattle Dog and his sister (both of whose colors are also mottled with white, not included in my polish ). The copper teenies don't show up as well as I thought they would, so I think my Copperhead accent doesn't fit the look as well as I'd hoped for. Oh well.

Favorite Color Family

My favorite color is blue, and to me that includes all shades of teal and aqua as well. So for Day 6, I chose to use a franken I named Haring Off, a taupe jelly with deep, vibrant aqua glitter and accent my trigger finger and thumb with Wet 'n' Wild Bijou Blue, which looks to be just about a perfect match for the glitter in Haring Off!

Ballet Pink Nails

I actually did these back in February! I had a week of insane busyness getting ready for a week at Hilton Head (the beach in winter is the BEST!), then a week of vacation, then I have been desperately trying to get things back in order around the house since we got home five days ago! Someone please explain to me how four changes of clothes for six people equals six loads of laundry at the beach AND a behemoth-sized mound of laundry still to do when we got home. Anyway, that's why I haven't posted in a while, so on to the nails...

Day 4 of the Crumpet's Slow Challenge (even s-l-o-w-e-r here) calls for pink. I'm not much for pink, but it's better than gold! I know a lot of reviewers call Orly Decades of Dysfunction creamy off-white or some such, but my bottle leans very much toward pink. A pale, porcelain pink, but pink nonetheless. It reminds me of ballet slippers, tights, and leotards.

I wanted to also use a glitter that I hadn't used in a while, so I chose Pure Ice Spit Fire, a beautiful mix of tiny pale metallic pink and holo glitters. After that coat I was really feeling the ballet costume vibe, so I took a chance and stamped a crosshatch pattern from BM-315 using a frankened light pink metallic polish I cheesily named Pink Porsche.  It showed up better than I thought it would, completing the idea in my head of a sheer, glittery ballet tutu over tights. Yay!

Glitter Tips

Day 2 of Crumpet's Slow Challenge is silver. I am partial to silver rather than gold. I don't think I've ever tried a glitter tip gradient, and that is what I chose for this day. I started with a base of NYC In a New York Minute Sidewalkers, a light-to-medium grey polish that, to my eyes at least, leans just a teeny bit brown, or maybe it's greenish. Hmmm... I don't use grey polish very often, and I'm never that excited about it...until I put it on! I really like the subtlety of it, although I don't think grey would be a great color for me in, say, clothing.

There are two ways to do a glitter gradient, I think: sponging, or applying three layers of polish. I chose the latter. I used my unnamed silver glitter polish to apply a thin coat from about halfway up my nail down to the tip. When dry, I added a second coat over about 2/3 of that area, then again 1/3 of the way up. This was so simple, and yet so elegant! I love the way the glitter caught the light w/o outshining the base color.

Imitation is the Most Sincere Form of Flattery

Or so they say. For "Inspired by a Tutorial" on Day 30, I chose to attempt the spun sugar look I watched xoxoalexisleigh demonstrate here. I combined this with some Valentine pink hearts, saving the spun sugar for my accent nails because—dang!—it takes F-O-R-E-V-E-R. Looking  back on it, I wish I'd used a second pink rather than the blue; I picked blue because I was originally going to use a frankened jelly-sammy-in-a-bottle for the other nails that contained some blue glitter. Oh well.

My hands look terrible here! That is not actually skads of dry skin clamoring for hand cream; I'd just finished waxing a piece of furniture that I'd painted with DIY chalk paint (this blog has terrific instructions and loads of info on a fabulous technique!) and the wax dried on my hands. I didn't even realize it until I looked at the pic...after I'd taken this polish off and couldn't get a better pic, of course.

My base color is a franken my youngest asked for and named, a bubblegum pink creme with teeny holo glitter called Pink Ocean. (She's precious, but corny.) I stamped over it with China Glaze Fly and BM-317. My accent nail is a beautiful, squishy, unnamed raspberry red jelly from Donna Michelle I scooped up at the dollar store. (I bought it to franken with, but I'm kind of in love with it the way it is.) The strings of polish atop it are Fingerpaints My Art Belongs to You, Sinful Colors Snow Me White, and Pure Ice Calypso. As fun as this look is, just doing both my ring fingers was a pain in the tukhus! Stir, stir, stir, stir, stir. Stretch, stretch...you get it. Too little bang for my buck, effort-wise. So, if I EVER feel like wasting that much time for that little result, it will still be accents only!

Fairies on my fingers...

Day 29's challenge was "Inspired by the Supernatural". I am NOT AT ALL into creepy supernatural stuff, so I was leaning towards doing something that reflects my faith in Christ. But I could not think of anything at my skill level that would classily depict that. I went with something cute and sort of silly: fairies. This mani wasn't all that fabulous, mostly because it didn't show up that well on the black background.

I started with a base of Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Black Out, the most miserable, thin, streaky black creme I've ever owned, so I had to use two coats. I topped it with a coat of Wet 'n' Wild Fast Dry Hannah Pinktana and pressed a few holo silver hexes from the dollar store into it. I stamped a flower in Kleancolor Metallic Purple and a butterfly (just half the image on my ring finger) in Kleancolor Metallic Fuchsia from whatever Salon Express plate (can't be bothered to go look). I painted a head, arms and legs in Nakey Nana (a homemade franken named for my littlest's beautiful skin), a dress in Color Club Worth the Risque, and hair with Kleancolor Metallic Yellow.

Pardon the carpal tunnel wrist brace. Couldn't be bothered to take it off!

Awkward angle of my ring finger, trying to show the edge of the flower and the side view fairy w/o too much glare!

Back view of a fairy reaching to touch a flower. This shot almost totally disguises the flower, but it does extend to the right side!

Not my best ever, for sure.

I need another break!

After all the work on my Willy Wonka nails, I was ready for another easy mani before I tackle "Inspired by a Book", because it's another one I'll be doing my darn hardest on for my kids. So, in between, using (again) a polish from one of my kiddos, here's the latest:

Sinful Colors Superstar topped with SillyLily New Year's Eve. Kinda reminds me of a wizards robe and conical hat. Check out the rainbow on that star on my index!

After two days, I thought it'd be interesting to see what it looked like matte. Even two coats of NYC Matte Me Crazy had a tough time covering all this shine! It seems even more like a velvety wizard's robe this way.

1/31 EDIT:  I had this on for four days before it started to chip! That's almost unheard of for me!

A Breather

Just one huge pic here of a super-simple mani I did as a breather/break in between "inspired by a song" and "...by a movie". I hadn't used my "party in a bottle" in a while, and I've been trying hard to work in a lot of the polishes the kids gave my for my bday and Christmas. Here it is over Mmmm Nails Gummi Bears, which is beautiful but not what I expected at all from the pics online. I thought it was going to be a hot watermelon pink with a green fleck, when it's really salmon with gold fleck. I wasn't really impressed with Mmmm Nails at all; I bought her blue flakie as a cheaper alternative to Zoya Maisie. Wish I'd gotten Maise, at least off eBay, because Zoya's shipping is RIDICULOUS! Anywho, the blue flakie is OK, although the flakes are a little smaller than I'd hoped for, and since I was paying shipping anyway, I got Gummi Bears and a topper of mixed star glitter in a peach-tinted base called Play Date. Still haven't used Play Date. Need to. I also wasn't crazy about the fact that the creator/seller doesn't describe each individual polish; that probably should have clued me in about buying Gummi Bears, but oh well.

Stamp "Marbling"

I have a love/hate relationship with water marbling. Some of the first nail art I ever did was water marbling, and I loved it. But the prep of taping around my nails is a pain in the butt, as is cleanup whether or not one chooses to tape off areas. I've heard others say applying cuticle oil to the skin around the nail helps w/ cleanup, but I'd end up getting it on my nail, I'm sure. When I did my birthday/Xmas mash-up I stumbled onto the idea of applying lip balm around my nail and all over that section of my finger up to the knuckle. I still had cleanup to do right around the nail, but the rest of the marbling "leftovers" gooped up and pretty much just wiped off my finger!

My other issue with water marbling is that I seem to have a difficult time getting the drops of polish to spread effectively. I know all about room temperature water, distilled v. tap, how some polishes will work and others won't... I just keep having the first few rings spread beautifully, and the inner few NOT spreading. Maybe I need to drop from a little higher up?!?!

So, any-who, I decided to be a big, fat CHEATER for Day 20: Water Marble and use my BM-320 plate to stamp a marble-esque design. I just don't feel the love for this one. I didn't when I used it here, either. And what's up with the fact that I chose such a similar color scheme this time? Grrr.

This time around, it's Kleancolor Metallic Fuchsia over an unnamed freebie from SillyLily. It's a milky white (or pale, pale pink?) jelly polish with fuchsia and turquoise hexes and teenies and white shards. It's not my favorite, requiring 3 coats for the milkiness to disguise the stains on my nails sufficiently, but that's just a personal pref.

sunlight

My thumbnail isn't jagged; I think the dabbing to get glitter where I wanted it gunked up parts of the tip more than others.

flash (and horrendous glare on my thumb)

The combination of guilt over cheating and my unhappiness with this look makes me want to attempt real water marbling tonight. We'll see... I did end up wearing this for three days, because 1) I wasn't going anywhere that I cared who saw it, and 2) all my kids loved this one. Little weirdies.

Half-Moon Mani? Yes, Please!

I've seen plenty of well-executed half-moon nail art/manicures, but I was never really that excited about the look. Until I did this mani for Day 18! I had almost complete coverage with one coat of Finger Paints Tiffany Imposter, which was surprising for such a light colored creme, and I knew any tiny bald spots would be hidden by my glitter topper. I used paper reinforcements as my guide/masking tool and applied one coat of NYC Prince Street (that I got in a combo pack with Flat Iron Green at the $ store—that's 50 cent nail polish, people!) and removed each reinforcement as soon as I coated each nail with purple shimmery goodness.  When that was dry, I coated the whole thing with SillyLily FAB3. I didn't even know those beautiful turquoise diamonds were in there until one showed up on my nail! It took one coat of Gelous and two coats of NYC Grand Central Station to smooth things enough so that the diamonds didn't snag on clothes, etc., but I can live with that!

flash

 

indirect natural light

sunlight

Wow!

Lucky Dragon

My sweet hubby sweetly sold the reading/back support pillow he'd gotten for my bday and let me use the money for indies instead! I had to find a way to make $20.50 stretch as far as possible. I found SillyLilyPolish on Etsy. She had some really great glitter mix polishes with fun names, her mini bottles were just $3, her shipping was great, and she had a deal running for a mystery surprise if you ordered $15+! I got 6 polishes plus my bonus surprise polish for exactly $20.50. Winning!


For Day 17: Glitter, I used Sinful Colors Slate and then topped it with a sponged gradient of Slate and SC Rise and Shine, a beautiful kelly-green-with-a-hint-of-blue matte shimmer. On top of that I used one coat of SillyLilyPolish Lucky Dragon. Lily's polishes are so glitter-loaded, and what I can see through the bottle never gives me a true picture; there's always at least one fun surprise: an unexpected color, an unusual shape, a holo I thought was just one color...  I'm picky about my glitter placement, so I did fish quite a few of the larger pieces off the brush with my smallest dotter and place them strategically. That's just the way I am. I don't do random very well. I didn't manage to find very many of the medium purple hexes, so they're kind of a bonus on a few of my nails.

I haven't been very lucky with my flash shots lately. I probably need to build a lightbox or something. Blah. I don't really care enough to do it, since these are just for my personal enjoyment.

natural light, shade-ish

sunlight

flash, w/ some stupid shadow—argh!

The Tribe of Ugly Sweater Wearers Descends into Anarchistic Social Suicide

There was no way in HADES I felt up to attempting freehand art for Day 16: Tribal Nails! I flipped through my stamp plates, and although this image from BM-315 makes me think of Christmas sweaters, I thought maybe in the right color combo it would look more tribal. First hitch: my desired combo was red and yellow, b/c I wanted to use Under 18 as my base color. But none of my yellows stamp vividly over dark colors. So I went with white, imagining the Tribe of Ugly Sweater Wearers.  Second hitch: I could not get this image to stamp cleanly for the life of me! I thought maybe some black dots would 1) make it look a little more tribal and 2) cover some of the ickiness. Meh. I was so irritated by the stamping that I figured I'd throw DIFFERENT Dimension Social Suicide on two nails as accents, thus avoiding more stamping. Which is when I realized that, while SS is wonderful, combined with this intricate stamp image, it just looks like my nails are a visual aid for the (imaginary) morality tale called...The Tribe of Ugly Sweater Wearers Descends into Anarchistic Social Suicide!!!

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 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.