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!

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!

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.

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.