Cheery Daisy Mani

I saw Kelly's nails here at Set In Lacquer, and attempted my own version. My nails being much shorter, the flowers take up much more space. I really liked how hers just peeked at you from the tips and base of her nails, but this isn't too bad:

I used a franken I made from an L.A. Colors Color Craze polish; I'd jacked the color up a notch with a dribble of my China Glaze Japanese Koi and called the new color Cosmic Carrots.  I used a dotter to make the daisies with Sinful Colors Snow Me White and Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Lightening (rolls eyes at stupid spelling of polish name...). Very cheerful mani!

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!

Watercolor Nails

I love participating in nail art challenges, albeit completely on my own. I get to try so many new techniques; day 15's challenge is watercolor nails!

Watercolor makes me think of...water, of course. And water, in this case, made me think of dragonflies:

Alas, I cannot remember AT ALL which polishes I used for the watercolor effect! I know both the green and blue were shimmer polishes, but that doesn't help much, since I have a TON of blues and greens! I know I used OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls for the base, a waste of one of my more expensive polish purchases; I could have just used Snow Me White. And the dragonflies were applied using Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Black Heart, Kleancolor Metallic Orange, and a dotting tool. I was happy about the discovery of using a dotting tool for the wing shapes; I just dotted, and without lifting the tool, dragged toward the body of the dragonfly!

My first striping tape mani!

I've done a little taping here and there, but it always makes me nervous. Even after learning the trick of laying down a coat of quick-dry top coat to keep the base color from peeling up with the tape, I still get nervous! I bought a bucket-load of super-thin striping tape off eBay from some place in China about a year ago, and because I didn't know how to use it properly, it has languished in my nail art bin for too long! Now that it worked so well for masking, I might get brave enough to use it and leave it on...

Anywho, for the 12th challenge in The Crumpet's New 31 Day/Slow Challenge, my base color here is Sinful Colors Timbleberry/Thimbleberry. I'd love to know what the polish's real name is! I assume it's the former, since every bottle I've ever seen says "Timbleberry". But I have seen display cases with it spelled both ways...not all at once...you know what I mean! 

I laid down some striping tape in various designs, then sponged over my nails with a gradient of Timbleberry, Sinful Colors Hazard, and a pastel peach knock-off of Butter London's Kerfuffle that I call Kerfuffulous! (This is actually a name my son and I made up long ago for his alias during a silly tea party with his sisters!)

My skin is looking terribly dry here! Even with using lots of cuticle oil and body butter, my hands just stay dry. But at least I usually apply cuticle oil right before taking pics so it's disguised somewhat...

I liked this look better than I thought I would. I would like to improve my gradient technique, too, so that colors blend more seamlessly. Not sure how to accomplish that.

Irish Nails!

Yet another challenge I was a bit stumped by was Day 28: Inspired by a Flag. I'm not a patriotic person, and the American flag seemed too complex for my skills, anyway. I got to thinking about my Irish heritage (among all the other things I'm a mix of), and the fact that my oldest daughter is completely enamored of everything to do with Ireland. So, I picked the Irish flag, a fairly simple one that is nice and bright:

I gave all my nails a coat of Sinful Colors Snow Me White, as three of my nails would have white, and the other two colors I chose are rather sheer.  I topped the white ones with Finger Paints Well-Cultured Pearl, my index with Sinful Colors San Francisco, and my ring finger with Pure Ice Hot Tamale (I find myself falling back on that particular orange quite a bit!). For my thumb, I pulled apart some Born Pretty dried flowers and rearranging them to look like four-leaf clovers. And in honor of the legend about St. Patrick chasing all the snakes from Ireland, I stamped the snake image from Mash-50 with my frankened green stamping polish and then carefully painted the universal symbol for "no" or "forbidden" or whatever in black. Pretty cute, I think.

Day 20 Doover: STILL Not a Water Marble!

Doover: (DUUUver) smooshing-together of the words "do over". My kids hate getting back school papers that I tell them are doovers. After the stamp "marbling" fiasco, I decided I'd give water marbling another try. Oh, it was horrible. The agony! The ugliness! The mess! I think I figured out what's up, though. I swear to goodness, I think it's my dehumidifier!!!! Going to test that theory out in a couple days; I raised the indoor humidity level from 40% to 50%. We'll see...

In the meantime, I removed my two coats of Pure Ice white and the gunk from trying to water marble three nails at 10 pm Saturday night. I NEVER start doing my nails after 9:30, but I started all over after 10 o'clock and did these needle marble nails:

sunlight

crummy indoor shot

right thumb, one of my faves

 I used CG Fly, Pure Ice Hot Tamale, Wet 'n' Wild Bijou Blue, and NYC Purple Pizzazz Frost, which is not a frost but is actually a gorgeous deep purple-to-blue duochrome. All but Fly are the ones I'd wanted to use for the water marble, but I think this was pretty nice, too.

Oh, and then, OUCH! This is what happened the next morning:

 My first break since doing the treatment outlined at Nail Care HQ (but my own mix made from her recipe).

Here's a majorly overexposed shot of my nail after I repaired it with nail glue and a piece of silk wrap. I don't mind having to nubbinize because of a broken nail, but this one was into the quick, and I need it to grow out enough that I can cut it and still keep my finger protected! As long as I was doing that, I figured I'd just leave it the length it is for now...

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!"

Recovery From Failure

Um, maybe. Really, I need to take pics of my failed manicures, for no other reason than to give myself a good laugh. For Day 2: Orange Nails, my oldest daughter wanted me to finally use the faux dried flowers I got from the BornPretty Store. I, on the other hand, was hoping to achieve a verdigris look by stamping with this image from BM-301:

 Blurry, but whatever.

"Ooh", I thought, "feminine and floral with accent nails of edginess!" Uh, wrong. (And dangit again! Why don't I take pictures of the crappy manis?) What happened was that after a base color of Pure Ice Hot Tamale (which my oldest, Olivia, gave me for Mother's Day ), I stamped the crackly-looking image with a homemade mixture of Konad Special Blue and Special Yellow..."homemade" special green! (I can franken successfully as long as it doesn't involve glitter.) My ring fingers and thumbs ended up looking muddy and brownish.  Not so pretty in combo with the shimmery orange with teal flowers.  So, this a.m. I removed the stamped ones (dangit, double dangit for not thinking to take pics!) and did accent nails with Sinful Colors Kissy (so beautiful, I want to eat it!).  Ahh, much better. Trust me.

Natural light

Flash (No idea why clean-up around my ring finger looks so bad in this one. It looks fine above and in RL.)