Flosser Stripe Mani

I fell in love with this idea from cutepolish at first sight! It doesn't have the texture of a candy floss/spun sugar mani, but it's so much easier and less time-consuming to do! I used three coats of OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls as my base color, then painted Sinful Colors Aquamarine and Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Vigorous Violet directly onto a floss pick (not both at the same time, obviously). I also showed a little love to Sinful Colors Super Star on my trigger finger accent nails. I pretty much LOVE this look!

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.

Inspired by a Pattern

My first thought when I saw "inspired by a pattern" for Day 26 was some sort of clothing pattern: floral, plaid, stripes, polka dots, houndstooth check, ... But when I Googled "pattern", this image popped out at me:

Oh, I love it. Nothing too original, but this green is beautiful! Not too hunter-ish, not too emerald, and I love the swirls peeping out from behind the snowflakes. And here in SC, man, do I wish we got more snow!

I don't have this green in my arsenal; the closest thing I had was Sinful Colors Rise and Shine. The label on the bottom says matte, but to me it seems to dry looking a bit like all those spiffy rubber finish polishes I've seen on blogs. The closest I could get for the swirls was to stamp Mash-40 with a shimmer over that rubbery goodness, as I was not in a million years going to keep mixing little dots of Rise and Shine with just a touch of black to get a darker green. I used another Sinful Colors polish, Gorgeous. Oh man, I was tempted to stop there with the swirls. I've never done a tonal stamping mani before, and it was so elegant. But, further up and further in! I stamped with BM-323 and (yet another) Sinful Colors Snow Me White.

I had a hard time capturing the swirls. I can see one glinting on my thumb and the darker effect I was looking for on the other fingers in the first pic, and all shimmering a bit behind the flakes in the second pic. Not too bad for someone who is determined NOT to buy a new polish every time I don't have the exact color in my stash.

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!!!

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:

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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.

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 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

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blurry flash

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

Kitchen Table Nail Salon

All my girls wanted they're nails done last Friday. It took me an hour and a half to "do up" everybody; I jokingly told them I felt like I was working in a nail salon!

Olivia (14) chose CG Starboard stamped with Orly Buried Alive and Mash plate 44.

Isabella (10) was getting parakeets for her bday, hers are painted with Pure Ice Free Spirit and a franken I made from Sinful Colors Tokyo Pearl and Midnight Blue, stamped with budgies and bows in Konad Special Blue and a green I frankened from Konad Special Yellow and Blue with plates BM-315 and  BM-317.)

Kristiana (6) wanted blue and white skittles (Revlon Indigo Night and Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear White On) stamped with doughnuts and cupcakes from BM-308 using Konad Special White and Blue.

 I thought it was cute/funny that all my little women picked blues and greens! I, on the other hand, went way out of character for Day 7: Black and White Nails. I went minimalist! I can almost never bear to do anything this simple on my nails (or in the pages of my kids' scrapbooks—too many good pics to choose from!). 

I decided to use Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Black Heart for the base color because the thought of cleaning that much Konad Special Black off my fingertips was daunting. I used the gradient image from BM-301 and Konad Special White. This was one of the BM plates that I had trouble with, even with two replacements! It leaves a huge bare spot in the middle of the image unless I scrape with a metal scraper... I then sponged some Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear White On at the tips to even things out, cover bare spots, and make the tips even whiter. I love how it turned out, especially as everyone in the family had the same initial reaction I had: "It looks like snow falling!"

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inside, no flash

sunlight

Now, if South Carolina would just GETsome snow this winter!