Glitter Snowflakes

I've been having the worst luck photographing my nails lately. It's constantly overcast during this season and all my indoor lighting has a yellow tone. I'm sorry about the weird tones, but I did my best to adjust to make the polish accurate but not so much as far as the skin tone.

This week's challenge is "over glitter". I've done a lot of glitter before, so I was hoping to make this one stand out from the rest. It's a little premature for the area I live in, but I thought I'd get the jump on snowflakes before everyone else.

The images are a combo of Shany and Bundle Monster. The polish is layers of Hard Candy, Sinful Colors, Pure Ice, L.A. Colors, and a couple of coats of Seche Vite to smooth out the uneven glitter surface.

Hard Candy - Sky

Sinful Colors - Cinderella

Pure Ice - Oh Baby!

L.A. Colors - Sparkling Diamonds

Sally Hansen - Hard to Get

Seche Vite - topcoat

Shany - SH17

BM - 323

Poison Dart Frogs

Although I've been pretty slack about posting lately, it's Sunday! Which means another AIS challenge. This week: Toxic or Poisonous. The first thing that came to mind was snake, and even though I had some good snake ideas, I wanted to do something else. My thinking outside the box only got me so far as Poison Dart Frogs. They are so vibrant and of course cute. There's a bunch of different colored poisonous frogs, but red, green, blue, and yellow seem to be the basic colors. Their patterns vary too. So doing the best with what I had this is what I came up with!

I used 3 different Bundle Monster images and a Salon Express. These 2 photos are with NYC matte topcoat for the less wet frog look. The last photo is the original shiny, but I was just in love with the yellow matte finish.

The yellow pattern was my favorite, but the Salon Express full nail images are too small to fit on any other finger. I tried to add eyes, but that turned out looking really stupid.

e.l.f. - Smokin Hot

Wet n Wild - SaGreena the Teenage Witch

Pure Ice - French Kiss

L.A. Colors Art Deco - Yellow

Wet n Wild - Black Creme

NYC - Extra Shiny Top Coat

NYC - Matte me Crazy

BM-313

BM-222

BM-211

SE22

Lazy Man's Ombre

If I had done a true ombre, I would have used 1 pink and added white and black to achieve a seamless color change, but as indicated by the title, this is the lazy way. This was actually one of my first attempts at a previous Sunday challenge titled pulsating pink, but I wasn't happy with it after I stamped over it and I did something else last minute. Even though I didn't use it, I was thrilled about the pink and the glitter.

I had actually left this on for a day before stamping over it knowing I wouldn't like it once I stamped the purple over the top. I used some of my favorite bargain buys from Ross, the Dollar Tree, and Sinful Colors (of course).

Colors listed from left to right:

L.A. Colors - Fuel

Kleancolor - Barbie Pink

Kleancolor - Pastel Pink

JLB - Blush

Sinful Colors - Pinky Glitter (glitter)

Kleancolor - Metallic Purple (stamp)

Seche Vite - topcoat

BM - 207

Green Spider

Today's Sunday Challenge is using 2 or more stamps. 

I was originally going to do a flower on flowers design, but when I stamped on the roses I realized I needed a pop of color and I immediately thought about this photo I had taken a while back.

At the time, this spider totally creeped me out, but he served his purpose today.

L.A. Colors - Magnetic Force

e.l.f. - Smokin' Hot

Sally Hansen - Lickety-Split Lime

Seche Vite - topcoat

BM - 323

Shany - SH09

Paw Prints

The other day I was agonizing over which set of plates to buy. The paw prints and puppy face pretty much sealed the Shany deal for me. I'm sure a neutral base and brown stamp has been done before, but it's just the perfect combo for this stamp.

I used L.A. Colors Mega Watt which is almost the same color as my skin, but with the slightest shimmer to it. It took about 3 coats to cover, and it was still a little sheer, but really for $1.00 can you complain?

L.A. Colors - Mega Watt

e.l.f. - Chocolate

Seche Vite - topcoat

SH08

Glistening Purple

I recently discovered the best Dollar Tree ever! I've been in some that have a couple of rows of nail polish but this one had the biggest selection and each peg was crammed full of L.A. Colors nail polish. I really really love L.A. Colors and the best part is, they're only $1.00! Anyway I found a couple of glitter polishes I had to have and this is the first one I couldn't live without.

It was gorgeous alone, but I'd just gotten a bunch of new plates, and really why not stamp? The glitter is in a clear base so this is 2 coats over black.

L.A. Colors - Glistening Purple

Wet n Wild - Black Creme

Sally Hansen - Silver Sweep

BM - 322

Furry aka Velvet Nails

I'd seen this done before here and wanted to try it out for myself. This is definitely not an every day manicure. People have labeled this, in reference to Ciate's manicure sets, as velvet. However, it comes out more of a furry stuffed animal rather than velvet. This was my first attempt so there are some things I could change to make this better. I did as suggested and bought the same flocking powder set from Michael's. I had quite a few issues. The flocking powder was mostly clumped together making the openings in the containers useless. I jammed the sharp end of a paper clip down in there a few times to break it up which helped a little, but the results weren't exactly powdery. I tried mashing my finger into the top of the container, but that only resulted in wiping away some polish. A friend gave me some tiny resealable storage bags from the dollar store so I tried pouring some in there first and dipping my finger in, but I wound up getting my finger stuck to the inside of the bag or having the polish dry on me before I could manipulate the powder onto my finger. I found the best way to go about this was pour some into the bag, then pour some onto my finger over a piece of paper or wax paper. Then I patted it down a little to make sure it was sticking. After it was dry, I used an old makeup brush to brush away the excess. I did get a couple of bald spots, but I put a little more polish on and then more flocking powder. It did fix that problem, but it also resulted in making clumps and/or discoloration. Another thing to note is the polish underneath makes a difference in the final color. The softer the polish color, the less extreme these bright colors will look. As you can see, I used polish that almost matched the powder exactly.

Sorry I can't include the names of the polishes I used because they came in a pack of 10 mini L.A. Colors Color Craze with no names on the packaging or the bottles.

Flocking Powder - Recollections 6 pack

L.A. Colors - Color Craze assorted

Green... Again

I couldn't steal my sister's cupcake thunder so, keeping with the work shirt matchy tradition, I did another green. After today's and last week's greens, I think I'm going to have to put a stop to that trend. When I first started painting my nails with essence Choose Me I LOVED it, but having it on my nails all day with the green shirt got to be too much. Besides, I have a box of untrieds to work through which doesn't include any greens at this moment. So after falling in love with Choose Me, I couldn't stop myself and I had to keep going with stamping and dotting.

essence - Choose Me! (base)

Wet n Wild - Black Creme (stamp)

L.A. Colors - misc blue that I thew away the package with the name for (dots)

L.A. Colors - Fuel  I was all over it this time (dots)

e.l.f. - Royal Purple (dots)

BM-212 (stamping plate)

Seche Vite - topcoat

Water Color

I'm not a fan of these, but I spent so much time I had to post pictures anyway. I've seen this water color technique on a few different blogs so I thought I'd try it myself. One of the pictures I'd seen had the Bundle Monster stamping over the top and it looked beautiful! I'm not sure what the difference is between my nails and the pictures I had seen; maybe my colors were too aggressive. Anyway here is the result and instructions:

1. Paint nails with 2 coats of Wet n Wild White Creme and protect the white from the polish remover with 1 coat of Seche Vite.
2. Dot Art Deco Intense Pink in a few different spots and spread/pat the color around with a makeup brush dipped in polish remover.
3. Dot L.A. Colors BCC 566 (Apparently the name of the color was on the package it came in that I no longer have. It's a shimmery intense blue) and repeat the previous step.
4. Dot Art Deco Yellow and repeat the previous steps.
5. (sorry just noticed the font for the 5 was different) Using SH Hard to Get, I used the Bundle Monster 2011 stamping plates BM-201, BM-203, BM-212, BM-222, and BM-223.


Again, I'm not crazy about it, but there's one more thing to cross off my list of manicures to try.