Let it Snow! Challenge 10: Hot Chocolate

Hi everyone,

as I'm going to try catching up with the challenge, I'm continuing with my season-unappropriate postings. :P Today's is going to be about theme 10 from the Let it Snow Challenge: Hot Chocolate.

I love hot chocolate! Hot chocolate is the only form of warm milk I drink... but sadly, my stomach can't handle it well. But since I love the taste so much, I'm kind of used to dealing with the consequences afterwards. ^^;

I'm cheating a little bit for this theme. I didn't really do any nail art, but played around with glitters to create a top coat instead. You see, I don't have any indie polishes in my stash, but I tried to get my hands on one bottle for the first time around christmas. I totally fell in love with the KB Shimmer winter collection. Especially with the shade called Cocoa Nut. I really really wanted that. But I just didn't manage to get a bottle from the shops that send international. KB Shimmer polishes sure are sold out fast...

Instead, I thought about creating something close enough for me to not be too sad about not getting this polish. So I threw together a lot of glitters and applied this creation over a brown polish, I also mixed together from three different brown shades.

I like the look, but it's nowhere close to Cocoa Nut. ^^; I overdid it a little with the density of the glitters. This would be solveable by adding more clear polish. But I wish I had pinker glitters in my stash. The ones I used were mostly rose colored and slightly too big. They just don't pop as much as the ones in Cocoa Nut... So my quest for Cocoa Nut continues...

Thanks for reading!

The Lazy Days of Summer 1: Beach Themed

Hi there~

I decided that I'm going to do a summer challenge. And because I liked the open timeframe from my last challenge, I decided on the so-called Lazy Days of Summer challenge, actually created my the same ladies that created the Spring Challenge. I just hope I'll be able to complete it faster than the Spring Challenge, hehe.

Here's a chart of the different themes I'll be working on in the next few weeks.

Well, today I want to show you my first mani for this challenge, supposedly be beach themed. I'm not a hundred percent happy with it. Mostly because I had this idea, but I just wouldn't work out on my nubbins anymore. I downgraded it a lot, placing only one real shell on my nails. Maybe I'll try again, when my nails are back to "normal".

When I think of the beach, I think of shells. I used to collect bags full of all kinds of shells with my sisters when we were kids. I wonder if they are still around at home... So that's basically where my idea came from.

My base for this mani is a franken I made from clear polish, a white polish with subtle shimmer and some of my Zoeva eyeshadow pigments. I'm not doing a lot of extensive eye make-ups lately, so I put them to better use that way. On top of two coats of that unnamed franken, I dabbed a blue holographic polish I won in a giveaway last year. It's by a Japanese company and apparently discontinued.

Next, I took out the crushed shells I bought a few weeks ago. I had bought blue and natural ones. I placed the blue shells on top of the holo and a few natural colored ones near the bottom. Next, I applied a generous coat of essence BTGN Top Sealer to "glue" all of that together and added a few rhinestones and half pears while it was still wet.

On my thumb, I also added a mini shell. It was really pointy and I removed it before going to work. I think it would have been too dangerous, hehe. I had planned to use more of them and bigger half pearls too, but it looked really awkward on my tiny nails. I think it's still too big on my thumb...

And because I actually wanted to capture my franken on its own...

What do you think?

And I'm sooo getting myself a lightbox...

Please take a look at what the other wonderful ladies have been doing so far:

Victoria @ Manicurator

Alyson @ BEADS. NAILS. FOOD.

Mandy @ Mandy's Polish

Hannah @ Polished Prisms

Sue @ Creative Nail Design by Sue

Katee @ A Girl and Her Polish

Charlotte-Louise @ Charlotte's Nails

Karine @ Karinea0a

Jen @ The Polished Zombie

Jessica @ Jessica's Nail Tales

Ashley @ One Nail to Another 

Pryanka @ Nail Sparks*

Anna @ Polished Cousins

Maribeth @ Obsessive Cosmetic Hoarders Unite!

Sharra @ The Blahg

Stephanie @ A Little Polish

Amanda @ Counting Down to Bliss

Jess @ NearlyNaturalNails 

Heidi @ DIY Polish 

Becky @ Glamfiend

Spring Challenge 8: Matte Magic

Yes, I continued doing my challenge depite not being able to post. I hope I'll finish it within the next week, because I'd love to start another one. Those challenges are really fun. =)

So today I have one of those themes that really gave me a headache. I tried several combinations for this one, but none really appealed to me... Today, I want to show the two I liked the best.

after 1 day of wear

This polish is a franken I recently made myself, because I just can't find myself the perfect cornflower blue. It turned out a little bit too violet compared to a real cornflower, but I'll get there... I *need* the perfect cornflower blue. I mean, I'm looking for more than a year already.

I added those tiny silver pailettes and mattified the whole thing afterwards. I love mattified glitters... and silver plus purple is always a great combination in my opinion. My hand could have been a bit steadier while placing the glitters though.

I didn't wear this for long. Well, mattified manis just don't last very long on me, even though the polish itself was topcoated before I mattified it. But the real reason is the crazy amount of polishes I bought in the last few weeks that still want to be swatched and played with. Not that I got around to do that. Haha.

And then there was this manicure. I did it a few weeks before the purple one, around the time we had major bunny trouble.

This is Catrice Beam me Scotty! from the Out of Space LE. On it's own, it's drying to a suede like finish. I decided to mattify it nonetheless, because I found the effect of suede-and-glossy too subtil. To create this (still very subtil) manicure I applied two thin coats of Beam me Scotty! and topped it with essie Matte about you. When this was dry, I used tape to cover some matte stripes, then topcoated it using essence BTGN Top Sealer and immediately removed the tape. That's it. Nothing fancy.

Doing a glossy/matte-mani for this theme was my first idea when I read the challenge chart and I have tried several other combinations. I remember seeing some really awesome manis that sported this.. but mine didn't turn out that great. I'll try again some time.

This is Beam me Scotty! on it's own, not mattified. I like the finish, but I love the polish with top coat to make it glossy. If you use slightly thicker coats, this one is a one coater.

So what do you think of my matte attempts?

My first "franken"

Today I want to show you a few pictures of my first "franken".

Okay, I originally really wanted OPI's Sparclelicious, but couldn't get my hands on it. (I refuse to pay 16€ in my local Douglas store...) One day I noticed that one of essence's nail art twins reminded me a lot of Sparclelicious. I'm talking about the glitter twin Troy. It's basically blue and pink micro glitter suspended in a clear base. So I thought... maybe I can recreate Sparclelicious if I add some gold micro glitter to it!?

So my quest to find a gold micro glitter polish started and it was surprisingly hard to find one. Most seemed to yellow to me... or the glitter was too big, etc. In the end I bought a bottle of a no-name glitter from Claire's. I mixed them together in an old polish bottle of mine. It turned out a bit goopy, but I think I can solve that by adding some thinner. I misplaced mine for now though... ^^;

I really liked the result and wore it the same night over my already existing manicure: the violett gradient mani I showed in my last post. I think I added like 3 layers of glitter. You don't want to know how thick the polish became after all that violett, several layers sponged on top and then 3 layers of glitter! It was ridiculous.

Anyway, that's what it looked like:

By now, I got my hands on the original OPI polish, yay. So I had to compare my wannabe-dupe to it. Haha, they are quite different. While I always thought of the gold glitter polishes to be way to yellow, that's what I should have bought! The glitter I used looks really pretty, but compared to the one used in Sparclelicious, it looks almost champagne gold. The gold is not so much in-your-face as the one in Sparclelicious. It's like having a gold and silverish version of Sparclelicious. But aside from the color difference in the gold glitter they are really close.

What do you think of my first try on frankening? :D