Dandelions

After I had to take off my apple manicure on Thursday, I ended up painting my nails with just one color, because I ran out of time that night. That happens more and more often lately... but I can't say that I hate it. I have so many untrieds... If I do nail art, I just can't take it off the next night (usually). There's a lot more time involved and I want to enjoy what I painted. With just polish, I don't feel bad at all if I take it off the next night to use another color.

So this Thursday night, I painted my nails with one of those untrieds, essie Bikini so Teeny. I had hoped that this would be my perfect cornflower blue, but at least in the bottle, it is not blue enough. Also, I wasn't sure about the glitter. On the nails, this color is somewhat different than in the bottle. I wish there were still some cornflowers blooming, so I could compare... well, next spring then.

I really liked the color and the next night, when I was browsing through my inspiration folder, I stopped at this cute dandelion manicure. I think it was created using some stamp, but I don't have that, so my good old brush had to do the job.

I painted one more coat of Bikini so Teeny, because, well, I wore it for a day already and hadn't topcoated it the night before. Tipwear  was the obvious result. I had three coats of that polish on now and put one more coat of BeYu 393 on top. 393 is a silver glitter polish, but it's no clear base... rather a pearly silver one. One more of my untrieds. I only noticed it later, but the BeYu considerably changed the color of the essie. It's a lot darker, bluer now. Maybe it's closer to my cornflower blue...

First, I tried to paint the dandelion with white polish, but I couldn't work as detailed as I wanted to, so I switched to white acrylic paint. Much better. So on my pinky, the dandelion was painted with polish, the rest is acrylic paint.

I finished the whole thing with one coat of essence BTGN Top Sealer and that's it. I was really happy when my co-workers could identify them as dandelions. Yay. I'm about to take the mani off now. Not sure what I want to do next. I need to research for the upcoming challenge themes...

So what do you think of the dandelions? Is it weird to paint them in almost-fall?

The Lazy Days of Summer 10: Favorite Fruit

Hello~

Here I am again with another post for the Lazy Days of Summer Challenge. There weren't as many usuable pictures for this one, so here it is... my favorite fruit! I was really pondering which is my favorite fruit. I don't eat fruits just as they are very often, but I use them for cakes, smoothies, ice cream... you name it. And I just love kiwi fruits are a base for my morning smoothie. So this mani is kiwi-themed!

direct sunlight

I used OPI Greenwich Village as my green base, though I diluted it with clear polish to make it more of a green jelly. My greens are all not very kiwi-colored, but this came closest. I did three coats of my green jelly, let that dry and then grabbed my white acrylics.

shade

I painted an oval shape in the center of the nails and then, using a striper brush, drew the short stripes. A dotting tool and some black polish (p2 eternal) for the dots. I covered my stripes a little bit too much, so I added a couple more white stripes afterwards.

I was really surprised that I barely have any "middle" greens in my stash. I have a lot of dark and tealish greens though. What fruit has that color... watermelons maybe?

So today is supposed to be the hottest day of the German summer. I'll try to hide in my house, but it's sooooo warm in here already. I'm so weak when it comes to heat... 

The Lazy Days of Summer 8: In the Garden

Hello~

today, I want to show you another mani I did for the Summer Challenge. This time, my inspiration was supposed to be anything "garden". I had a couple ideas for this one and went with a pattern I saw on a Japanese blog a while ago.

Have I ever mentioned that I hate every single white polish I own? All of them need 3 coats, have horrible application and take forever to dry. Why is that!? Is there a white polish that's opaque in one coat?

Anyway, three coats of an unnamed Color Club polish are my base for this manicure. The flowers were painted with acrylic paint. I added a couple sparkles in the center of the flowers and framed my non-flowery nails with a golden glitter polish. That's all there is to this mani. I wanted to keep it rather simple and let the white be awesome on its own.

It was fun painting those flowers. Getting the shape right and all that. I'm not very good at keeping proportions, but I think my flowers turned out nicely this time. I need a better orange acrylic paint though...

While taking pictures, I noticed that my nails were matching my curtains...

What do you think? Do you like white nails? I find them rather interesting at times. Still looking for my perfect off-white too. Suggestions?

I hope you all have a nice day! See you tomorrow~

Spring Challenge 13: The Paper Gal (Newspaper Transfer)

I really don't know what's going on lately, but bad things keep happening again. First, my notebook died on me, so I had to get myself a new one. A day later I was diagnosed with a dead tooth thanks to the dental braces I wore until about a year ago. More money gone. And friday my router died too, so I had a weekend with no internet. That was probably the worst. I'm using an old one for now, but it's not working properly, so I'll probably have to spend some more money to get myself a new router. Just why are those things always happening at the same time!?

Well, I used my offline time to work on the many pictures that are still sitting in my blog folder. So today, I present my take on the 13th take of the Spring Challenge. The theme was pretty open. It just had to include a newspaper transfer.

I didn't really think this one would be a problem, because I have done newspaper transfers before and it worked just fine. Not this time though. Just like a lot of other participants in this challenge I was sitting on this mani for hours, trying to make the transfer work.

I had seen a mani before that looked pretty similar to what I did here, but it was some kind of lace sticker. When I saw it, I had the idea to do a use newspaper here instead of the the patterned lace sticker. In theory not even a difficult design. In theory...

I started with two coats of Color Club Little Miss Paris. Then, I taped off a chevron, to create the french using Kleancolor Holo Pink. When that was dry, my misery began. The plan was cutting thin lines from a newspaper and transfering it along the french edges. But it wouldn't work. I tried different alcohols (rubbing + vodka), all kinds of newspaper, dipping the newspaper in the alcohol, dipping my nail into the alcohol and then putting the newspaper on my nails. All I did was smudge the pink polish.

I noticed that the newspaper would only transfer slightly on the pink holo, so I started to wonder if my nail polish may be too smooth!? Then, I had an idea that proved successful at last. When essence changed their range of goods this spring, they started selling a base coat called studio nails 24/7 nail base. The interesting thing about this base coat is the fact that it is drying to a velvety finish providing grip to any nail polish. So along the inner edge of my french, I applied a thin stripe of this basecoat... on top of Little Miss Paris, let that dry and then tried to transfer my newspaper again.

...and it worked! Still not as well as the last time, but something was finally happening. After I had transfered newspaper to all ten nails, I painted the white lace design around it and finished the whole thing with a generous layer of my favorite BTGN Top Sealer. I placed a few rhinestones while it was drying.

I'm a bit embarassed about my lace design.... and how it is inconsistent. But I have to admit that I was so fed up with painting my nails when I finally got to the stage of painting the lace. The transfer on my right hand turned out a bit better in my opinion, so here's a rare picture of my right hand. The design looks better on the longer nails on my left hand, but you can tell that there's a newspaper transfer on my right.

I think in about a week I can finally take of the annoying gel on my left hand and cut them down. I can now see the broken edge from underneath. Yay. I'm still surprised that I didn't experience any liftings...

One more design and it's time for a few summery designs~ Still waiting for the summer to arrive here though... :(

Spring Challenge 12: May Flowers!

There's three more designs of the Spring Challenge for me to post... one of them I'll show you today.

Design 12 was supposed to be "May Flower"-themed. I don't remember if the flowers I tried to recreate actually bloom in May, but I remember seeing them around in our garden this spring. I really wanted to do a manicure that uses the colors at least, but I decided to recreate the flowers themselves for this challenge. I hope you can tell what flowers they are supposed to be... :P

Despite my love for acrylic paints, I actually did this manicure with polishes only. The ones I used are:

- Manhattan Frozen Jogurt
- Illamasqua Load
- Color Club Almost Famous
- essence A Hint of Mint
- Catrice Virgin Forest mixed with A Hint of Mint
- Color Club Incognito
- Woo 665

Color Club Incognito is a light nude shade that looks really violet here. I was a bit surprised and had to check the bottle to make sure it really is Incognito. I think it made a surprinsigly well suited background for my flowers though.

Sadly, I didn't manage to take a solo shot of my thumb nail that wasn't blurry. In my opinion the flowers looked best on my thumb. But can you tell what flowers they are supposed to be? My colleagues mostly guessed the wrong flower... But to be fair the flowers they guessed also exist in this color pattern.

Two more to go... but well, it's all about finally posting them... ehem.
Have a nice day~

Holiday in Japan-Mani

I finally got around to do some real nail art today. Finally!! I missed doing it a lot... but when there's no time, you can't do anything about it.

Some of you know part of the reason for my dilemma this past week. Last Sunday morning, we found our bunny mom dead in her cage. She leaves behind 6 bunny babies that we are now feeding by hand every 4-5 hours. It takes about one hour for each feeding, so I don't really have the time to sit down and do nail art. The good thing is, they all are still alive, 24 days old now and are finally starting to gain weight.

But being home sick and alone for once, I managed to sit down and paint them~ Heaven!

Ok, I stumbled upon this blog and its contest and well, I decided to take the theme as inspiration. Lately, I feel like I really need to go back to Japan soon. It has been about 1.5 years now... aah, I miss it so much. So here are my Japan holiday nails.

I should have taken pictures prior to the next feeding of the hungry bunnies... they decided to taste a bit of Mount Fuji! Also, for some reason, major tip wear showed up. Meh. This was done using both polish and acrylic paint.

Where would you like to go on your next holiday?

Gilded Cherry Blossoms

A few days ago, I decided on a nail design that was actually not part of the Spring Challenge. I just had to do a cherry blossoms design. I love cherry blossoms so much and their time for this year is almost over. So I decided to do this instead of the next Spring Challenge theme.

Also, I decided to enter a nail art contest with this one. If you like it, I would be more than happy if you would head over to Mada from Happy Nails and vote for my design. It's Number 8, btw.

First of all, the picture I sent to Mada to enter her contest.

Instead of a classic pink and white design, I decided to use one of my newly bought polishes, essence Mojito Green, as my base color. Then I applied this beautiful gold glitter polish I bought in Japan. I wish the glitter was a bit more dense, but it's meant to create a gradient, so I guess it's fine. Using white and pink acrylics, I painted my flowers. At first, I attempted to do them using the one stroke technique, but that didn't work as I wanted it to. (Hence the weird flower on my ring finger) After one coat of essence Better Than Gel Nails Top Sealer, I applied some microbeads in the center of the flowers.

I took the above picture before the second coat of top sealer, because I anticipated that they would start bleeding again... Well, they did. But this time, I actually liked the effect. It's like subtle yellowish gradient around them that blends quite well into the pink.

This is a picture of my right hand. I just thought it turned out quite pretty as well, so I took some pictures. I'm slowly getting better at painting with my left hand. This, too, was taken before the second coat of top sealer.

Only sad thing was the weather. All rainy and dark, so I didn't get a chance to take color accurate pictures. Both pictures above were taken under my desk light.

But! This very morning it's sunny outside! And actually super hot already. So here's a picture under sunlight. Excuse the tip wear please, as this was taken on day 4!

Mojito Green appears a little bit to light in this picture. Just imagine it a little more intense and that's what it really looks like. Very pretty color in my opinion. I'll show some proper swatches soon.

Ok, of to work now~ Have a great weekend!

Spring Challenge 6: Ombre

Today, I want to show you my take on the ombre manicure. I googled a bit and found out that ombre can mean a lot of things. Some are doing a skittle mani using polishes from a similar color range, others are doing gradient manis. I felt that a skittle mani was a bit boring, but I had already done a sponged gradient, so I was left with the same problem as before. I still decided to do a gradient. This time, I wanted to try it a different way though. I'm playing a bit with texture lately, so I tried to give the gradient a little texture by painting it instead of sponging.

I used about 5 different shades of blue to achieve this mani. I mixed them together to create a smooth gradient. I just painted small strokes in an alternating way. It almost looks like fish scales, I think. I got a few nice comments from co-workers on this one. My boss thought I had hurt my hand at first though, haha. It's simple, but I liked it. Am I doing too many blue/green manis lately? I just reached for the blues again... maybe I should have done a pink gradient instead.

I wore this for 2 days only, because by the end of day 2, I had quite extensive tipwear... It had already started after I applied topcoat, as you can see on the pictures. Oh well.

Since I haven't posted it in a while, here's the chart once again.

And the list of participants too~

Amanda from Mandy's Polish
Heidi from DIY Polish & More!
Katee from A Girl and Her Polish 
Charlotte from Charlotte's Nails
Tess from Football and Fingernails
Karine at Karinea0a
Victoria from Manicurator
Ashley from One Nail To Another
Dani from Rustic Comfort
Sue from Creative Nail Design by Sue
Amanda from Counting Down to Bliss
Hannah from Polished Prisms
Sarah from All This Polish
April from Munia's Nails
Sharra from The Blahg
Jess from Nearly Natural Nails

Studded sponging experiment

Today's mani is obviously not part of the Spring Challenge. I'm not finished with my nails yet and I'm not sure if I'll manage to post them today.

Today's nails were done a while ago on a whim. I just felt like playing around and trying stuff I wanted to do for a while. I had gotten so much nail art stuff that was still unused. I always feel bad about my buying habits... What makes me want to post about this mani is a small contest held by Dani from Dani's Beauty Blog to celebrate her blogiversary. It ends today and I forgot to post the blogpost I had almost finished preparing, but since I didn't like what I did anymore, I'm rewriting it. :P Well, Dani basically wants her contestants to show her some inspirational nail art and I just thought that my experiment might be inspirational to her, because the experimental part is easily done and I'm pretty sure she has the stuff I used.

So here's what my evening sponging experiment looked like.

There were actually three things I wanted to try that night. First was to see how the silver email color I just bought is behaving. It's not meant to be used on nails, but I had read on several stamping sites that it works great for stamping because it's so highly pigmented. It is indeed and one pot of 14ml cost me less than a bottle of polish! Second was the striping tape that had just arrived in the mail. I experienced something similar to yesterday's mani, but I had completely forgotten about that. My top coat (same as yesterday's) was peeling off and the color was a bit faded the next day, but not as badly.

But what I wanted to try most was sponging using the scratchy side of a cleaning sponge. I don't know where I read about it anymore. It was last year, I'm pretty sure... took me a while to finally try it. Using the scratchy side creates a completely different effect, but I loved how it looked. Basically, it's the same as using a regular (makeup) sponge, but the texture makes the difference. I roughed it up a little bit, because it's a bit too flat on its own. Not enough texture.

So for the sponged nails, I painted my nails white using essie Marshmallow and let that dry completely. This time this was really important, because the scratchy sponge can actually pick up some of the base color if it's not dry enough. Then, I cut a little piece out of my big kitchen sponge, dipped it into black polish and then started sponging lightly. I tried to sponge triangle shapes on two of the nails. On those nails, I added another triangle in black. Afterwards, I cut some striping tape to cover the "edges" of my triangles. My ring finger also got a tiny bit of gold polish sponged upon as well as a few gold studs.

The remaining two nails were painted black first (p2 eternal). Using a tiny brush (I used size 3/0, but I cut away about half of the brush hairs) and my newly bought silver email color (Revell #90), I freehanded the flowers and dots. I had to find out that email color takes longer to try than regular polish, which means that topcoat has to be applied later. I smudged my silver a bit, because I didn't know.

There's only one picture, sadly. When I looked through my usable pictures, I found out that they all looked somewhat alike. Boring. But here's a picture of what I used.

So that's my experiment. I'm not saying it's overall successful. There was something I didn't like about it. Not sure what though.

What do you think? Did you try sponging with the scratchy side?

Spring Challenge 4: April Showers

Wow, the last few days were really tiring... I didn't get around to do anything. It's just horrible if half your colleagues are sick and you have to do their work too... But well, it's the same every year, so nothing we didn't expect. Last year around this time I wasn't doing my nails as frequently though. I managed to do my nails for theme 4 as planned, but I forgot to take pictures at first. Yet, this turned out to be a good thing!

I didn't really have an idea for theme 4, April Showers, so I ended up looking at random pictures that turned up when searching for rain patterns. I'm sure a few have done the same and have seen the pattern I ended up using. I wanted to do something quick and easy and this pattern just did the job for me.

First of all, I removed my previous manicure just to find out, that the polish had stained my tips even though I had used a base cost. Boo. I cut them down a bit to minimize the damage. After applying two coats of base coat this time, I painted my nails using two coats of essence Into the Dark, which is a polish from the fall LE called Vampire Love. So far, I hadn't used it. In the bottle it's a greyish dark blue with some shimmer which reminded me of rain clouds, hence my choice to use it. It doesn't translate like that to the nail though. It's darker and the shimmer is not as prominent. Still a nice color though... more of thunderstorm clouds maybe.

On my ring finger nail, I painted the pattern using white acrylic paint. The white also makes the colored drops pop a lot more. Here's the end result:

 

The next day, when I was showering, I was looking at my hands and had another idea. I thought, why not try to make the dark nails look like they were just hit by some rain. Using clear polish, I tried to imitate this. What do you think?

No spring-like manicure, but I like the rain effect. I didn't go to work leaving it like this though. After taking pictures, I added top coat which smoothed out my little raindrops somewhat. It was an interesting effect, almost 3D. I might have to try this again... doing it on purpose next time.

And again, here are the links to the other wonderful ladies participating in the Spring Challenge:

Amanda from Mandy's Polish
Heidi from DIY Polish & More!
Katee from A Girl and Her Polish 
Charlotte from Charlotte's Nails
Tess from Football and Fingernails
Karine at Karinea0a
Victoria from Manicurator
Ashley from One Nail To Another
Dani from Rustic Comfort
Sue from Creative Nail Design by Sue
Amanda from Counting Down to Bliss
Hannah from Polished Prisms
Sarah from All This Polish
April from Munia's Nails
Sharra from The Blahg
Jess from Nearly Natural Nails

Spring Challenge 2: Ladybugs

Here's my take on the second theme, ladybugs. A few of the other ladies had already finished theirs while I was still pondering on what to do. Well, one of them had done bugs on a leaf which became my inspiration of sorts.

I don't like how my bugs in the green grass turned out though. I imagined the whole thing a lot brighter... meh. This is also the reason why there is only one picture...

The little bugs kind of look like spiders... :( Red spiders. I like the antenna of the big ones though.

I used OPI Bubble Bath to even out my discolored nails first and then used Catrice I Sea You! and Sold Out For Ever as well as Rival de Loop  #01 Spring Melody to create the green parts of this mani. The bugs are painted using acrylics for the black and an unnamed red polish. That's it.

And here are the links to some of the other ladybug manicures ;)

Amanda from Mandy's Polish
Heidi from DIY Polish & More!
Charlotte from Charlotte's Nails
Ashley from One Nail to Another
Sue from Creative Nail Design by Suen
Karine from Karinea0a
Victoria from Manicurator
and of course Hannah from Polished Prisms

Spring Challenge 1: Spring Pastels

Happy Easter everyone! I hope you have a great weekend! It's nice and sunny here, but so cold... so we ended up not doing our annual Easter stroll. xD

Since I finished my first challenge, the Girly Girl Nail Art Challenge, I was keeping my eyes open for another challenge that sounds fun and is flexible timewise. The other day I stumbled upon a challenge hosted by Hannah from Polished Prisms called "April Showers Bring May Flowers. A Spring themed Manicure Challenge". It contains a total of 14 different themes without a set timeframe, which made it very appealing to me. Here's a chart of the themes:

Sounds fun, I think. I'm going to try this challenge from today on! I think I'm going to try to do 2-3 of the themes each week. I'll probably settle with Thursdays and Sundays as these are usually my days off. If I'm in the mood and have enough time, I'll try to do a third inbetween these days. Which means that this challenge will keep me busy for a minimum of 4 weeks. Sounds do-able.

So first theme is spring pastels. This is kind of convenient, because Easter is always a pastel colored holiday for me. I used to paint eggs in all kinds of pastel colors and patterns. I usually even wear a lot of pastel colored clothes around this time of the year. I used quite a few pastel nail polishes lately, even though I haven't posted most of those manicures yet. One color has been missing though, which is pastel pink. Last friday night (...xD) I decided that I would do a quick Easter themed manicure to calm down my nerves. I was really nervous because I was writing a job application... I don't know it always wrecks me...

Here's my quick and easy Easter manicure. Nothing special, but I like it.

I used two coats of a pastel pink polish by Jade, that I got from my mom a few weeks ago. It is kind of old and a little goopy. I like the color though. On my ring finger and thumb I used three coats of essie Marshmallow. I hadn't used this in a while, but I think it's actually a little bit too milky white for what I intended to do. The white is acrylic paint, the eggs, grass and odd flowers were painted using various Catrice polishes.

I like how the bunny turned out. It's a little on the heavy side... (We actually had bunny for lunch today...)

My camera had a hard time with this manicure. Not enough contrast, I guess.

Next theme for this challenge are ladybugs... I don't really have an idea yet...

The list of participants for this challenge is still growing. I think it's convenient to have it under the blog posts. Please take a look at the other participants manicures! Thank you~

Amanda from Mandy's Polish
Heidi from DIY Polish & More!
Katee from A Girl and Her Polish 
Charlotte from Charlotte's Nails
Tess from Football and Fingernails
Karine at Karinea0a
Victoria from Manicurator
Ashley from One Nail To Another
Dani from Rustic Comfort
Sue from Creative Nail Design by Sue
Jess from Nearly Natural Nails
and of course Hannah herself from Polished Prims

Have a nice day!

Girly-Girl Nail Art Challenge: Day 8, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun!

So here I am with my take on the last day of our Girly Girl Nail Art Challenge. I'm kind of sad that this is going to be the last challenge manicure... Anyway, today's theme is "girl's just wanna have fun", so I don't really want to start with the sad stuff, haha.

I had some trouble coming up with an idea this time. Since I was travelling last week, I didn't get around to prepare some ideas and mani's in advance. Work this week was also more tiring than I anticipated, thus I realised that today's mani had to be rather simple. I settled with trying the acid wash technique which I have seen on several blogs over the past weeks. Inspired by the coloful manis of my fellow challenge bloggers, I decided to use bright colors also.

Here's my first try on the acid wash manicure:

The polishes I used for this mani are essie Navigate Her, depend 295, Manhattan 51K and essence Sundancer. I got the depend polish when I was travelling in Sweden last week and it's really amazing. I wish the bottles were a bit bigger though...

I was also surprised just how easy it is to achieve this manicure. I prepared this over a total of 3 days because of my lack of time. I just painted a new coat of color on top of the previous every night. On the morning of day 4 I simply took a q-tip, dipped it in acetone and started scrubbing lightly. The acetone melts the different coats of polish quite fast. The longer you scrub, the more the layers are going to show up. I think I needed a total of like 15 minutes to do both hands and I'm confident that you can be faster once you get the hang of it.

Obviously, it might be best to use one coaters because you don't have to melt away so much polish if you are doing as many colors as I did or even more. The depend polish worked great. 51K on the other hand needed two coats and when I started scrubbing, it started to discolor the yellow... I don't know, but the consistency of the polish+acetone was a bit weird. I also think that this kind of mani is actually a great way to touch up a manicure.

What do you think? Have you tried this technique before? What are your results like? Got some tips maybe?

So this was my last girly-girl manicure... This past month has been a lot of fun, I got to know a lot of wonderful new blogs and I was also really overwhelmed with the feedback I got during this time. Thank you everybody, who took the time to comment! I was, and still am, really happy to read all of your comments!

I'm pretty sure this won't be the last challenge I'm participating in, but on the other hand, I'm still sure that I can't handle the daily kind of challenge. If anyone knows of a challenge with a similar time frame or wants to create their own, I'd gladly participate!

Please take a look at all the awesome nail art everybody else has been doing to!

Ashley of Follow The Yellow Polish Road

Stephanie of A Little Polish
Kelly of DevilishPolish
Jodi of Captivating Claws
Danielle of Lacquer Lover
Elly of Polishable
Olivia of Unprofessional Nails
Kate of This Charming Kate
Bethany of  A Plethora of Nails
Lizzy of The Do It Yourself Lady
Eugenia of Talon-ted
Lindsey of Neverland Nail Blog
Amanda of Nox Nails
Ashley of Smashley Sparkles
Sarah of See Sarah Swatch
Emily of The Lacquerologist
Jess of LuvMyLacquer
Tressa of O' Natur Nail

ChiChi of I'm just me...ChiChi 

CR of Color Me Silly

Amanda of Berry Polished 

Robin, Erin, and Anna of Polished Cousins

Bonny of Over Stuffed 

Taylor of REJOICE! 

Jess of Nearly Natural Nails

Girly-Girl Nail Art Challenge: Day 7, Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice

Haha, I'm soooo behind this week! This post was supposed to be up on Tuesday... and now it's Friday already. It's really interesting how a few days off work just confuse my routine completely. I had a good time in Sweden though, and that's what counts most for me. Plus, I got to buy a few polishes from brands I hadn't tried so far!

Anyway, here is my take on the theme for our seventh day. I took my inspiration from the subtitle "That's what little girls are made of!" My mom is currently working as a day nanny for a little kid just 1 year old and of course, there is all this cute stuff floating around when he is at our house. So I took inspiration from a pattern on his stuff. Ok, he is a boy, but it is a girly pattern to me.

Hm I have to admit, that I consider this mani a fail. It didn't turn out the way I wanted it too. This is partly due to my choice of colors... I'll probably try this pattern again with different colors. I really love my base color though. It's by far my favourite yellow and it's one of the few colors I have a backup of! It's called My Yellow Fellow and it was part of the spring limited edition by essence last year. Since I love it so much, here are a few pictures without weird flowers painted on ;-) My fingers sure look wrinkled here... that's what the foil method does to you....

That's it for today. I hope I'll manage to post my last manicure for this challenge sometime tomorrow!
Thanks for looking! Please don't forget to take a look at the other bloggers' manicures... who have mostly finished the challenge already!

Ashley of Follow The Yellow Polish Road

Stephanie of A Little Polish
Kelly of DevilishPolish
Jodi of Captivating Claws
Danielle of Lacquer Lover
Elly of Polishable
Olivia of Unprofessional Nails
Kate of This Charming Kate
Bethany of  A Plethora of Nails
Lizzy of The Do It Yourself Lady
Eugenia of Talon-ted
Lindsey of Neverland Nail Blog
Amanda of Nox Nails
Ashley of Smashley Sparkles
Sarah of See Sarah Swatch
Emily of The Lacquerologist
Jess of LuvMyLacquer
Tressa of O' Natur Nail

ChiChi of I'm just me...ChiChi 

CR of Color Me Silly

Amanda of Berry Polished 

Robin, Erin, and Anna of Polished Cousins

Bonny of Over Stuffed 

Taylor of REJOICE! 

Jess of Nearly Natural Nails

Corset nails

I did today's manicure at the request of a co-worker who asked me to do black nails. I guess she didn't notice that I have done black nails several times already. Since my last nails were mostly white, I thought, why not. I combined it with a design I wanted to do for ages: corset nails.

I used my go-to black polish p2 eternal and mattified it with essie matte about you. On my ring finger, I used p2 scandal, a pretty scarlet red. The black and white for the corset is acrylic paint.

scandal is one of my oldest p2 polishes, a red! I never really wore red until now. Haha. Anyway, I noticed that p2 reused the name "scandal" for a new shade last year. The new scandal is a bright pink. But I prefer my scarlet red version ;)

For this manicure, though, I think that scandal was too dark. The contrast is not strong enough for my liking, but I still like it somehow. I definitely like matte black!

A dotted Rainbow of sorts

A while ago, when I went to the city in my lunch break, I got lucky at TK Maxx. I found a whole set of the Foil Collection by Color Club. And cheap! So of course, I bought them.

At home I decided to change my manicure. I got inspired by the print of a dress I had seen the same day. It turned out quite well, I think.

I started with a nude base color... my p2 base coat that gives the nail a light pink hue. Then, using a white polish, I painted the upper 3/4 of the nail. I really like white polish as a canvas, but I wish it wouldn't take so many coats... :( Next was the black. I used black acrylic paint and a striper brush to do the net pattern.

What I really like about acrylic paint is that as long as the paint is still wet, you can corrigate any flaws using a wet q-tip. I don't know how this would have turned out if I had used black polish. I haven't used my striper very often yet. So I still don't have perfect control over the brush. :D

Anyway, when the acrylic paint was dry, I snatched myself a dotting tool and started placing the dots on the crosspoints. I used all of the foil polishes in a rainbow-like manner. I really like how opaque they are. Even with the lighter shades such as Antique, I didn't need to dot a second coat.

I got a lot of comments asking if those were nail foils I just stuck on my nail. Well, of course most of them were shaking their heads in disbelieve when I explained that they were not. I know that most of them think that my hobby is ridiculous... Oh well. Nothing new. :D

Valentine's Mani Take Two

So, this weekend I felt like doing another Valentine's Day manicure. I'm not a big fan of the day itself and I ignored it this year too, but there have been a few really nice designs I wanted to try. So today's mani has been inspired by some Japanese nail art I have seen on several blogs. Also, I'm entering another nail art contest with this mani.

The design looked easier than it was, but I have done more complicated stuff. I guess I should somehow plan nail art like this ahead.. like on a piece of paper. :D

Anyway, here's how I did it. I first painted my nails with Color Club Femme à la Mode, two layers. Then, I painted the tips with essence white glam. The hearts were done with Kleancolor Metallic Pink, China Glaze LOL and a golden p2 tip painter. The white is acrylic paint. Added some rhinestones and a bit of golden glitter and that's it.

Last but not least, as I already wrote at the beginning, I'm entering another nail art contest with this manicure. It's going to end tonight, so I have to hurry with this post :D Sarah from The Beauty Family asked for a nail art that was not wearable every day. I guess, most people (non-nail art addicts) wouldn't wear this one ^^;

My Entry into the Be My Valentine Nail Art Contest ♥

Valentine's Day is approaching... Well, it's not a day I care much about. So far, only once I had a boyfriend on Feb. 14th, so I don't know, it's a bit annoying when all the couples around me get all lovey-dovey... Maybe I'll treat myself to some nama-choco this year... (nama-choco = soft chocolate, I came to know this in Japan)

Anyway, I do like pink though and I do like challenges. So I decided sit down and do some real nail art and participate in the "Be My Valentine Nail Art Contest" held by Lacquered Me on Facebook. This is my entry into the contest. There are a lot of other great entries, too. Please take a minute to look at them :) If you like mine, I would be really happy, if you would take the time to vote for it!

I used Catrice Sweets for my Sweets as my base color. It just seemed to be such an appropriate choice :D Then, I started to paint the white parts using white acrylic paint. Using a striper brush, I freehanded the lace around it.

The leopard spots are done using the Catrice polish again, as well as some Elf polish that doesn't have a label on it. I had to water them down with some nail polish thinner, because both polishes turned out to be too goopy for the details. I tried to make the spots in a heart shape... Meh, I still need to practice with those striper brushes to get those tiny details done.

At the end, I surrounded the heart on my thumb with bullion beads. Last was a thick coat of essence BTGN Top Sealer. Yay, I managed to *not* smudge my design this time :D

What do you think? Pink enough?
If you like it, please vote for me (and/or the other entries you like)!
Simply click -->here<--