From the Vault: A Blue French

Hi again,

I still have so many manicures ready to post that I did ages ago. Today, I'm going to release one of those from the "ready" folder...

I was inspired by some manicure I saw on Pinterest, but I can't find it anymore. I pretty much recreated it, but I just couldn't paint thin lines that day. Haha... it looks a little silly. ^^; My nails are too short for this sort of manicure.

Materials used:
- OPI Bubble Bath
- OPI Last Friday Night
- white, pink and blue acrylic paint
- loose pink glitter

I practiced simple one stroke leaves here... again. I really want to master this technique, but it's so hard o.O""

Thanks for reading!

TNCC - Favorite Color - #1

Hi everyone,

it has been ages... again. Partly, this was planned, partly... not. In September, I was on vacation and travelled a lot, so I was pretty sure beforehand that it would be a quiet month. But I had planned to still do all four manicures for that TNCC month afterwards.

Well, I had a great time in Japan and, maybe, I'll even write a post about it. But all of that has got a really bad aftertaste now, because I had to find out the night I returned, that three days after I left for Japan... my cat had disappeared and nobody told me. While I understand why my family decided to keep quiet about it, it made things difficult for me - emotionally. My pets are very important to me and when something happens to them, I get extremely emotional. And lagging two weeks behind everyone in that aspect was terrible. They had long accepted the fact that Mio had disappeared and were not really understanding/supporting in any way. They all appeared rather indifferent to me back then and I still can't understand how they could give up searching actively after a mere two weeks and bake elaborate cakes instead of putting up new posters.

I don't know if it would have been better if I had known while being in Japan. Maybe. What I know for sure is that it threw me out of my loop completely. I didn't really do my nails for a couple of weeks, didn't read any blogs, just worked and kept looking for my cat. He's still gone and there's little hope that he will return considering his character. He loved being with the family, so he wouldn't just disappear without any reason. It's too quiet in the house with him missing and even though it has been 10 weeks by now, I'm still not used to him not being here...

But I started doing my nails again. I feel really uncreative since then, but I can't stay in this slump forever. So starting this post, I'll try to not only do my nails, but post the pictures to my blog as well. The posts might be shorter on text for the time being though.

So to get back on track, I'm going to ignore the fact that I have been missing about 9 TNCC manicures until now and just start with the first one for the month of November. The theme is easy: favorite color. I decided on purple, because there were a couple of purple untrieds on my desk. So here you go, a Japanese nail art inspired manicure in purple!

I tried to paint one stroke flowers, but failed. I liked the one on my thumb though...

Materials used:
- p2 sensual purple from the Mirror Mirror on the Wall LE
- Biocura Fliederzauber
- essence Steel-ing the scene from the metal glam LE
- white and purple acrylic paint

That's it for now! Thanks for reading!

TNCC - Around the World #3 - Arabian Night

Minna-san, konban wa!

I arrived in Japan after a very long trip... 55 hours of staying awake are really not a lot of fun. I'm getting too old for that. ;__; But here I am in my hostel with working (!) wifi and I want to show you my overdue manicure for the third installment of "Around the World".

I knew I wanted to do something arabian, but even though I tried a couple of times, my original idea just didn't work. This manicure here was not planned. I basically only did it because I didn't want to take of my polish at the time yet. I saw a picture of someone else doing a manicure like this, found it very pretty and decided that this was going to be my third mani.

So the base of this one is Barry M Blue Grape with 2 coats of Max Factor Fantasy Fire on top. These two are from my recent trip to London where I barely bought polish, because I had to keep my money together for my trip to Japan (^.^). But since this combo is sooo pretty after all, you can probably understand that I didn't want to remove it after just one day. So I grapped Zoya Faye and Misslyn Las Vegas and did a gradient. On top I painted the skyline using black acrylic paint. Some highlights with Las Vegas and then I added topcoat - done.

What do you think?

I'm really happy that even on my third day here in Japan, I have not bought any polish yet! But I admit that I was close... I'll do my shopping after travelling. So looking forward to that~~

*And sorry that I'm only using English this time...*

TNCC - Around the World #2 - Greece

Hello~

I'm almost done packing and currently waiting for my travel manicure to dry. So here's the second of my August manicures for the Nail Challenge Collaborative. For the second one, I wanted to do something mediterranean and I ended up being inspired by Greece. I wanted something simple, maybe some stamping. Sadly, I didn't have a matching plate, so I ended up painting my Greek pattern by hand.

Ich bin jetzt fast fertig mit dem Packen und warte gerade drauf, dass meine Urlaubsmani trocknet. Also genug Zeit noch einen Blogpost zu schreiben. Hier ist also die zweite meiner Augustmanis für die Nail Challenge Collaborative. Ich wollte diesmal irgendwas Mediterranes machen und habe mich letztlich von Griechenland inspirieren lassen. Ich wollte etwas eher simples, vielleicht ein Stamping. Leider hatte ich aber keine passende Schablone und habe meine griechisches Muster letztlich mit der Hand gemalt.

For this one, I only used three products. The white polish is W7 Polar Bear, a white shimmer polish. It appears to be opaque quite fast, but I continued until fully opaque at 4 coats. When that was really dry, I painted the pattern with blue acrylic paint. One coat of essence BTGN Top Sealer sealed it in... and I was done. Sounds simple, but painting patterns like this is no easy task for me. It was a challenge for sure.

Für diese Mani habe ich lediglich drei Produkte verwendet. Angefangen habe ich mit vier Schichten von W7 Polar Bear, einem weißen Schimmerlack. Als diese vier Schichten dann trocken waren, habe ich mit blauer Acrylfarbe das Muster aufgepinselt. Mit einer Schicht des BTGN Top Sealer von essence habe ich das Ganze dann versiegelt. Klingt recht simpel, aber Muster zu malen ist für mich gar nicht so einfach. Blümchen sind so viel einfacher...

What do you think of this?
Was meint ihr dazu?