Practising the art of stamping...

...and still not getting much better. But I have been practising ever since and slowly... I'm getting a little better. I love the possibilities you have with stamping. Not just the images, but all kinds of different techniques, for example making your own decals.

Here's another manicure I have only posted on my Instagram so far.

"Second manicure for the Nail Challenge Collaborative's month of July. We are recreating some of our earliest manicures. I chose a different stamping plate this time. Otherwise not that different. The base is #essie Lapis of Luxury, the stamping plate was Pueen46."

My original post can be found -->here<-- It's even older than the first manicure I recreated.

Catching up... again

Hi everyone,

first post in half a year. My longest break so far. I just didn't feel like writing anything. Some might follow me on Instagram and know that I have been posting a couple of manicures there. Sometimes I find it a lot easier, sometimes I feel restricted, because I can only choose one picture and text is not really what matters. The latter not being that big of a problem though. xD
Lately, I feel that I want to write a bit more about my manicures, so my little project is to catch up with my recent manicures on this blog. That's half a year worth of manicures plus there's still a ton I  could post "from the vault".

So the first posts are going to be about manicures I posted on Instagram before. I'll try to include a couple more pictures. That's going to be hard, because I took way less pictures and the few I took look like crap.

Anyway, spring this year, we had a month of recreating our earliest manicures in the Nail Challenge Collaborative. This is the first of those.

"This is my first manicure for the Nail Challenge Collaborative's current monthly theme. This month we're supposed to recreate 4 of our earliest manicures. I have already replicated a couple of my earliest ones, so I chose one of the missing ones. This one started my hunt for the perfect off-white polish, so I was looking forward to see if I have found it yet. All the basic colors are the same except the white!"

You can find the original manicure -->here<-- Look at those pictures.... o.O"

From the Vault: Bubbles, bubbles, bubbles

Hi everyone,

I finally found the polish I used as the base for the nail art I want to show you today. I guess that's the downside to my reorganizing... I don't find what I'm looking for quite often.

Without much further ado, this is a manicure I created pretty much right after returning from my last vacation in Japan. I used one of the polishes I bought in Japan, tried to use a technique new to me and tried to find out if Japanese newspaper works better than German newspaper for the transfer technique. Don't ask me why I combined those techniques. It doesn't make much sense to me anymore...

I'm sorry for the crappy cellphone pictures. I didn't notice my daylight bulb and my camera don't like each other too much until I had removed the manicure.

The base for this manicure is actually a polish from one of Japan's many 100 yen stores. (100 yen ~ 1 $ ~ 0,75 €) There are silimar stores in Germany, but quality-wise there's a huge difference. I love 100 yen stores! The polish here is Salon Nail Enamel #17 and I think I have seen this particular "brand" at different 100 yen store chains. I bought mine in Kyoto in some store on Kawaramachi street. I remember that I had a hard time deciding which shades to buy, because the colors were all quite pretty. I could have gotten more, of course, but you want to test the quality before carrying home lots of bad polishes, right? Next time, I'm getting more of these. They're awesome. Especially for a brand this cheap!

So I tried the newspaper transfer technique again... I tried using a Japanese newspaper (I got that one at the hotel we stayed at when we got stranded in Kochi because of a taifun), but by the time we got back to Germany it might have been to old after all. The ink didn't transfer very well anymore.

The other technique I used to create the bubbles with worked much better, but it's very time consuming. But... I have sooo many ideas for this technique!

I finished the whole thing with a generous coat of my DIY-Fairy Dust topcoat. Sparkles on bubbles = love.

Lastly, a couple of pictures of the base on its own!

I'm not wearing topcoat on any of those pictures! Doesn't it look pretty?! The brush is really nice, coverage and drying time were quite impressive too. There are a couple of brands out there that could learn from Salon Nail.

What do you think about this manicure? Do you have any experience with Japanese nail polishes?

Thanks for reading~

Priti NYC - Susan Azalea (swatch)

Hi everyone,

I had something else planned for today originally, but while writing the post, I noticed that I didn't have all the polish names/numbers at hand and decided to put it on hold until I have found those polishes in my stash..... Yeah, the collection got so big now that I sometimes have trouble finding a polish that's not from one of the major brands.

So anyway, I still have a lot of swatches in my 'ready' folder. Why not finally post one more of them? The following swatch of Susan Azalea by Priti NYC is no less than 18 months old. Honestly, after all this time, I can't really say much about it characteristics anymore, but I still kind of like the pictures. (My cuticles are so healthy-looking...)

Same as with French Affair by essie, I'm not a hundred percent sure if I can pull this kind of color of. I really like this kind of color though, so I'll probably wear them anyway.

Susan Azalea has this really pretty silver shimmer running through that makes it a bit special for me. The shimmer was one of the reasons why I bought it and I remember that I saw some swatches for this polish back in 2012 that didn't mention that shimmer... Really confused me, since it's one of the major characteristics, in my opinion.

Seeing the pictures makes me want to wear it again. It's the perfect season right now, but I would feel so bad... there's soooo many untrieds right in front of me. I really need to change my buying habits... °-°;

I wish Priti NYC weren't so expensive. I really like their formula and the colors are really pretty too. So whenever I see some at TKMaxx or the like, I'm grabbing some...

Do you like Priti NYC? Any colors to recommend?