Blueberries

Today I've got some more dotting for you.

I was playing around with my dotting tools and noticed, that if you plug the dotting tool on a dot that's not completely dry yet, you get a crater. And somehow those craters started to look like the blueberry "belly buttons" - you know, the opposite side from where the berry is attached to the twig. You don't? Oh well, never mind. You do? That's great - I bet you've been picking them sometimes.. Anyways, here is my blueberry mani.

The most fun part in this was definitely choosing the colours and getting to spread out my swatchsicles on my desk!

I started out by painting the base, which is three coats of Catrice Khaki Perry (was disappointed by the opacity of this one..), and adding the lightest purple and green dots.

Then I made a kind of a gradient by dotting the centres of these base dots with darker colours. Oh heck, what am I babbling here. You can propably see everything from the pics yourself..

You see the "craters" or "belly buttons" in my blueberries? I made them by poking the dotting tool in a semi-dry dot, and turning it around a little. I finished the look by adding a tiny dot in contrasting colour. And a coat of Seche Vite, of course!

And here are the bottle pics along with some clutter on my desk:
greens:
China Glaze Westside Warrior, Essence Show Your Feet In The Jungle, Catrice Sold Out Forever, OPI Stranger Tides

purples:
Essence Multidimension Found My Love, OPI Planks a Lot, Astor Pop Color 139, China Glaze Loft-Y-Ambitions

Punched French

Today's mani is a design I shamelessly copied from a pic in Pinterest. Remember you can follow me there, too! I tried to track the person/blog originally behind this design, but in vain. If it's you or someone you know, please leave a comment!!

Somehow this design reminds me of punched white sheets of paper on a pink background.

For long I've been searching for THE pastel baby pink polish, I thought it was China Glaze Dance Baby from the Electropop collection. Well, it wasn't. This took three coats, plus some bad words. There was a lot of dragging, pooling, patchiness and whatnot. And the colour is not the pastel I hoped for... So the hunt continues...

I started freehanding the french tips Wild and Crazy Montana, but after two wobbly ones decided to go for scotch tape after all. I used a dotting tool (two different sizes) for the dots in the aforementioned colours. Some Seche Vite on the top, and that was that.

And here are the polishes:

Wild and Crazy Montana
China Glaze Dance Baby

Black Lace

I was pestering my husband the other day asking for nail art ideas. At the end he told me to go paint on some black lace and call it "Black Lace". So that's what I did.

The base on most of the fingers is two coats of Essence Colour&Go Wake Up!, and orange/red very opaque creme and a dupe for Essie's later shade "Orange, It's obvious". I've used it before in my rainbow mani, but it had to wait this long to be worn on its own. It really was almost one coater, and the application reminded me of smooth cream. These little paint pots are amazing!

On the accent finger I painted two coats of China Glaze Papaya Punch. Application was a lot trickier with this one, some pooling and dragging was definitely involved.

The needed lace pattern came from m57, stamped with Konad black special polish.

I also tried a taped stamping on the accent finger with BM 225, but didn't like the result too much. Meh. But here are the polishes:

China Glaze Papaya Punch
Essence Colour&Go Wake Up!

Sweet Hook for Marbling

Today I've got a sweet lilac water marble for you.

Water marbling was really frustrating at first, but now I've learned to love it. Of course the result can be awesome, but I particularly love the process itself: taking my time on a peaceful sunday afternoon, testing different polishes, crowding the dining room table with all my nail stuff, doing one nail at a time and making everyone marvel it...

I liked this a lot, although some of the nails came out a little wonky. (Don't look at my left middle finger..) I feel the most difficult phase in marbling is the dip, and it's easier to do with the right hand, so it's usually the right hand which comes out better. That's what happened here, too.

The base is two coats of China Glaze Sweet Hook - one of the three polishes I decided to get from the spring collection. You've propably seen a million swatches of that, so none of them here.

I did the marble with SH, Flormar U15 and Essence Show your feet Purple Magic. As I've written before, the Flormars are great for marbling. The only problem with them is that they sometimes bleed to some other colours. So some testing is required before the real marbling can begin - as always.

As the final touch I decided to give the ring fingers one coat of Lacquistry Lilacquistry. I love the name almost as much as I love the polish! I want to try that on every colour!! I've got in my mind an awesome purple-teal combo, for instance..

 And here are the polishes I used for the marble.

China Glaze Sweet Hook
Flormar U15
Essence Show your feet Purple Magic

And as the sweet end, I'd like to promote the Just Add Polish's sweet giveaway, where US participants could win the either the Zoya Beach or Surf collection. And there's an option for us internationals, too - any two NfuOh's for example!! Go and participate!

Konadlicious Giveaway

I don't usually write individual posts of giveaways. I think they get a lot more attention in the sidebar, than in a post which gets buried under new and new posts. And now I wanted to make an exception, because this giveaway is simply... I can't even think about a suitable word... awesome? mind blowing? supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?

Carli in Konadlicious aka Vintage Musings of a Modern Pinup is giving away 500 dollars worth of vintage clothing and the most wanted nail polishes! Cult Nails, Nerd Lacquer, Lacquistry, Dollish Polish, OPI, Orly...

Get in there right now (or at least before 16th of May) and be prepared to squeal!!!

Liebster Award

I just got this award from Berry Polished. Thank you so much, Amanda!!

The Rules of this award are:
1. Put the link to who gave you the award;
2. Put the award on your post;
3. Choose 5 blogs with under 200 followers to receive the award;
4. Let them know you awarded them.

And my 5 blogs are (Just for fun in the order of the number of followers they had when I last checked..):
1. Unglue Your Lips (26)
2. The Gorgeoisie (32)
3. Nail Call (43)
4. These Nails Are Mine (73)
5. Polishable (83)

Actually I'm not a huge fan of forwarding awards without any fun "mission", but this award is an exception, because it goes especially to those who don't yet have a huge crowd of followers. These blogs I've chosen all do great nail art and are definitely worth your attention, too!

The Girl Who Was (by the cosy) Fire

I'm a little late with this one, but today's mani is my take on The Girl Who Was in Fire nails. I saw a lot of those when the movie premiered, and some fine hand painted mockingjays, too! So I decided to take a different course...

I woke up to the existence of The Hunger Games books only when the polish collection from China Glaze came out, had just run out of easy reading for the train trips, and decided to download the books on my iPad. Yes, they seemed to be directed to teen audience, and yes, I stayed up reading until 3 o'clock one night when I couldn't put the book down.

The base is two coats of Catrice Bring Me Terra Copper (what does this polish name refer to, anyway?), a dead dupe for Essence Colour&Go Be Optimistic from the same manufacturer. This isn't the first time this has happened with Catrice and Essence...

I had the Lacquistry Cosy Fire still in my untrieds (shame on me!), and of course I had to use it for this mani! I sponged it near the cuticles, and topped off with Seche Vite.

On the accent nails I did a water marble with Borghese Notte Black, BMTC and OPI Bling Dynasty. I'd say the water marble turned out ok. I went through a lot of polishes though, and was desperate because none of them seemed to spread well and not blend with each other.

Here are the polishes:

Lacquistry Cosy Fire
Catrice Bring Me Terra Copper
Borghese Notte Black
OPI Bling Dynasty

Now in Pinterest!

Just a quick post today to let you know about my newly opened Pinterest account.

In case you didn't know, Pinterest is an online pinboard where you can create your own board and pin pictures you see in the net and want to share or save for later.

I created a few boards dedicated to nails: one with my own nail art, another with the awesome manicures of others, and also one with general mani ideas.

If your interests are not limited to nail polish, there's also a board labelled "Heels & Hair", which tells you something about my other obsessions.

So go on and take a visit by clicking this button! You can find this button on the sidebar, too! 

   

Teal Ombre

Happy Easter everyone! I'm back from a brief holiday and ready to boast a manicure with some serious golden bling. (And open a Cadbury Creme Egg - my Easter treat!)

This is a simple mani, I mean it required zero nail art skills, but still I liked it a lot and wore it for days. And, not unimportantly, at last I got to use my swatchsicles in the way they are at their best - ombre manicures. 

The polishes I used are:
pinky OPI Ski Teal We Drop
ring finger Essence Multidimension Trendsetter
middle finger Sally Hansen Complete Salon Fairy Teal
pointer Essence Multidimension Tryin' to Be Cool
thumb China Glaze For Audrey

All the polishes were two coats, even For Audrey, which I doubted at first.

I couldn't really decide the decorations, but int he end I decided to brush on one coat of Lacquistry 24k Shredded on each nail. And I loved the result!

Especially For Audrey in the thumb enjoyed the golden company. Lacquistry's 24k Shredded was easy to apply, had the perfect golden shade and lied flat on my nails. One thick coat of Seche Vite was enough to smoothen things out.

Here are the polishes and the chosen swatchsicles. I'm already planning a second ombre mani to get to play with the swatchsicles again...

Red, Silver and Studs

This is one of my short lived manicures (from the archives). I don't know why, but for some reason I didn't want to wear this, really. Is it the mani, or is it just me?

The base colours here were Revlon's Revlon Red (a great basic red - my favourite!) and Essence Nail Art Twins Romeo.

The decorations were made using:
China Glaze Love Marilyn in the ring finger half moon
Stamping, dots& lines with Gosh Silver
Plate BM203 (pinky) and m59 (bows)
Silver studs from eBay.

 In retrospect, the only thing that appeals to me in these pics is Love Marilyn on the red base. I'll have to give that another chance.

 And here are the polishes.

 Please don't unfollow me for these! I debated with myself if I should post these at all, but I myself like to see manis that are a bit on the failing side one way or another. You can learn from the mistakes of others, too. And besides, I've got some pretty decent water marbling coming up next...