Circus Water Marble - Nail of The Day!!

Here's something you haven't seen for a while: a nail-of-the-day post :) I am actually wearing this mani right now! Woot!

I decided to call this the Circus: there's some candy floss, some magic dust, some clash and some drama...

The polishes I used were:
OPI Mod About You, Life Gave Me Lemons and The Power of Pink.
The purple is Catrice Pink Punk - which is a bit funny as it's the not-pink polish in this lot.

Alongside the water marble there are nails with Mod About You as the base, topped off with the Power of Pink glitters (they are both fom the breast cancer awareness set OPI released last year), and with some dots of the Life Gave me Lemons.

The hugest thank you to you, my dear reader, for being there and reading this!!! You are awesome!  There have been some hectic times in my life - but I am a lucky girl to be able to come back to you and the world of nails. There is so much joy to be found in this little hobby of ours – let's go and find it together!!!!

TPC: Grayscale Water Marble

Another water marble for the Tri-polish challenge this year – wow, I've been adventurous :)

I've actually found out, that I like water marbling! Who would have thought that after my first disastrous attempts?! I see water marbling as THE legitimate reason to just sit an entire hour by my desk and "do nothing", maybe browse a few nail blogs, maybe shop some nail stuff, but doing nothing productive.

The  February colours are gray, brown and pink, and only brown is missing here... Luckily this is allowed in the challenge rules!

I started out with a white base, and used Wild&Mild Rockefeller Center, Models Own Mushroom, NYX Girls Perfect Gray (giveaway score) and China Glaze White on White for marbling.

On the accent finger I added a touch of pink: Essence Multidimension Most Wanted.

This is maybe not the best water marble I've made, but I spent a lot of my precious time doing it, so I'm going to like it! Ever felt the same??

An InLinkz Link-up

TPC: Squishy Water Marble

The third Tri Polish Challenge post still features the only yellow polish in my travel stash: Rimmel Lemon Drop. Try to bear with me!

 It's been a long time since I did a water marble. The main reason, I think, is that the water where I lived simply wouldn't cooperate. Now that I'm back in Spain, I simply had to try one.

For this marble I used OPI Y'all Come Back Ya Hear and the ubiquitous Rimmel fruities Lemon Drop. I painted the base with Lemon drop, but it turned out so streaky even after three coats, that I came to think of a marble. And I'm glad I did!

 The marble is far from perfect, but I like how squishy the mani looks. Like fruit candy! Omnomnom...

An InLinkz Link-up

Funky Water Marble

I wanted to do a water marble, but didn't want to end up with anything too sweet or lame. I had something like 70's wallpaper style colour combo in my mind when I started, and this is how it turned out:

Not bad, and quite seventies, huh? Ok, so there are bubbles and other mistakes, and my cleanup isn't perfect, but with dim lights and the right music.... (Soundtrack fot this definitely includes Stayin' Alive and some selected funk classics.)

The base here is two coats of China Glaze White on White, and the marble was done with China Glaze WoW, For Audrey and Happy Go Lucky, plus OPI A-Taupe the Space Needle

A hint: if you don't want to get green on your nails, don't put blue and yellow side by side when you marble... At least with these polishes...

My right hand turned out better, as always. I believe it's because of the dip - which actually has a big influence on the pattern - is much easier to do with the dominant hand.

And here are the polishes:

China Glaze Happy Go Lucky , For Audrey and White on White plus OPI A-Taupe the Space Needle

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!

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

Yellow & Pink Water Marble

I'm back from my hiatus, and I was really surprised to see my blog had attracted some new followers while I was away. Thank you for the "old ones" for sticking with me, and a warm welcome to you new ones!!! You mean a lot to me! I don't know which amazes me the most: that there are people who don't even know me, thus don't need to be afraid of hurting my feelings and still want to read my blog, or that there are people who know me and want to share my nail enthusiasm even if they don't do nails themselves.

Today I want to show you a water marble I did a while ago with  Flormar U23 and China Glaze Happy Go Lucky, Orange Marmalade and Señorita Bonita.

This is only the second water marble I've ever done, and I owe so much to all the tutorials and "tips and tricks" pages you other nail bloggers have made. Without you I would have thrown these precious little bottles straight out of the window so many times.

The pattern I used here is the classic slightly diagonal lines. I also did accent nails on the thumbs, by taping them diagonally before dipping. This came out as one of my favourite nails.

 The Flormar polishes I own - from the Miracle Colors series -  can be quite sheer, but they work well in water marbling. Keep that in mind if you don't know what to do with yours or would like to save some of your more expensive polishes for other purposes. While making this marble, for example, I noticed that CG 108 Degrees & Flormar U23 and CG Senorita Bonita & Flormar U15 are very near each other, if not exact dupes.

I knew I wanted a yellow on this mani, and I took out all my yellow swatchsicles to choose the right colour.

Try to explain a non-polish-addict that "seriously, these are totally diferent colours..." I truly identified myself with this awesome video about the life of a polishmaniac.. And well, Orly Spark and China Glaze Happy Go Lucky ARE quite near each other... But otherwise they really are different.

I wore this mani for a few days, and got an excuse to wear it a day more by adding OPI Rainbow Connection on the ring fingers. What a happy couple!

Day 20: Water Marble

Today's challenge was the one I'd been dreading the most... the big bad water marble!

The base was Astor POP color 139 - a supermarket polish for 2 euros that really exceeded my expectations. It could have been one-coater even on my long nails, but I did two coats just in case. Amazing brush, opacity and formula. I'm definitely going to haul more of these!

The marbling was done with the Astor, plus China Glaze's Ahoy, Senorita Bonita and Thistle. I'd read in other blogs these polishes were okay with marbling, and I wasn't going to take any risks.

So, how was it, water marbling for the first time? Well, bad, to be honest. After the first nail I thought "Hmm, this wasn't so hard", after the second "What the f*** is happening here" and after re-doing the second for the third time "I'm not going to make this". Just look at this mess!

But after all, I managed to finish the mani and marbled both hands. I'm not too proud of the result, but I'm definitely proud of my resilience. I know only few other persons who could possibly think spending hours on a manicure is not a complete waste of time, and in times like this, I'm extremely happy to have them somehow around me.

Here are all the polishes I used. I hope I'll gather the guts some day to try the water marble again. It was still kinda fun. I enjoy doing things I'm simply not good at - a kind of perversion, I guess...