Sunday, April 29, 2012

Week 18: Hubby's Choice - 101 Dalmatians

My husband told me, several months back, that when I hit 101 nail polishes in my stash, that I ought to do a 101 Dalmatians manicure to celebrate. Well, with winning Girly Bits' giveaway and receiving two polishes in the mail, my total reached 102 nail polishes (not counting base and top coats, thank you!) so as promised, here is my first attempt at cartoon nail art. ^_^

Also, I realized two days later, when I went to check what this week's challenge was for the Year's Challenge that I'm participating in, that this week's theme was, in fact, "Cartoon Mani" - so I had already done this week's challenge and didn't even know it! (So next manicure will be *last* week's challenge, "Earth Appreciation," since I skipped that one. :P

I started with a base of Sally Hansen's White On, which I realized after finishing my swatching sticks is my only one-coat white. I did use two coats on my nails to make sure it was even, but it was pretty close with the one coat. I added dots of China Glaze Liquid Leather in varying sizes. I did my cartoon art, however, on plastic, because I'm not that great at drawing with nail polish, and I'm certainly not good enough to do it left-handed!

Basing my art on this picture of Pongo and Perdita...


...I put down base coats of China Glaze Frostbite for one thumb and Sally Hansen Cardinal for the other to go with their collar colors. Using the method of drawing cartoons that I've seen on Simply Rins and Polish Art Addiction as my guideline (though 1: I don't have acrylic paints so I used nail polish, and 2: I'm clearly nowhere near as good as they are, nor will I ever be!) I started with the whole shape in black, filled in with white, and then added the details. Here's what resulted (though as you can see, I used a different picture to actually work with when drawing Pongo)


They're not fabulous by any stretch of the imagination, and as you can see, my topcoat resulted in a little streaking of the base color, but for a first attempt at drawing cartoons in nail polish? I'm pretty darned stoked by my results! Thankfully, they look so much better in real life than maxi pictures make them look. :)




Friday, April 27, 2012

Hippity Hop, Dippity Dot

First, let me squee over happy mail nail - I won a giveaway from Girly Bits! Before this, I only had Street Magic in my stash, but I really love quite a few of Pam's polishes. She was offering a bottle of Hippity Hop and a bottle of the winner's choice - I wanted Magically Delicious, which really is magically delicious! It's a gorgeous green glitter with gold hexes and the occasional larger gold square. I used it first thing, but while the accent nail I had MD on was gorgeous, I wasn't nearly as fond as the nail art I attempted to go with it. Add to that the fact that I did it laaate at night and it was messed up on a few nails by the morning, I never took any pictures. Oddly enough, my co-workers really liked it, so I wished I had taken pictures, but I had tip wear by the time I got home and it just wasn't blog-quality. :P Enough words, look at the pretties!!!


When I took off the magical deliciousness, I decided to go ahead and use Hippity Hop next, and I decided to match (to the best of my available palette) the awesome glitter colors. I started with a base of China Glaze Sea Spray (my only pale blue at the moment - I really need a nice baby blue, Sea Spray is a bit too gray for this mani, though the pictures in the sunshine look more blue and less gray than it looks to me in real life), and then added two coats of Hippity Hop to the ring fingers.

I then grabbed a couple of sizes of dotting tools, and assembled the following colors: China Glaze Frostbite, Milani Whitest White, China Glaze Sex on the Beach, and my frankened light purple that I showed you in the last post. I added dots of varying sizes in a curve on each of my remaining fingers, and all over my thumbnail, and this was the result:

For once, I actually think my right hand looks better than my left for this manicure! Of course, that's primarily because when I added the topcoat, a couple of my dots decided to streak on my left hand. ^_^
Mr. IJAH thought my right-hand thumb was the best of the batch, while several of my co-workers pointed to my left-hand middle finger (the worst of the streaked ones, in fact!) as their favorite. Here's the left hand, so you can decide for yourself. Either way, this is the first manicure in a few weeks I've been completely, unreservedly, happy with. It's happy dotting day!




Thursday, April 26, 2012

Little Purple Dress

I've had a stream of non-inspired days for a while now. And even when I've felt inspired, what I've come up with hasn't been. I really wasn't happy with this manicure and took it off after a day, but I did take picture of it and decided to share. Some people liked it, even though I really didn't, so maybe some of you readers might be part of the people-who-like-this population. :)

First, here's the inspiration for this manicure:

I don't think I'd ever wear this dress, but when I saw it on Pinterest, I thought it would make nice nail art. I think I did it wrong, though. I can think of a couple of other ways to interpret this dress on nails, and I may try again. ^_^ First, I don't have a nail polish of that shade of purple, so I had to franken one. It's a combination of China Glaze Salsa, Frostbite, and a lot of Milani Whitest White. I'm really happy with the colour of purple I created. I think it would've matched the dress better if I'd matted it, but I haven't yet bought a matte topcoat. It's on The List. ^_^


I used NYC Black Lace Creme for the belt, and I mixed a bit of Milani Whitest White, a touch of China Glaze Mahogany Magic, and a teeeeny dot of neon yellow and neon orange to make the cream color. I really do like all the colors together.


It's just the artwork that doesn't work for me. I think maybe I shouldn't have turned the dress upside down on my nails, maybe. Put the cream ruffles at the base of the nail, and do...something?...to make the bottom look swirly and loose. That will take thought so it might be a while before I revisit this fashion disaster on my nails. :)

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Graduated Greens

I've mentioned in the last few posts that I haven't felt very creative this last week. After my matte & glitter mani chipped (as mattes are wont to do quite quickly) I just painted my nails with China Glaze Mahogany Magic and a couple coats of Windestine's Rainforest.


She's out of stock on this color right now. No clue if she plans to make more once the current lacquer base shortage clears up, but you should check out her shop anyway for all her other awesome colors.

I was bored and didn't do any nail art, but it made for a beautiful manicure. When I started to get some tip wear, I added a gradient of dots in other shades of green, leading up to black sparkly tips.


Leaving the base of my nails as it was, with the Mahogany Magic and Rainforest, I took a medium-sized dotting tool and dotted across with Sinful Colors Call You Later. That row isn't clearly defined, as the polish is a clear base with cool green and yellow glitters, but if you click on the picture to blow it up, you can see how it adds extra sparkle and hints of yellow from the gold glitter, in between the bottom color and the first solid green.


After that is a row of Nubar Reclaim dots, then Nubar Greener, and topped off with a final row of dots in China Glaze Smoke and Ashes, and then I wrapped the tips with it since the row of dots didn't completely cover the end.


So yeah, still wasn't feeling very creative, though I think it's picking up. We'll see what shows up on my nails in the next few days... ^_^

Dry Marbling Funky French

Once again, my friend V's nails are visiting our blog. I honestly haven't been feeling that creative this past week, but between her ideas of what she wanted and my ideas of what I can do, we came up with something that she really loved and I think suits her personality and looks good on her nails! And what more can you ask of a manicure, really? 


To create this look, we started with a base coat (we normally use a ridge-filling base coat for V, but since we were going with a sheer base color, we used my clear base coat instead) and then painted one coat of China Glaze Fast Track. It's not clear, but its color looks the closest to nude I can come to V's skin tone in my palette, and the glitter just adds that touch of oomph.  



I taped her fingers off at an angle with standard French manicure tape and then painted a thick coat of China Glaze Foie Gras. I then added drops at random of China Glaze Solar Power, Riveting, and Harvest Moon, and then swirled them gently with my thinnest dotting tool. We decided to marble the whole thumb, though I did leave a few bare spots to show off the Fast Track. After letting that dry for a bit, I took a striper brush and lined the French tips with China Glaze Electrify. Since we didn't have tips on the thumbs, I just striped along a few of the most prominent swirls. Here's a picture with flash to show off the sparkle:


When I pulled out the colors I intended to use for this marble, V looked askance at the bright yellow. She claims yellow doesn't look good on her, and in large amounts, she's right. But we were doing a "fall colors" manicure, and I knew that yellow would be the perfect color to make it POP and keep all the browns from just melding together. She had to stop and just look at her nail after I finished the first marble tip, because she was amazed at how it ended up.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Talk about a giveaway...

Things I Love At the Moment is having a 400 & 500 follower giveaway (apparently she shot past 400 right after her 300-follower giveaway. ;) She's going to have 3 winners, and both first and second prizes are bottles of Lacquistry polish - Rouhir and Now for first prize, and Devil's Dandruff for second prize! OH, and a set of nail art polishes for third prize! Okay, I'll admit it, it's kind of obvious which ones I'm all excited over... :P

Seriously, you should check out her blog (her main site is linked with the blog name in the first sentence) and while you're there: enter her giveaway! :)

Monday, April 16, 2012

Going to the Showing - Giveaway

Going to the Showing has reached 100 followers! Woot! Which she totally deserves, because she does great swatching, and even cuter nail art. I have to share - this is my favorite of her posts in the last month:


Seriously, how adorable is that?? And to celebrate her audience numbers, she's having a 100-follower Giveaway, with two winners! Click here to enter!


Sometimes Ya Gotta Simplify

I had a busy week last week, and I was tired and cranky by the weekend. Thankfully I had a lazy, relaxing weekend to sleep it off! However, Sunday night I was no closer to creativity than I had been on Friday, but hey, my nails needed to be done, whether I was interested in it or not. So I decided to go simple. Simple is good. I picked one of my two (count them, TWO!) matte polishes (yes, I really really need to pick up a matte topcoat one of these days, but I'm honestly not a polish-aholic and I don't buy a whole lot of nail polish when I don't generally have a lot of spending money - my tax refund splurging this spring notwithstanding!) and then spent a few minutes hemming and hawing over which glitter I reaaaaally wanted to use (I've got so many pretties now!) and finally decided on one of my new Indie polishes I recently bought. The result? A really difficult manicure to photograph, actually. ^_^


The base color is China Glaze Stone Cold, from the Capitol Colors Collection. The glitter is Endangered "Blue"Loons from Windestine. Click that link to check out her Etsy shop - she's got a lot of great glitters to choose from. (I'm lemming Into the Wild, myself.)

I took several pictures outside at lunch today, taking advantage of the sunlight. These pictures just don't really show the prettiness, in my opinion, but I'm not an artist, and I can't really put into words what's missing, so I'm just going to show you several of the pictures. Enjoy!

Just Add Polish - Summertime Giveaway

As the title implies, Just Add Polish is having a Summertime Giveaway! Click the picture below to enter to win either Zoya Surf or Zoya Beach Collection!


As always, I want to reiterate that I don't follow any blog just to enter their giveaway. If I find a blog through someone else's advertising of their giveaway, I always review the last few weeks of posts to see if I actually *like* the blog before following. Because I actually do read each and every post in each and ever blog that I'm following...okay, with the exception of makeup reviews, because I don't wear makeup. But I do look at the pretty pictures in those! ^_^

Just Add Polish is a blog that's been in my Reader Subscriptions for a while now. Whether you're a nail art afficionado like I am, or just like nail polish, this is a Must Read blog! She's got great nail art, wacky inspiration (my daughter -loved- the Minecraft nails and made me recreate them on her nails!), excellent swatching and honest product reviews worth reading. I just can't say enough to emphasize that I actually do LOVE this blog. I don't enter giveaways on blogs I don't read, and I don't re-blog every giveaway I enter, either. So click the pic and enjoy!

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Week 16: Dotticure

Okay, I'll admit. I did this manicure on Thursday before I even looked to see what this week's theme was. And I've been antisocial for the last few days and haven't felt like posting. But here it is Sunday, and I was looking at this week's theme to see if I wanted to use it to redo my nails today...and lo and behold, what's already on my nails fits just perfectly! I also accidentally used only polishes from China Glaze's Capitol Colors Collection, but that actually was an accident. The reason I wanted the collection was that I loved most of the colors...so it should be no surprise when they show up on my nails a lot! :)

All right, enough blathering. Here's what you're here for: the nails!


The base color for the index, middle, and pinky fingers is China Glaze Dress Me Up. The base color for the thumb and ring fingers is Mahogany Magic. I added dots in the alternating colors, and then dots on all the fingers in Electrify.


I did learn one important tidbit when doing this manicure - dotting with a glitter can be dangerous. I actually scratched myself a few hours after I did this with a piece of glitter that was sticking up sideways on my nail. I ended up taking a nail file parallel to my nail bed to file down the glitter flat in several places, and then added a second coat of Seche Vite. It still left a few bumps, but no more sharp edges! :)

Konadlicious' HUGE Giveaway!

Okay, I'll admit it. Not every blog I follow is about nail art. Maybe 98%. I haven't counted. :) Konadlicious is one of the awesome blogs I follow that is about something else...her blog is called, "Vintage Musings of a Modern Pinup." I have no aspirations to dress in vintage wear myself, but I certainly admire the look, and KL pulls it off amazingly.

Her giveaway is half vintage, half nail polish! How's that for awesome? Seriously, go check her blog out and if you like it (and how can you not?) you should follow and enter her giveaway! You know the drill: click on the picture to hit the giveaway post!




Thursday, April 12, 2012

Red Hair and Black Nail Polish GIVEAWAY!

I love that blog title, honestly. Red Hair and Black Nail Polish. The fact that she's having a giveaway to celebrate her blog's one year blogoversary is just an excuse to pimp a great blog, honestly - I love her nail art! She's doing a series of manicures inspired by the Hunger Games collection. She's done the expected cover art and Effie Trinket nails, but she's also doing them by district - she's covered the Capitol and districts 12, 3, 7, 5, 4 and 11 (yes, in that order, because you don't think I have that trivia on the top of my head, do you? ;) I've pinned several of her designs onto my pinterest board (http://pinterest.com/iroshi/ if y'all really wanna go there) and I just love seeing what new things she's come up with this time!

So here's the plan. You click here or on the picture below to head over to her giveaway, and when you're done with that, you spend the next couple of hours going through the archives of goodness she's compiled over the last year! You won't regret a minute of it.


ColorSplash Nails Giveaway!

Three cheers for ColorSplash Nails, who has reached 200 followers! Woo, and I say, HOO! Here's a little factoid about me and my blog reading habits: I read all my subscriptions in Google Reader. I click on the post when I see something I just have to comment on, when there's a cut and I want to read the rest of the post, when I need the URL to pin some gorgeous nail art, or when there's a giveaway. When a giveaway offers extra entries for making a post for the giveaway? I go back to the main blog page and scroll down through the last several posts, so I refresh my memory of why I'm following that particular blog. Yes, I really do this for every giveaway I post here. Which is why I can tell you that I'm SHOCKED that ColorSplash Nails ONLY has 227 followers at this moment! I'm going to guess it's because the blog has only been running since January, because WOW, guys.

I follow ColorSplash Nails because she has everything I look for in a nail blog - great (I repeat, GREAT!) nail art, good swatching, good photography, and even step by step tutorials on some of her art! Seriously, I love this blog, and I've repinned a fair bit of her nail art to my pinterest board. So if you've never been to her blog, you OWE it to yourself to spend some time perusing the archives after you click "follow". Trust me, you will not be sorry!

Okay, the moment you've all been waiting for. (Or, you know, just going "Ro shut up and post the link already!" :) Click here or on the picture and get yourself over to a great blog!


Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Polished Criminails - 700 followers!

Polished Criminails is having a giveaway for reaching 700 followers! Woohoo! Honestly, how can you not love a blog with that title? I don't really understand what the pink furniture and lace on her blog logo have to do with the title, but even if there's not a hidden connection I'm missing, they're pretty anyway! :) Seriously, though, she posts some pretty, pretty swatches. So go give her some love and enter her giveaway - she's giving out three beautiful Models Own polishes! ^_^


Week 15, sort of...You're such a pansy!

Yep, that would be me. Or at least, my nails at the moment. :) I should explain the title of the post a bit better, though. Week 15 on A Year's Challenge is "Easter Day" mani. I'm not a Christian. If I were going to do manicure in honor of spring fertility, it would have been done on the spring equinox, March 20. So instead, for this week's challenge, I give you flowers. It's the closest you're going to get to "Easter" from me. :) To make these pansies, I followed Nailed It's tutorial.


As you might notice, I've gone down to nubbins. I broke another nail last night and decided to file them all down to be even. I've managed to square off all my nails except my left-hand thumb, but that's the one that broke nearly at the quick not too long ago. It'll be another couple of weeks, I expect, before the side edges get far enough out to file it square. I'm hoping that my continuing regimen of biotin, cuticle care, and a nail strengthening base coat will eventually get my very thin and flexible nails to stop flaking and breaking. I've used Sally Hansen Miracle Cure for the last few months, and now I'm trying something I picked up at Sally Beauty a week ago. We'll see where my nails are in two months! :)

The base color is China Glaze Re-fresh Mint. Such a lovely mint green! It looks very blue-y in the bottle, so I did a swatching stick before deciding to use it here. I'm still in process of swatching my stash. I think I'm about a third of the way through. It's hard to keep it organized in the meantime - trying to keep track of what I've swatched and what I haven't, especially since I'm overflowing my current storage, is difficult.
I did purple pansies on the left hand, with two blue and white ones on the thumb, and then reversed it and did blue and white pansies on the right hand, with two purple ones on the right thumb. 
 The blue pansies are done with China Glaze Frostbite and Milani Whitest White. The purples are done with Sinful Colors Rich in Heart and China Glaze Reggae to Riches. The yellow dots in the centers are China Glaze Solar Power.


What I think is interesting is that all those "streaks" are not from top coat. They're errors I made with the striping brush while doing the center coloring stripes, and I left them on purpose because I liked the way they made the whole manicure look. In these pictures, it makes it look very amateurish, but in real life, they look gorgeous. One of my co-workers asked if they were decals, and everyone has commented on how "perfect" they look. While I think they're far from perfect, the errors that glare so strongly in these pictures actually make them look more natural and life-like on my hands.

Pansies are actually my favorite lawn flower. I love the many, many colors they come in and the two-tone variegation of every flower. My second favorite flower to look at on the landscape would have to be bluebonnets, but I don't think I could do them justice on my nails at this point in my skill level! :) My favorite flower in a bouquet, however, is carnations. Trust me, Mr. IJAH is very happy that I don't care for roses (except when drawing them, because roses are really easy to draw. ;) Really, I think they're pretty, but the price for the amount of pretty you get is absurd, and they wither in days.  Carnations, on the other hand, can last for weeks with care, and they smell just as glorious as they look! It's especially fun to get light colored ones and add food coloring to the water. What are your favorite flowers?

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Nox Nails Giveaway

Nox Nails is having a 50-follower giveaway (though as seems to be normal for a giveaway, her followers have skyrocketed, since she's about to hit 100!) To celebrate, she's giving away two pretty polishes that are only sold in Canada:


Aren't they gorgeous! They look rich green and purple in the bottle, but the glass flecks range blue-green in the green polish and blue-purple in the purple one. Click here or on the picture to head to the giveaway, and give the archives a browse for lots of pretty nail art! :)

Blue Mondays

Yes, I know it's Tuesday. I was exhausted from a looooong Monday of paperwork and when I got home I curled up and took a nap. So I never got around to posting my pretty manicure, even though I took the time to head outside at lunch hour to take advantage of the brief spot of sunshine to get pictures! Also, have you ever had a manicure that is pretty, but just...not what you were hoping for? I can't label it a "fail", because really, it is pretty, but I had higher hopes for it.

I can't point to a single blogger who inspired me for this one, because I've seen so many stained glass manicures and I like bits and pieces of them all. But I've been planning to do one for a while, and Sunday night, after putting water marble transfers on V's nails, this is just what I felt like doing. The pictures are all direct sunshine, no flash.


I started with a base of China Glaze Sea Spray, drew random black lines to make straight sections on my nails, and filled them in semi-randomly with Pure Ice Splash, Pure Ice Strapless, Sinful Colors Cinderella, and China Glaze Frostbite. Then I went back over the black lines with Sinful Colors Secret Admirer.
I think there are two things that really made this nail art less than I wanted it to be. First, I realized after the fact that I hadn't used my smallest brush, which meant no matter how much I tried, I couldn't get the lines as thin as I wanted. Second, I should have used a flat creme black rather than the shimmer of Secret Admirer. I'm a sucker for always going for the bling, honestly. If there's a single artistic thing I need to learn, it's that less is more.
Also I needed a second creme blue color. The only flat color in this "stained glass" is the base color of Sea Spray. I should have either used all sparkle or at least two flat colors. There are a few spots where I mixed Frostbite with Pure Ice Splash to make a more medium blue, but even the Frostbite by itself has a light shimmer. Sea Spray was the only creme, and it just looks off in the middle of all that bling. So yeah, it's pretty. So I didn't take it off (though I will tonight, because I chipped it today. Paperwork is hell on nails, have you noticed?) But it's not as good as I could have done, which to me is a failure.

ChromaCraze First Giveaway!

ChromaCraze is having a giveaway for 150 followers on her blog and 100 followers on her tumblr. Great job! You know the spiel: click the pic to enter the giveaway and find a great new blog to follow!


Nail Noise 50-follower giveaway!

I just found this lovely blog this morning, and I'm so glad I did! I hit the "follow" button after just a few posts. I'm always looking for more nail art to inspire me, but so many of the blogs are just swatching or stamping. Don't get me wrong; I follow a lot of swatching blogs. (I don't follow many blogs whose only art is stamping, though, not because I don't think they're pretty or interesting, but because I don't stamp.) But I'm here for the nail art - polish isn't my hobby, the nail art is. So finding another blog with nail art? That's a squee-worthy morning for me! And a few minutes after I'd hit follow, I found a post where she's having a giveaway! More grins for a Tuesday morning.


Click here or on the picture to check out NailNoise's giveaway, but you should definitely spend some time browsing her archives - I know what I'm doing over my lunch hour today! :)

Monday, April 9, 2012

Deuce Beauties Giveaway

For what? I don't know! She's just giving away polish and lip color! Maybe she's just generous like that. :)


You know the routine! Click on the picture or here to head to the giveaway post...but make sure to check out the archives while you're there if you're not already a follower. DB does beautiful swatches!

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Floral Frontiers

Our visiting nail canvas, V, is once again gracing our pages with images of my nail art. Or, you could say, she's shamelessly taking advantage of my new hobby to save money by not going to the salon to get expensive nail art done. ^_^ Honestly, it's a win-win situation. My best friend comes over to hang out, my kids get to see their Aunt V, I get to make more pretties than I can wear on my own nails...it's all good! :)

So this manicure I actually flat-out copied from another blogger. paint that nail did a gorgeous neon yellow flower this week that I stuck on my pinterest board. When V asked what we should put on her nails this week, I immediately thought of this:


I did, however, want to do it in a different colour, since yellow is very much not for V. It makes her look jaundiced. I knew, however, that the dusky pink of China Glaze Dress Me Up would be perfect for her. This is my result:

The black is China Glaze Liquid Leather, and the red and silver are from a dollar package of Wet N Wild nail art set of five colors that V picked up for my little girl's birthday yesterday. (She's eight now! Brianna, not V. ;)

I tried to get some more shots, but this was the only one that came in good focus. Dress Me Up was very, very pink-y when I practiced this nail art on a swatching round, but it comes out looking almost nude on V's hands! Not the effect I was going for, but it's pretty. :) I wish I'd gotten a picture of the other hand, also. I didn't realize until I was watermarking the photos that 1) only one of them came out well, and 2) my flower petals got bigger as I went along, and this was the second hand I did. The other one was, in my opinion, a little better. Ah, well, live and learn!

Friday, April 6, 2012

Things I Love At The Moment - 300 follower giveaway

Things I Love At the Moment has reached 300 followers! Woohoo! And to celebrate she's having a giveaway of a custom, one-of-a-kind (or is that two-of-a-kind?) lacquer from Nail-venturous! :)


As usual, click on the picture to be magically transported to the giveaway page! :)

Water Marble - the transfer method

I have tried water marbling before, without success, as many, many nail polish enthusiasts have done. You watch the youtube videos, you read the blogs, and it looks so easy! They LIE! Not intentionally, of course. Every single blogger out there that I've read with a post on water marbling has filled it as full of hints, tips, and tricks that they can to help us poor normal schmucks out here, who don't have the time or the perseverance to try over and over and over again, how to learn from their mistakes.

What I'm going to do is show you what made the difference for me - not sticking my fingers in that mess of nail polish! :) One complaint I've heard over and over on the boards is that water marbling is such a waste - you make this big pretty swirl of polish, and it's only used for one finger. No more! I used the results of a single bowl of water marbling for an entire manicure!

First, a teaser of my pretties:


Second, a link to the blogger responsible (to my knowledge) for this breakthrough technique: More Nail Polish - "My take on dry water marbling" Do not ask me why she called it dry water marbling. To me, "dry" water marbling is what I did to create the pretty white/blue/silver swirls I did on my nails back in February (Marbled Waves post) using a technique I got from Robin Moses. The technique used in today's manicure, however, is more of a water marble transfer method, so unless someone else comes up with a better name to distinguish them, that's what I'm going to call it.

So how does the newly-titled "water marble transfer method" work? As MNP tells you (with pictures of the process, which I don't have, so check out her post...go ahead, I'll wait! ;) you start by making the prettiest swirls you can, cut a circle out of a thick plastic bag (regular zip bags are too flimsy, you need the freezer thickness for this), lay it on your marbling, and pick it back up. Let it dry, and voila, a water marble transfer! I notice now in looking over her post that she mentions a small detail that I left out that I will definitely remember next time I do this - leaving a "tab" on the plastic circle to pull it back out with! My first transfer was a bit of a MESS not having that! I managed with tweezers, but having a tab to hold onto would have made the whole process much easier.

Not knowing how well I'd succeed (or fail ;) at this transfer process, I set aside an evening to make water marble transfers around a week ago, rather than expecting to make pretties on my nails that evening. (Note to self: schedule time to re-do your nails afterwards anyway, even if it's a simple manicure, because you will get polish on them!) You want to see my results? ::rolling eyes:: And now you're saying, Ro, quit with the stupid questions and make with the pictures already! The rest of this post is picture-heavy, so here's the cut.