Happy Birthday Flowers!!

My birthday was back in July, and I absolutely adored the birthday card that my co-workers gave me. So much so that I did a manicure based on it that very weekend!

Isn't that pretty?! So many colors went into this manicure: the base white was Sinful Shine Wisp, but the rest of the polishes are in no particular order: Sinful Colors Happy Ending, Sinful Shine Bananappeal, Avon Absinthe, Orly What's the Password, Above the Curve Wisteria, and I used both Girly Bits Street Magic and a little bitty Bon Bons clear glitter polish (no name on the bottle) to mimic the sparkle-shine on the card. Here's a blurry pic to show off that glitter:

And here's the rest of the nails!

Magically Delicious

I have no words for this one. I had no plan for it at all. I just felt like green and didn't feel like working too hard on the nail art. The base color is Wet N Wild Stand the Test of Lime, followed by a layer or two of Girly Bits Magically Delicious.

I used OPI Live and Let Die and Suzi Loves Cowboys for the design details, and I was done!

Cupcake Mania!

My 9-year-old wanted her nails done the other night, so knowing some of her favorite things, I showed her a nail art I'd pinned recently that was just up her alley - cupcakes! Bedizzle was swatching some glitter indie polishes and had a pink one that made her think of sweet things, so she drew cupcakes on top of it so that the glitter looked like the frosting on the cupcakes. B loved it, so we did our best to do the same. Admittedly, I had much smaller canvases to work with!

I apologize for the quality of the pictures - it was excessively humid and I had to wipe off the camera lens after every shot, but as it was fogging up in a matter of seconds, very few of the pictures came out without some level of fog to them.

We started with a base of Pure Ice Home Run, and added a nice layer of Girly Bits Hippity Hop to the top of it. I have no idea which polishes were used in the creation of the cupcakes (other than the black was China Glaze Liquid Leather) as B just gathered a handful of polishes and said, "Use these!" On a whim, I put ice cream cones on the pinkies rather than cupcakes, but B liked them.

And here's our inspiration!

Green Flakes and Black Swirls

This is quite an old manicure, but I couldn't find the pictures for it for the longest time, and then once I got them edited and uploaded, I still had this draft post with only pictures and polish listing needing words for longer still. But at last, you get to see the pretty that was this manicure!

It was inspired by a manicure by The Nailasaurus, which was in turn inspired by a dress design that "didn't quite make it" to their Spring Season collection. I am still in awe of nail artists who manage to get tiny fine lines, crisp even, out of nail polish. It's something I aspire to, and I get hints that I might someday master the technique by the occasional sharp line I produce...but mostly I still have fat blobby things compared to the nail artists I admire the most. :)

On to what you came here for - the nail art pictures!

Underwear was Sinful Colors Mint Apple, topped with first a coat of Girly Bits Street Magic and then Sinful Colors Green Ocean. It made a beautiful sparkle-filled sight all on its own, but then I topped it with Sinful Colors Black Diamond. I don't consider it one of my best, ooh-inspiring manis, but it was a pretty darned nice one, in my opinion! There's not much to say about the technique or anything, so pic spam follows the cut.

52-week challenge 3/11: violet

The next belatedly-posted weely challenge theme was the week of 3/11, with the theme of violet. I considered picking a purple nail polish, but I decided instead I'd rather do actual violet-type-flowers on my nails. Before I could tell them the theme, several co-workers who saw this manicure identified them as "either violets or pansies...but I think violets," so I must have gotten them close enough!!

The underwear is three coats of Sinful Colors Innocent, topped with one coat of Girly Bits Street Magic. I do love that polish, though it's extremely understated when worn on green. It really excels on black or dark brown, I have to say. I then dotted the violets with a base of Sally Hansen Blue Me Away topped with NYC Purple Pizzaz, to give them that nice indigo shade. Milani Whitest White for the center dot and lines, topped with just a dot of my brand-new Sinful Colors Unicorn for the center yellow of the flowers.

Aren't they pretty? What's your favorite spring flower?

Belated St. Patrick's Day Post

As in keeping with my habits of late, I've been doing my nails, taking pictures, but not writing the blog posts to go with them. I'm only a day late on this one, at least! I've also got a bonus mani for you done by my 9-year-old daughter on her own nails, and a picture of our homemade "Shamrock Shakes" that we had in celebration of the day (as well as a link to where we got the recipe, of course!)

First, my nails:

Let's see if I remember everything I used to make these pretties... I started off with a base of China Glaze Re-Fresh Mint. I then used Sinful Colors San Franciso for the next layer, and then used the saran wrap method to make it marbled. The next addition was one coat of Girly Bits Magically Delicious on the entire thumb and swooshed in a curve across one half of the rest of the nails. Sinful Colors All About You  and a nail art brush produced a few accent curls, a shamrock on the ring finger and a four-leaf clover on my thumb. The clovers are a little subtle in the gold (and upside-down on my ring finger in this picture!) but they're very pretty in real life without just jumping out at you.

My 9-year-old B did these nails all by herself, from base coat to nail art. I did a bit of clean-up for her afterward, and did the topcoat for her as she was worried about smearing her beautiful shamrocks. The green splotches you can see here on various places of her fingers are actually green food coloring, not nail polish! She used a base of Sinful Colors Mint Apple and Nubar Greener for her shamrocks. I offered to show her an easy way to make shamrocks with a dotting tool, but she said that she could do them with just the nail polish brush...and proceeded to prove it!

 I think she did a great job, honestly. These are adorable! And here is the source of her green-splotched fingers:

We made shamrock shakes - I measured out the ice cream and milk, and she measured out and added the peppermint and green food coloring to the mixer! Our inspiration and the source of the recipe was:

Enjoy! Hope you had as good of a St. Patrick's Day as we did!

O Tannenbaum

My friend V had a holiday party for work this past week, and she wanted some appropriately festive nails to go with the celebration. She spent some time googling images for Christmas nail art, and she decided on a Christmas tree made with the tape method.

We started with a base of China Glaze Adventure Red-Y in the standard two coats. One coat is more than sufficient for opacity, but the second allows for a more even color and gets rid of any ornery brush lines, I find. She wanted sparkly red accent nails, so we added a nice layer of China Glaze Ruby Pumps over her thumbnails, and then topped them with Cherimoya Vernis Love Potion #Mine.

Using standard scotch tape to make the tree shape, we added small strips of striping tape across the tree area, and then we painted the trees with Nubar Greener and topped it with Girly Bits Magically Delicious for that added extra sparkle of a Christmas tree. We used Sally Hansen Celeb City and a dotting tool to add ornaments to the tree and a star-shaped glitter for the tree topper.

I included an out-of-focus picture to show just how beautifully sparkly this manicure came out!

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!

"Inspired By" + a bonus mani

Kitties26 from More Nail Polish is having a giveaway/contest in celebration of her 2-year Blogiversary. But she didn't want to just give away stuff, she wanted us to put forth some effort to enter. So she wanted to see nail art where we were inspired by something. Not only that, but there are three prizes on offer. First prize will be awarded to the winning nail art as judged by a "panel of judges" - basically her husband, mom, and various family members. :) Winners for prizes two and three will be chosen randomly, one from Australian entries (where she lives), and one from international entries. Each winner gets THREE bottles of Lynderella nail polish! WOW! First prize is She Lived in a Swamp, Happy HoloDaze, and Gotta Love Brains. The randomly-chosen Australian winner will receive Thank Blue, All Hallow’s Eve, and Cauldron Drippings, and the international winner will find Mercury’s Rainbow, Bibbitty Bobbity Boo Blue, and One Nutty Fruitcake in their mail! Entries must be received by 11:59 pm on Sunday, March 11. (ANY 11:59 anywhere in the world. :) Click here to go to the giveaway post.

First, here's the picture I used as my inspiration:

This gorgeous photograph is copyright by Edward Thomas. If you click on the picture, it will take you to his website to see more of his amazing work. In the meantime, here's my approximation of this beautiful scene:

I have a tree on both thumbs, but the one on my right hand is necessarily not as pretty as this one, since I'm right-handed. :) I started with a base of one coat of Cinderella to give a nice sky background if any showed through the sponged "leaves", and added a sheer pearl and another sheer sparkle blue. Then I sponged on four different greens on the bottom half of my nails, and then two yellows and two oranges on the top half. Finally, I sponged just a touch of brown in the green areas, then used two different browns to draw the tree with a detail brush and a verrrry thin dotting tool. I actually used the spun sugar technique for the thinnest branches! Here are all the polishes that went into this!

Well, my subject line mentioned a bonus manicure. You may remember that I showed you a manicure I did for my friend Vicki back on February 29. Believe it or not, until today she'd only experienced minor tip wear! So she called me this morning and asked if she could come by and get her nails did. ^_^ I apologize for taking the pictures before we did the clean-up, but here's what ended up on her nails today.

All the nails have a base of one coat of Sinful Colors Exotic Green with one coat of Girly Bits Street Magic over it. The french tips are two coats of Sinful Colors All About You. The thumb has one coat of All About You topped with one coat of Essie Shine of the Times, so it has some gorgeous color changing at different angles. I was amazed at how different Street Magic looks over a light green than it does over black! It was full-out emerald over black. Here it just added a subtle green shimmer, which was gorgeous and perfect for this manicure, but verrrrrry different!

I need to get a table that's suitable for doing nail art on. Currently I do my own manicures sitting at this computer desk. ::grin:: Yes, that means I have my polish bottles cluttered up on one side, my keyboard pushed back toward my monitor, and just all around tiny space. Mind, it's my most comfortable space, but still. Not exactly designed for the purpose I'm putting it to. It's only exacerbated when trying to do Vicki's nails, because we use a corner of the dining room table, which doesn't work well. So I started looking up narrow tables that might be useful for doing a manicure on, at a not-too-expensive price! I think I'm going to ask on my Facebook group what everybody else uses. How about you?