Three Golden Stripes

Another one of the manicures I did just before the holiday break was this gorgeous glitter fest. It's so hard to get dark colors to show up color accurate on my camera, but this picture has the closest I could get, but only on the index finger! But isn't it just beautiful? I looove the rich and dark emerald green that I got by putting Windestine Rainforest on top of OPI Live and Let Die!

The base color underneath is two coats of China Glaze I Herd That. A coat of top coat across the glitter bomb, three pieces of striping tape on each nail, and one coat of Live and Let Die topped with one coat of Rainforest results in this subtle and elegant shimmer bomb.

I tried to get an out of focus picture to show off just how much this manicure was actually sparkling, but none of them came out quite as I wanted. This was the closest I got, though the thumbnail on the left picture above certainly shows off the multicolored sparkles of I Herd That along with the green/gold glitters of Rainforest.

Week 29: "Rock Star" Nails

Doing a google search on rock star nails leads to a lot of different manicures, but glitter bombs tend to be in the majority.

I started with a basic shimmery green that's new to my stash: Avon Nailwear Pro+ in Absinthe. Then I layered three different flakies over it - Nubar 2010, Sinful Colors Green Ocean, and Zoya Opal, in that order. For accent nails, on my ring finger and thumb, I used glitters instead of flakies: CND Gold Shimmer, follow by Windestine Rainforest and Sinful Colors Call You Later. Then I topped all the nails with a thin coat of Sinful Colors San Francisco.

A few days later, I added some taping with China Glaze Smoke and Ashes.

Vacation Nail Haul & Mani

I just got back this weekend from a week's vacation - my first actual, full vacation as an adult! (Yes, I'm almost 42 and I've never taken a vacation. I've had days off, lots of maternity leave, but no *vacation* where you take a full week off work and actually go somewhere as a family.) Well, my newly-adult daughter, Grace, is staying with us for a month this summer, between graduating high school and heading off to University this fall. So what better time? We spent three days visiting my dad and sister in KC, then headed down to Branson for a day and a half at Silver Dollar City, and then a day at the beach on Table Rock Lake. Despite the heat wave (thank goodness for water rides!) we managed to keep hydrated and thoroughly enjoy ourselves.

While we were at my Dad's place, one of my sisters decided to get rid of the last of her polish stash, so Grace and I split it between us. Here's my half of the haul! ::insert evil laugh here - Bwahahahaha!::

From left to right, that's Cover Girl Electric Blue, Sally Hansen Chrome in Gilded Pearl, Opal, and Black Pearl, then Avon Nailwear Pro+ (the glitters) and Nailwear Pro (the non-glitters) in Ruby Slippers, Lucky Penny, Absinthe, Vintage Blue, and Jade.

I also gathered Avon Mosaic Effects (otherwise known as crackle, duh!) in black and white, and two Avon Mirror Shines in Peace Ice and...well, the label says "Polish" but I don't know why they'd name a polish "Polish". WhatEVAR, moving on! Color Trend Refreshing Pear and some unnamed mini Lisa Frank Nail Magic. Is pretty, though!

And now I need to buy more swatching sticks, can you believe it? I think I have two or three left. Maaaaybe four. But I have 141 polishes on my shelf! (I bought 150 swatching sticks, and of course a few were cracked/broken.)

Last, but not least, lots of stickers/rhinestones/pretty things to stick on my nails!

I am sad to say that my right-hand middle finger was a casualty of war, though. It broke off at the quick while we were camping. Bad Ro for having nude nails for two days! If I'd taken the time to put a coat or two of basecoat on them, at least, it probably wouldn't have happened. But we had fun-filled days and we were TAHRED! (that's Texan for plumb worn out, by the way) when we got back to camp each night.

I did put on a basic manicure once it had broken, though, to ensure no more nails would go the way of my poor middle nubbin. I put on a couple coats of my wonderful Haken Nail Magic, then a couple of coats of my brand-new gifted polish, Avon Ruby Slipper, and then I added a gradient of Windestine Star Bright to the top half of my nails, and added a full accent nail of Star Light to my ring fingers.

At least I stayed with the patriotic theme for the week, yeah? ^_^ I mean, look, there's stars and bars right on my nails!

Would anyone like to share their tips or techniques for taking care of their nails while away on vacation? I'd love to hear them!

Week 24: Flag Manicure

This year's challenge theme for this week is flags, and, as a co-worker pointed out to me, today is Flag Day here in the U.S. (which I assume is what prompted the scheduling of this theme?) While I live in America and I'm proud of my country (its history at least, if not the current policies and directions) I decided not to do an American flag, simply because it's so typical. After all, I did red-white-and-blue for Memorial Day, and I fully expect I'll have the stars and stripes on my nails come July 4th. I decided I wanted to challenge myself a little more than that this week. And a challenge it was! I think in retrospect I should've done these flag designs on plastic and transferred them to my nails. The end result is cute enough, but I'm seriously disappointed in my skills at drawing flags, sideways and upside down, on my fingernails. I intended for all the flags to be upright when my hand was held in the typical picture pose, but I accidentally did one on my right hand upside down, and I just totally forgot which way my thumb would be angled when I was done, so that one's upside down, too...though I apparently neglected to take a picture of the left hand with the thumb showing. ^_^

So here's the explanation behind the flag choices: the middle and ring fingers on my left hand are my genetic history, and the ones on my right are my personal history. My thumb, of course, represents where I am now: that's the flag for the city of Fayetteville, Arkansas.

My mother used to call herself a European mongrel when asked her family history. My dad, however, can trace his family tree back to Wales pretty clearly (his sister was interested in genealogy for a while) and his grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee. So that's the Welsh flag on my middle finger and the Cherokee Nation flag on my ring finger.

The entire manicure started off with a base of two coats of Milani Whitest White, except for my left thumb, which started with Sally Hansen Cardinal. Then the Cherokee flag was done with Sally Girl Orange, dots of Neon Primark Neon Yellow, and little rings of Sinful Colors Exotic Green. I didn't even attempt to make tiny little stars, knowing how badly I'd mangle it, so I represented all the stars with dots, each topped with a piece of yellow glitter. The Welsh flag was also done with Exotic Green, and then my attempt at a dragon was drawn with Cardinal and some China Glaze Liquid Leather.

The Fayetteville flag was also done with Neon Yellow, followed by a circle of Whitest White, some stripes of Sally Hansen Blue Me Away! and then circles and the mountain done in China Glaze Frostbite.

My personal history can be portioned off into cities: I spent the first eighteen years of my life growing up in a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri (Go Independence, the real gateway to the West!) so that's the KC, MO flag on my middle finger. One year wandering around (two semesters at college, a few months living in a St. Louis suburb, a few months in Louisiana) before my new husband got a new job, and then the next eighteen years of my life were spent in the Dallas, Texas area. (I've lived in I'm not sure how many cities in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex, including Dallas itself twice.) So that's the Dallas flag on my ring finger, admittedly upside down compared to the KC flag. And then 5 years ago I moved here to Fayetteville, Arkansas. Growing up in KC led me to frequently comment that Dallas didn't have trees, it had landscaping. I missed trees desperately all those years. Being back in the Ozark mountains that I spent so much of my childhood summers in is amazing for my soul.

Both flags were done with Sally Hansen Cardinal and China Glaze Frostbite, with just a tiny bit of Liquid Leather for the fountains on the KC flag.

I thought with the number of flags in the world that use stars, that Windestine's Star Light (the pink on my left hand) and Star Bright (the blue on my right) were appropriate to use for the remaining fingers.

I hope you liked my attempt at a flag manicure and weren't too bored with the personal story that came along with it. Check out the list of challenge themes along with other bloggers who are playing along at Jennafroggy's blog, I'm Still Thinking.

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... ^_^

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!