tri-colored stamping, and another small haul!

For today's post, I tried stamping with different colors!  I saw a picture on fuckyeahnailart and thought about what I could do..


So maybe I should've used neons lol I like the way it turned out, even if it was slightly hard to tell exactly what was going on from far off:

Sorry, it's so hard to tell what this mani actually looked like from these photos!

I used Gelous as my base coat, Sally Hansen French White-2 coats, then using a floral all-over Cheeky plate, I alternated the combo of China Glaze For Audrey, Secret Periwinkle, and Sweet Hook.  I mattified it with Hard Candy's matte top coat, and called it a freakin' day =]


I must say my stamping skills are coming along! For this one I did not scrape off enough Secret Periwinkle before I stamped my thumb, and did not have enough polish on the stamper for my ring finger at the tip.  I like this design =]


And now, because I absolutely can't be on any sort of no-buy..
Another Sally's and wal mart haul!  Oh payday..

First up:Sally's.  I actually almost got two Hunger Games polishes because they're $1 off right now, but my mission was for more glitter.  Mission: accomplished.  For now..


I picked up China Glaze Fairy Dust, I'd been eyeing this baby for a bit, and heard many great things, like that it turns any mani into magic. We'll see =]


Also, CG Liquid Crystal from the Prismatic collection.  This is the only one that I have from it, and I really like it.  The color shifts from a light blue to a light purple with lots of different colored glitter and shimmers.  Very pretty =]

I got two Sally Girls, a gold and a pink glitter.  I like these, and I think that someday my Sally Girls will come in handy should I choose to start franken-ing =]


I also bought a huge thing of acetone, which was like three bucks I think with my Sally's card, and another nail file!


Wal-mart:

Sally Hansen Double Duty base and top coat.  My nails are getting longer, I need some more protection!  Revlon Blue Lagoon, Maybelline Color Show Tenacious Teal and Porcelain Pretty.


All together now:

All of these are two coats.


Whew. Okay I gotta stop now!  Next month, I plan on beginning the indie section of my stash!


What's your favorite indie polish brand?

My favorite bag from high school!

This mani was done on a whim, after I took a stroll down Kroger's cosmetics section and decided (on a whim) I NEEDED three Sally Hansen polishes.  Some no-buy, huh?  Here's one of them, Twisted Pink. stamped with Pure Ice Black Rage on thumbs and indexes in an awesome houndstooth print from my Cheeky plates, then mattified with Hard Candy's matte top coat.

The only thing about Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear polishes from my experience is that they can be on the thick side, and this one wasn't good at leveling itself out..I don't hate 'em though, I can make it work =]

What inspired me to do this was I once had a purse that I had bought at Wal Mart that was basically this shade pink with black houndstooth all over.  I loved that bag=]  Now, I have no idea where it is..  

Thank you, I'll Have Another

..But I was really rooting for Hansen (for obvious reasons)

In case you didn't know, or care (I pretty much didn't) yesterday was cinco de mayo!

..and that's not what I'm about to talk about.  Yesterday was the 138th Kentucky Derby. woo.  So it's sort of something that you can't go anywhere or do anything on said day without knowing that IT'S THE KENTUCKY DERBY!  But I never watch, any time I put money on the horse whose name I like the best, I lose, so I pretty much just don't care about that day.  And I had to work tonight, so it's not like I could celebrate Cinco De Mayo (I never have, that I can recall...but it sounds like margaritas are in order for the occasion)

But do I need much of a reason to do my nails?  No, ma'am.  I'm sorry, you probably don't like to be called ma'am, I know that I don't..

So when my thumbs were chipping like lead paint from the 60's yesterday morning, I knew as soon as I got home I would need to set my Pandora to MGMT and keep in mind the day's celebrator-iness.  Something that involved flowers, drinks, the color blue, and some sweet stampage.

This is two coats of Gelous, my lovely Gelous which has less than half of the bottle left and starting to get thick :(  Anyway, then two coats of China Glaze Tree hugger, and a coat of Seche Vite to speed things up. I was tired!

Then I used a few different floral designs mixed together and stamped my thumb, index, middle and pinky with Pure Ice Flirt Alert, and another design that signified drinks and celebration in Pure Ice French Kiss.  I topped it all off with NYC's matte top coat.  Lovely!

Did you guys do anything yesterday?

Aqua Zebra!

I will never regret the day I bought my stamper =]

So, my Cheeky plates had a few different animal print designs, and I feel like a lot of people do those, so while it might be a little overdone, the still young and fun girl inside of me (way down in there, stifled by work and sleep and soon school! I feel old..) just could not wait to get some zebra tips.

I started out with Gelous as my base coat, then for my thumb and ring fingers I layered two coats of a super pretty no-name aqua color that I bought at Maurices a few months ago.  Application is really good for this one, opaque in two coats, and it dries semi-matte.  I have another polish that I bought at the same time from Maurices and they are my only colors that dry semi-matte..I'm iffy about that type of finish.  Are you trying to be matte because you know how cool it looks?  Why are you still satin-y and almost shiny?  PICK ONE!! Eh..

For my index, middle and pinky I used Kleancolor Neon Aqua.  I do love this blue!  Again, the application is really great with these polishes I have found, and I'm almost 100% positive this is opaque in two coats.  I keep feeling like these neons from Kleancolor are going to show my nail line, but this one did not.  Anyway, perfect color combo in my eyes =]

Sorry about the mess! I was excited because it actually went really well, unlike my first attempt at stamping which I am sure I will eventually post lol  I used Pure Ice Black Rage and one of the zebra print designs from my Cheeky plates.

So You can't tell from the picture of my left hand before I cleaned up, and I didn't post of my right beforehand, but I did miss a couple of spots.  On my left hand it wasn't a big deal, I remembered that with my bottle of Seche Vite came a little strip with some tiny rhinestones that look like diamonds along with about 25 little pink breast cancer awareness ribbons.  I think some of the money went toward that cause, and that's why I bought it.  I mean I was going to get the bottle anyway but I only had to pay maybe a dollar more for this one.  Anyway, so I fixed my left hand, and then finished my thumb with Seche Vite (I didn't have nail glue, so this was the only way I could think of to get the rhinestone to stay) and the rest of my fingers I finished off with Hard Candy's matte polish (I think it's called Matte-ly in love?)

For my right hand, there were a couple of extra problems that I fixed the same way.  As you can see, my thumb has a missing part of the zebra design on the right side.  I knew that my stamper hadn't picked up all of the design (my fault, not Konad's lol) and I thought I could make that work for me.  BAM! Two rhinestones.  Then on my ring finger the same thing happened in the left corner, so I fixed it the same way.  Sorry for my middle finger being in the way lol I finished my thumb and ring finger in Seche Vite, and the others in Hard Candy's matte.

Also, my pinky was just beyond repair and I did not feel like taking it all off and putting it all back on again.  I felt accomplished, nothing was gonna bring me down!

You can probably tell that I did not wait for my stamping to dry before putting my top coats on.  If you're a beginner like I am, please please please please wait for your stamping to dry for a bit lol  You won't regret it!  You might however if you have to look down at your nails and see veiny streaks all over.  I do a little teeny bit, but I know that I'm just going to get better at this, and I think I did pretty well for my first zebra stamping attempt.  I still only know of my Pure Ice Black Rage as being my go-to polish for stamping, but I don't see why Pure Ice's other cremes wouldn't work as well.  I will find out though=]



China Glaze Stone Cold & Secret Periwinkle

I would like to start this post off by saying my inspiration for this mani came from Nailside's blog, a super awesome blog that I love to follow!  I follow a lot of nail blogs, and I do love them all.  Nailside's manis just always seem to speak to me though, they're always saying things like "You know you want to try to recreate this somehow, someway!!"  And I reply back with "Yeah, but I really need to invest in some actual scotch tape instead of just regular stupid tape that lets polish seep through around the edges of my fingers and throws the whole thing off.." you get it..

anyway, she usually has some easy to follow tutorials for her tape manis and whatnot, and I think this one is the mummy one.  The only difference that I can think of is I'm not sure (because I'm too lazy to check right now) if she leaves her tips out when doing these manis or if she angles the tape still on the tips of her nails.  Either way, I tried to get my tips as straight as I could.  This is two (maybe three?) coats of CG Secret Periwinkle.  Not that two coats wasn't dandy, but I think this was the day I was like "I'm gonna do THREE!!" I'm just a maniac..

horribly indoors:

Then I decided to do the mummy tape mani which can be found here,

And I honestly think it would've been better if my nails were a bit longer.  Oh well! Then I did a layer of CG Stone Cold (another great one from the Hunger Games collection) and then I think I did a layer of Gelous on top.

Refrigerated:

Now, I've gone all out of order.  This mani was done before my first post of Magic Wok nails, which was done before my For Audrey Simple nails.  The pictures are obviously horrible compared to the other post's pictures, and I doubt those can be much better so...sorry about that!  I'll definitely be uploading some newer pictures tomorrow.

I worked with my dotting tools for the first time today!  I had to redo my nails though.  I took pictures first, but I realized after I had gone off to bed and woke back up in the middle of the day that my colors (Sally Hansen's Hard as Nails French White, Kleancolor Neon Aqua, a red from Finger Paints but I can't actually remember the name right now and finding it online would be a headache) were totally the same colors of a work friend's mani that she had showed me the day before and though I was using a white base with blue and red dots and hearts and hers was totally different, I refused to suffer the embarrassment of copying a friend's mani.  I always have better nail ideas when I'm falling asleep or waking up.  I really need a notebook by my bed because I always think of something really cool but I don't really remember it much when I wake back up..

Have a great day =]