31 Day Challenge, Day 4 (Green Nails)

I'm kind of sticking with the abstract theme (until I can come up with better ideas, that is.)  Pretty basic today, just polka dots and stripes.  Still playing around with the set of nail art brushes I bought to figure out which ones work best for smaller details and such.

And here we go!

I started with 2 coats of Revlon Snow Bunny (LOVE this stuff!), then added stripes and dots with Sinful Colors Happy Ending, Nicole by OPI Nicole's Nickel, and Sinful Colors Innocent.  Topped it off with 2 coats of Sally Hansen Dries Instantly.

31 Day Challenge, Day 3 (Yellow Nails)

Finally caught up!  Day 3, here we go.

I've been wanting to try a sandwich mani for awhile, so this worked out pretty well.  Started out with 1 coat of OPI Need Sunglasses? and then added 1 coat of China Glaze Electrify.  Polished it off with another coat of Need Sunglasses? and here we are!  (See what I did there?  POLISHED it off?  I crack myself up.)

Hopefully I'll be getting a new lens for my camera soon so I'll have some better closeups.

31 Day Challenge, Day 2 (Orange Nails)

Catching up on the challenge - here's day 2!

I started with 2 coats of Sinful Colors Cloud 9 (odd name for an orange polish, no?), then stamped the design using Essie Blanc.  Not the best stamping job, but this was kind of a challenging stamp.  The gold accent is SpaRitual Conduit - love this color!

I'm pretty happy with this one....just wishing the stamp had come out better.  :/

I'm baaaaack!

My apologies to those of you who read my blog - I have been AWOL for far too long.  This means this will be a long post.....I must catch up!  Here we go:

The company I work for (RE/MAX Results) had a booth at the Minnesota State Fair this year.  I decided to go and help out a bit before I stuffed my face full of fried food.  :)  I figured this would be a nice occasion to try something a bit more....complex.  Best way I can think to describe it.  I wanted to try to recreate the RE/MAX Results logo.  This involved 5 different polishes and quite a bit of work.  First, I painted all of my nails with 2 coats of Essie Blanc.  Then I decided that I would need to mix my own light blue - I did this using Essie Blanc and Sinful Colors Aquamarine.  I used this to add a gradient to all my nails.  THEN I got out the reinforcer stickers (you know, the ones that look like donuts that you use to reinforce paper that has been 3-hole-punched?) and placed them on each nail, then painted the tips white to create the "swoosh."  Using a small brush (I just got a new set of nail art brushes and I LOVE them!) I added some Revlon Snow Bunny to the tips - this was the closest I could get to the grey-ish part of the swoosh.  Final touch: I used my small brush again to paint 2 Rs on my thumb.  One red for RE/MAX, one blue for Results.



I follow a few different nail blogs and I've been seeing a lot of them doing 31-day challenges.  I've decided to give it a shot as well - this will be especially difficult for me because I just moved in to a new apartment and most of my belongings are still in boxes, but hey.  I think I can make this work.  I found this particular one on Chalkboard Nails.



Since I don't have internet in my new place yet (thanks for that, CenturyLink....how long does it take to just switch my service over to the new place, which is only 4 blocks away?), I wasn't able to post on the first day of the challenge.  But I'm hoping that's okay.  Here are my red nails for day 1!

Not the greatest photo, I know...but it's the best I can do for now.  The effect on this is pretty subtle - I thought it would be a bit more obvious, but that's life for you.  Here you see 2 coats of OPI Mrs. O'Leary's BBQ, then some SpaRitual Epicurean on the tips.  I'm still playing around with gradients...I think I'm getting a little bit better at them. 

Stay tuned for day 2 - I should be posting my orange and yellow nails later on today.  :)

THE COLOR RUN 2012!

On Sunday, I ran in the happiest 5k on the planet - The Color Run!  This is a 5k for non-serious folks mostly; at each kilometer mark, you get splattered in colored powder.  :) Proceeds go to a different charity in each city, and proceeds for the Minnesota run went to the Open Your Heart foundation, which is pretty cool! 

So.  In the spirit of this race, I decided to try out a splatter mani.  :)  I started with 2 coats of Essie Blanc, then prepared my workspace.  Once my entire coffeetable was covered in grocery bags and I had my paper plate, drinking straws, and splattering colors of choice within arms reach, the fun began!!  The process for this mani is pretty simple: put a blob of polish on the paper plate, dip the straw in it (I turned the straw to the side a bit and kind of scooped some polish in to the straw to make it work), then blow a sharp blast of air through the straw, which is pointed at your finger.  Repeat with each of your splatter colors - I'm too lazy to grab the bottles and look at the exact color names, but I went with blue, pink, yellow, green, and purple.

To minimize the amount of cleanup you'll need to do, you can cover the skin around your fingers in scotch tape, but I did this on the first hand and decided it was too much work.  The splattered polish on my skin came off easily enough with a q-tip and some polish remover.

Bonus: me (and my friend Michelle) after the race!

Happy 4th of July!

I am both incredibly happy and incredibly disappointed with this manicure.  Strange, I know.

(Reminds me of "Mood Rings" by Relient K - "She said to me that it's so happy it's depressing / and all I said was 'Someone, get that girl a mood ring.'"  It doesn't take much for a random song to pop in to my head....then I always have to listen to it.  Starting up the Two Lefts Don't Make a Right....But Three Do album now......)

I spent a fair amount of time on this last night, but I was rather impatient when waiting for each layer to dry, which means I have nicks, I have bits of blue polish that peeled up with the tape, and I have flooded my cuticles with topcoat.  All around, not my best work.  I also ran out of regular Scotch tape partway through and started using clear packing tape.  NOT ideal - the packing tape was much more sticky and pulled up the blue and some of the silver when I peeled it off.

BUT.  I do love the concept and I love the color combination (Sinful Colors Aquamarine, Sally Hansen Insta-Dry Silver Sweep, and Sinful Colors Ruby Ruby.)  The somewhat transparent red over the silver has a pretty cool effect.

(This, of course, reminds me of another song...."Ruby" by the Kaiser Chiefs.  Hope I have that one on my Zune or it's going to drive me nuts all night.)

Hope you all have a safe and happy 4th of July!

Crooked stripes....

Unfortunately, this mani makes it very clear that I need some striping brushes. I do absolutely love the colors though. I don't have all of them in front of me, but I know that the base coat is Essie Licorice, the purple stripes are China Glaze Gothic Lolita, the yellow is a super awesome neon glow-in-the-dark polish from Forever 21 (a gift from my mom), and the blue is Sinful Colors Aquamarine.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!!!

I'm Switzerland!!!!

Quick post before I get ready for the day - I have the rest of the week off work because I have a visitor in town!!

When I was in high school, an exchange student from Switzerland lived at my house for a year.  She's in town for a little while so here's what I did this morning in her honor:

Today's plan is to rent some Nice Ride bikes and scope out the food trucks in downtown St. Paul.  I hear there's one devoted to bacon, so this should be good!!  Thankfully, there is a Twitter feed dedicated to just food trucks: @tcstreetfood.

On Saturday one of my best friends is getting married - so stay tuned for more, since I'll most likely change my mani for that.  :)

Have a great week everyone!  Enjoy the sunshine!!!

Rrrrrrrrruffles!!!!

Chalkboard Nails did a great tutorial for ruffle nails - so that's how I spent my night last night.  9 different nail polishes, 3 episodes of Scrubs, Sally Hansen Quick Dry Top Coat, and a few spritzes of OPI Rapid Dry Spray later......

My apologies for the less-than-stellar image quality....I took this with my cell phone this morning.  Wanted to get a halfway decent photo of this before it chipped.  I had originally planned on applying each row of dots in a random color order, but the boyfriend decided it would be best to put them in the proper order.  :)

Anyways - OPI Rapid Dry Spray is my new favorite product.  It's been sitting around with the rest of my nail polish and up until this point I've only really used it on my toes.  This stuff works wonders!  My nails were dry to the touch (no nicks!) in 15 minutes.

Have a good weekend everyone!!

Pretty blue boxes!

I walked in to Ulta one day with the intent to find some Tiffany blue polish.  The closest I could find was more green than it should be - so I turned to Amazon once again and ordered China Glaze's For Audrey.  It's perfect!!  I just love those pretty blue boxes.  :)

(My apologies - I'm still working on getting the lighting right in these pictures....)

Accent nail is Nicole by OPI's Rainbow In The S-Kylie.

Copycat (kind of)

I have a confession to make.  I couldn't help myself.  Nailside has inspired me once again...this time I'm looking a bit more like a copycat. Amazon is quite an amazing thing when it comes to purchasing nail polish that you can't really find in stores - hence my recent purchase of OPI's Mrs. O'Leary's BBQ and China Glaze's Jitterbug.

Mrs. O'Leary's BBQ was not what I was expecting - it looks almost pink/purple tinted in the bottle.  Once you get two coats on your nails though, it's pretty close to being the color of BBQ sauce.  Very, very nice dark color.

Add a little bit of Scotch tape and one coat of Jitterbug, and we get this!

Angles

This week's inspiration comes from Nailside.  I've really been wanting to use China Glaze's Smoke & Ashes (from The Hunger Games collection) but it's much much too dark for my taste, especially with my fair skin.  It is a gorgeous color: a very dark black/blue base with some green/blue glitter.  You have to get rather close to see the glitter.

The base coat is Essie's Turquoise & Caicos - I love the color, but I had to put on three coats for it to come close to opaque.  I left it at the base coat for about 6 hours to make sure it had dried completely, then taped off a diagonal portion on each nail with scotch tape, then painted the tips with Smoke & Ashes.

I also picked up some Lemony Flutter Cuticle Butter at Lush last weekend - makes a huge difference and is really cutting down on hangnails (no pun intended)!

Easy-peasy

I opted for something relatively simple for this past weekend.   The boyfriend and I went on a road trip up to Duluth for his college graduation.  :)

Stopped at Target on my way home from work on Friday and couldn't resist picking up some more nail polish!!  A friend of mine recently reminded me that Sinful Colors polish is only $2 per bottle - and they have some really fun colors!!!  The color on my index finger is called Happy Ending (strange name for a nail polish I thought, lol) and all the rest are Aquamarine.

A touch of organization

Found my inspiration for the day today on The Beauty Department.  I always end up with bobby pins and hair binders all over my bathroom counter - the madness had to stop!!!

Fortunately, I had some plastic shot glasses left over from my 21st birthday.  :]

Love it!!!

Stamping!

Essie Blanc stamped over OPI DS Extravagance (using the BM 203 plate.)  And I added a little gem on my thumbnails.

I'm still working on the stamping process.  It's more difficult than I expected!!!  The most challenging part is covering my entire thumbnail - the designs are never big enough.  So if anyone has any tips, feel free to share them.  :)


Enjoy!

Following the trend...

After a long day of driving (Saint Paul to Saint Cloud to Plymouth to Saint Paul) and teaching some technology classes, I decided to reward myself with a sandwich from Cossetta (YUM!) and a mindless activity for the night.....


I decided to try a microbead manicure - I'm seeing them all over Pinterest and they look unique to say the least.  And I'm all about looking unique.  :]

I don't think this will last more than a few days; quite a few beads have already fallen off.  But the process was simple/quick enough!

-Apply first coat of desired polish, let dry completely
-Apply second coat, then sprinkle with microbeads (I did this one finger at a time)
-Let dry completely - I find it's best to just not touch anything for 30-40 minutes to be extra sure.

I found a 6 pack of the microbeads at a craft store near the scrapbooking supplies for around $6.  I also just got a pack of Bundle Monster stamping plates in the mail today, so we'll see what kind of fun I can have with those.  :]

Day one!

Hey-o!  Let's start with some basics:

-I work in technical support [I've been using computers since I was about 4 years old.]
-Last October, I bought my very first brand new car.  A 2012 Chevy Sonic - love it!  :)
-Martha Stewart is kind of my hero.  Yep.  I'm that girl.
-I dream of owning a house - just renting for now!
-I've recently started reading a lot of nail blogs and getting more creative with my manicures.  It's a lot of fun!!


This will be a random mishmash of interests.  Mostly for me, but perhaps others will find it entertaining as well.  :)