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!

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!!!

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.

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.  :]