July 4th - Stars and Stripes!

Happy 4th of July!  I had some more elaborate plans in my head, combining stamping and striping and gradients and um, ya...just a mishmash of everything really.  But I usually like to try to pull off more complicated nail art on the weekends, since I have more time in case I screw something up (which is pretty much bound to happen at least once if not on several attempts).  I didn't get a chance to do my July 4th manicure until Tuesday though, so I decided to keep it simple this year and stick with just stamping.  And I'm glad I did because I think it turned out to be my favorite July 4th manicure ever.

I started out with 3 coats of China Glaze White On White.  The stamp designs are both from
Winstonia plate W107.  I stamped using Konad Special Polishes in blue and in red, then top coated with Seche Vite.  I stamped the blue stars design on my thumb as well, but earlier in the week I somehow managed to snap off the entire free edge of the nail...whomp, whomp.  The nail is so short that my thumb now basically bares a striking resemblance to my big toe.  So ya...I'll spare you from having to see that!

Happy Independence Day!  Have a safe July 4th!!!

Over The Rainbow

Remember a few months ago, I mentioned that I had a bunch of manicure pictures to post that I had taken when I was on sort of a blogging hiatus?  Ya, well I still have them and these aren't them, lol.  But this is another manicure that I ended up skipping over because of everything going on with the blogiversary, giveaway and my Valentine manicures.  I'll get to the other pictures eventually, but I couldn't let these pictures sit on my hard drive any longer.  This is another beauty from Amy's Nail Boutique, it's called Over The Rainbow.

How awesome is that?!  Over The Rainbow is a white base with rainbow colored hex glitters, black and blue star glitters and red micro-glitter.  I think the red micro-glitter was the perfect touch by Amy to pull everything together in the creamy white base.  

I discovered that Over The Rainbow definitely would have been opaque on its own with probably just two coats.  But I did start out with a base of Wet N Wild French White Creme just in case, since this was the first time I had worn Over The Rainbow.  It applied so smoothly for me.  With the first coat, a small amount of glitter spread out on each nail and with the second coat, the glitter distributed and built up perfectly.  I didn't have any major issues with the star glitters either.  A couple times actually, I had a few too many stars and had to use an extra brush stroke or two to spread them apart from each other or to wipe a couple extra stars off the nail.

I can't wait to wear this polish again.  There's a lot of white based glitter polishes out there these days, but this is easily my favorite of them all.