Christmas Lights

For my second Winter mani of the season, I leaned a bit more towards a Christmas design instead of just a basic Winter theme.  I've been wanting to try out the Christmas light bulb design on the 2012 Bundle Monster plates since I first bought the set, so I figured now was as good a time as any to give it a shot.

I started out with a couple coats of Orly Au Champagne, then went over that with one coat of Sonnetarium Snowfall.  I picked out 4 colors from my Konad Special Polishes to use for the bulbs: orange, blue, yellow and red.  The bulb design can be found on plate BM-318.  For each bulb, I stamped using one of the 4 colors and some Konad Special Polish in green for the little light socket part of the design.  Then I used the same green Konad polish to freehand some wires connecting all the bulbs.

The only issue I had with this design was that the yellow bulbs were a lot harder to see in real life than they are in the pictures.  You had to get really close to see the detail in the yellow bulbs but the other colors really popped well on the white background.  Snowfall over Au Champagne was gorgeous all by itself.  I didn't take any shots of it without the stamping (D'oh!), but it was so pretty that I think I might have to use this combination again at some point this Winter for another manicure.  And I should have a new post up later this week of the design I have on right now, that I did to wear to my office Christmas Party last night.  It reminds me of Christmas tree wrapping paper.

December Snowflakes on Plaid

When December rolled around, I wanted to do something winter themed but without diving right into all the Christmas designs just yet.  We haven't had any major snowstorms so far this winter but the weekend I painted this design we did have a few small flurries, so I guess I had snowflakes on the brain.  I decided to stamp some snowflakes over a plaid design.  (Yes, more plaid from me.  I love plaid.  Be warned...'cause there's more coming.)  The chilly weather makes me think of wrapping up in a warm flannel blanket.

It turned out even better than I had pictured it in my head.  I didn't want to take this off at the end of the week.  I started with three coats of China Glaze Recycle.  Then I stamped the plaid design from Konad plate m60 with Konad Special Polish in red, then the same plaid design again using Konad Special Polish in black.  The snowflakes are both Bundle Monster designs.  The spiky looking snowflake is from plate BM14 and the more lace-like snowflake is from plate BM-319.  I just alternated their placement on each nail and stamped them with Konad Special Polish in white, then used a dotting tool and the same white polish to add some dots to fill in the empty space.

I loved the end result.  Loved it hard.  This might be my favorite manicure of 2012 actually.  I can see myself repeating this at some point this winter, with a different plaid under the flakes or maybe even with the exact same colors.  I loved the look of the grey plaid so much.

Don't Call It a Comeback.

Although I guess you could call it that, it has been three months since I last posted.  Three months exactly actually, which I didn't realize until just right now.  I last posted on September 9th and it is now December 9th.  That doesn't mean that I stopped painting my nails, it just means that I kind of put off posting about them.  I couldn't tell you what the reasons were 'cause I honestly don't know.  I just didn't have the urge to put together any blog posts for a while, didn't even really bother checking in on all the blogs I usually follow.  I think I started to reevaluate the whole nail obsession in the past few months.  I had sort of gotten away from what I liked the most, which was painting my nails and doing designs, and instead got caught up in everyone talking about all the new colors and collections and trying to buy every new, cool thing I saw.  Which left me with a ton of polishes I haven't even used yet and some credit card bills I wasn't too happy about.  So I want to go back to what got me excited about polish in the first place...nail art and basically using what I already own.  I don't need to have every single new polish that comes out.  Not to say I won't buy one or two if something irresistible comes along, but honestly, it's been almost as long as I last posted since I bought a new bottle of polish.  And that doesn't bother me at all!

As I mentioned, I've still been doing my nails this whole time and I have still been taking pictures, so I'm going to try to do a couple posts over the next week or so just to run through what I've had on my nails the past three months.  They will be mixed in with some of the more recent designs because I have a few Christmas type posts that I want to get up this month.  So some stuff will be a little out of order, but really does anyone care?!

So after I wore Cult Nails Deal With It, I tried out two others from the Coco's Untamed collection, Annalicious and Spontaneous.  First up was Annalicious, which I used as a base for a bandanna inspired stamp design.

Like a lot of my stamp designs, I like to test them out on a nail wheel first and when I tested this, the white didn't quite pop out on the red like it does on a real bandanna.  So I stamped the design, from Konad plate m60, with Konad Special Polish in black first then re-stamped with Special Polish in white.  The black shadow made the white pop out a lot more against the background red.

I absolutely loved this and plan to do it with a lot of other colors as a base.  After Annalicious, I tried out Spontaneous.  I also used it as a base for a stamping design, this time I used Bundle Monster plate BM-306 from the most recent 2012 set.  I stamped with Konad Special Polish in pastel violet.

I loved the final look, although my stamping on this one came out a bit blurry.  I'm definitely a Cult Nails fan though.  Easy application, great colors and great wear time on these polishes.  

I've got about eight more designs that I did over the past three months, not counting the two I've done so far in December that are more winter/holiday themed, so I'll probably try grouping two or three together in posts later in the week, like I did with this one.  And I apologize if anyone read the blog post title and now has "Mama Said Knock You Out" stuck in their head, but you know what they say, ladies love Cool James.

Cult Nails Deal With It

I've been wanting to get a number of polishes from Cult Nails, specifically from Coco's Untamed Collection. So a while back when Cult Nails had their big $7 sale, I ended up buying all 5 colors from the Untamed Collection.  Once they were delivered, I just had to choose which one to wear first!  My favorite color is green, so my instinct was to start with Deal With It.  I was going back and forth on it though so I asked for a few opinions in a Facebook group I belong to and Deal With It ended up being the winner!

I loved this color.  This is one of my favorite types of greens and that golden shimmer mixed in was just insane to look at.  It was even more intense in person.  I almost didn't want to cover it up.  I wore it plain for a day or two just because I could!

Then I finally decided on Konad plate m84 and Konad Special Polish in black to add a simple star pattern.

I ended up wearing a few different Cult Nails colors in a row, so you'll be seeing more of them shortly!

Guest Post at Polished Prisms!

Hey everyone!  Today, I have a guest post up at Polished Prisms for Hannah's Glitterific series!  It's my first guest post and I was so excited to contribute to this series.  Check out the guest post here.  It's all about some awesome glitters from The Hungry Asian!  And if you don't already read Hannah's blog on a regular basis, make sure to subscribe.  She's got some great posts, I know you'll all enjoy her blog!

Spring ASBMF Challenge #12: May Flowers!

Um, ya...wow, remember this challenge?  You know the one that started in April...that I still didn't finish.

...awkward silence...

Trust me, I had no intention of putting the next challenge post off for this long.  I believe my last challenge post was in June, which wasn't so bad for only having three parts left to do.  But considering that it is now mid-August...well, smooth move exlax!  I think it was just one of those things where, each time I went to paint my nails, I thought of the challenge but wasn't really sure what I wanted to do and just decided, "oh what's one more week?" instead.  Well Sarah, do a little math here...what is "what's one more week?" times 6 weeks?  Answer: way too friggin' long to be procrastinating on finishing this challenge!!!  You may be asking, why even bother?  Well...I don't know.  Even though I feel like a bit of a jackass for putting these last three parts off for so long, there is another part of me that doesn't want to just quit so close to the end and then pretend like it never happened.  So instead, here I am in mid-August with a post on...May flowers...lol.

This is two coats of Styled Out, from the Maybelline Color Show line, stamped with Konad plate m64 using Konad Special Polish in pastel blue.  Styled Out is part of the Denims set of polishes from Maybelline's Color Show line.  This is really the only Color Show polish I was interested in getting when I saw the swatches.  I might even grab a back up bottle since the bottles are only 7ml and this color is stinkin' gorgeous!  My favorite color may be green, but when it comes to polish, I can't resist a sparkly dark blue.  I used two coats but it was near perfection with just one coat.  I'm just crazy and felt like I needed to have a second coat because of some spots that seemed patchy to me, which in reality were probably fine.

The pattern is not your typical flower pattern, but I really like it and have used it a few times before this.  It has sort of a country/farm house feel to it.  Sort of reminds me of a pattern you might find on an old bandana, other than the typical paisley designs you normally see.  I also love the blue on blue look.  I don't stamp enough using something in the same color family as my base color and I really need to do it more often.  I'm getting in the habit lately of over analyzing what to paint on my nails instead of remembering that sometimes the simplest designs can yield the most amazing results.  "Keep it simple, Stupid!"  I have to remind myself of that every so often.

If you hadn't noticed, I decided to set up a custom domain so my blog address is now officially Allthispolish.com, and I'm also experimenting a bit with an updated watermark to match.  I actually bought the domain a couple weeks ago, but thanks to a bit of over zealousness on my part, I managed to screw it up.  It wasn't working and I didn't realize at first that I had done something to directly cause that, so I ended up waiting about a week and a half before trying to investigate what the issue was.  Then, with a little help from a friend at work, I got it fixed.  Here's a hint to anyone who is thinking of buying your custom domain through Blogger...when you get your Google domain registration confirmation email, DON'T activate Google Sites when you click the link to create your administrative account.  In fact, don't even click the links in the email at all, unless you're thinking of using Google Apps to set up a custom email address.  The domain will redirect to the blog on its own within a day or two.  But activating Sites will cause Blogger to think some other blog is already using that domain and it won't redirect automatically.  All you would need to do then is deactivate Sites and add the domain manually to your Blogger settings, but Blogger and Google Apps don't always want to cooperate so it may not get corrected on the first attempt.  Ok, end of rant, hee hee.  It's all good now so who cares!  Now to see if I can get the last two parts of this challenge posted before, oh let's say Christmas, lol.

Spun Sugar Sparkle

Today I have my second run at the spun sugar manicure.  This one actually looked much nicer in person than in the pictures.  I didn't really like it as much as the first one I did.  I'm not sure why but I think it's because I liked the final look more when I used creams than with the sparkle/glass fleck polishes I used here.  I still liked it a lot, but it didn't have quite the same spun sugar look to it as my first.

I had recently received the mother load of a swap from Jen from The Polished Zombie.  Seriously, it rocked my socks off.  Which was convenient since she also sent me a pair of socks...monkey socks!

Cell phone pic...I was too excited to get my camera out and set up for a nicer shot.

I was anxious to try out the polishes from the Color Club Take Wing collection she sent me, I've been wanting them for a while now.  I started with two coats of Color Club Fly With Me.  I wanted to use more than two colors for the spun sugar part so besides the other two Color Club polishes, Daisy Does It (yellow-hard to see, but it's there, trust me) and Sparkle and Soar (orange), I also used two Zoya's...Charla (blue/green) and Kym (red).

The sparkle/glass fleck polishes gave me a bit of a hard time trying to get consistent polish strings.  You can see where a string of Charla sort of broke half way across my middle finger when I was applying it.  It took a while for the polish to thicken up, and then when they finally did get thick enough to create strings, it suddenly would become too thick super fast.  I can't say for sure if that means that creams work best for this technique, or if there were other factors involved like humidity that could have affected it, but it seemed like I had a much easier time when I used cream polishes for this.

In the end, I was feeling about 50/50 on this manicure.  The Color Club polishes are gorgeous though!  I think next time I'll use one of them as a base for a stamping instead.