NOTD Before & After: a-England Tristam

Hello everyone!

So today's challenge in PFC was to do a manicure using straws. I wasn't sure what that meant, but since the previous challenge was the splatter mani where you blow through the straw, I figured it wasn't supposed to mean that.

So I improvised.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, I stared with a base of A-England's Tristam, which I wore for a day. Tristam is one of the a-England scattered holos that are quickly winning me over to the scattered holo team. I use to *far* prefer linear holos to scattered holos, until I got Dragon. Then when a-England had their sale, I decided to see if it was a one-time thing, so I got Tristam. This is a dark blue scattered holo that has also quickly won my heart:

a-England Tristam in the shade

a-England Tristam in the sun

I'm on a Color Club holos kick, so I decided to use Worth The Risque to play around with. I took a straw and cut two bits off. One bit I left in a chunk that you could use as a mini-straw, and the other I cut in half by splitting it down lengthwise, so I was left with two things that looked a bit like gutters (two long U-shaped half tubes). I took one of the gutters and turned it so the two edges of the U were downwards, and dipped it into the polish (which I had placed on a piece of plastic). Then I laid the U down over my nail so that the curve of the U roughly mapped on to the curve of my nail (if that makes sense) and squooshed it down onto the nail. This caused the polish on the edges of the straw to squoosh inwards in swirly shapes. Then I took the mini-straw, dipped one end in polish, and touched it to my nails; where there was no polish already, this left silver cirlcles, and where there was already some polish, it etched a circle design in it.

It made an interesting background, but was not cute on its own. So, of course I stamped over it! I used Color Club's Wild At Heart and Konad stamping plate m63 to stamp some purple swirls over it.

Here's what I ended up with:

Smooshy squooshy girly swirly

If you look closely you can see the smooshes and the circles, lol

Better perspective on how it looks

Oh yes, gotta love that holo!

 I'm on the fence about it. I like it as a method of putting down a swooshy background, but I don't think I'd do the cirlcles again. I also only liked it with something stamped on top of it. So I think I would use the technique again, but with a small change. I also love these colors together; Tristam and Wild At Heart look so pretty together, but never would have shown up on each other without the silver holo in between. So I'm going to remember that color combination in the future, as well.

I hope you enjoyed it, and that it inspires you to do your own straw manicures. Link them to me if you do!

Thanks for reading, and please check out the other bloggers' straw manicure creations, lined below via thumbnail. :)

M.