Before & After: China Glaze Cranberry Splash

Hello!!

Today has not been a good day--neither was yesterday--and I could use to have a little color and positivity in my life to make things a little brighter and happier. So today's prompt is a good one for me to focus on writing up right now...because it involves something I love and am fairly proud of.

Today's prompt is to do a manicure that's inspired by fabric. Right away when I saw this prompt, I knew which fabric I wanted to use...several years ago, when I was walking through a fabric store trying to pick out fabric to make a Halloween costume, I saw a design that I fell in love with, and had to have. The moment I saw it I knew I wanted to make it into a beautiful skirt:

There were several problems with this plan. One is that I am not good at sewing. With an easy pattern and a lot of time, I can produce something that will pass as acceptable. This works best with Halloween costumes, because nobody expects them to be perfect anyway, and you don't expect to get a lot of use out of them if you sew one of your seams a little bit closer than you should. That said, I have made myself about 4-5 articles of clothing in my life, and I figured it was worth the risk. If you look at them hem in the picture above, you will see it's far from perfect, although not quite as bad as it seems, because it's laying a bit oddly due to a pleat that needs to be ironed correctly.

The second problem is...the fabric wasn't really intended to be used for clothes. It was intended for home decoration, and was a pain in the tushie to work with. But, I worked slowly and carefully, and while it isn't perfect, I am proud of it and it's my favorite article of clothing to this day.

And I couldn't pass up the opportunity to make a manicure out of it, as well.

I started with a base of China Glaze Cranberry Splash, a pretty shimmery red:

China Glaze Cranberry Splash in direct sun

China Glaze Cranberry Splash in the shade

Then I did a gradient with the Cranberry Splash and Misa Spinning Out Of Control (I didn't bother to clean up the cuticles cause I knew I'd have to again after the next step):

Then things got a little complicated--why am I surprised, it's only fitting because the skirt was so complicated! I stamped over the gradient using Butter London The Full Monty, and Konad Plate m64. I put some Pretty & Polished Heist down over the bottom part, to give it a little gold-flake goodness. And then it went very, very wrong. I went to reach for China Glaze Golden Enchantment, and I grabbed I'm Not Lion instead, which is much thicker and more glittery. So when I sponged some at the tips, it ended up looking like this:

Ugh, just ugh. Icky Icky ugh ugh ugh. So, I took it all off, and started all over again...and this time did everything from above except the last bit of sponged glitter:

Ah yes, much better. Even with the random hair in that last picture. Where do they always come from??!!!

Hope you like it, and thank you for looking. Please check out the other beautiful manis below. :)

Xoxox,
M.