Before & After: a-England's Avalon

Hello!

Today's prompt in the CNT 31 Day Challenge is purple, a color I love almost as much as red. Bouncing back from pink, babyyyyyyy!! :)

In my attempt to support Indie polish makers on my blog, I've been showing a lot of glitters lately on the blog (and you'll certainly see more). Most of the time when people think of indie polishes, they think of glitters. However, there are some indie polish makers who do really beautiful things with non-glitter polishes, and today I have one of those for you: a-England Avalon. I'll be trying to show you others from smaller labels in the future as well.

One of the things I love about a-England is the beautiful, deeply pigmented colors they have. Avalon is a perfect demonstration of this is...Avalon is a brilliant purple shimmer, with a regal, glowy depth, and duochrome tendencies shifting gently to blue. I love purples and this is one of my favorites:

a-England Avalon in the shade

After wearing Avalon on its own, I knew just what I wanted to stamp on it; I've been waiting to use this stamp for quite a while... I used Konad plate m69 at the cuticle, and stamped with China Glaze Avalanche:

A-England Avalon + China Glaze Avalanche 

Check out that duochrome shift...:)

I love the way this color and pattern create a lacy sort of effect; I'd love to have a blouse or dress edged like this. :)

Thanks for looking, and please check out the other purple manis, linked below. :)

Xoxox,
M.

Before & After: Barielle Jess' Champagne Toast

Hello!!!

Oh yes oh yes oh yes today is my very most favorite prompt of the 31 Day Challenge (NOT)!! You guessed it, it's pink day!

::shudders::

Putting the drama aside, lol, my feelings for pink are still not positive, but I have become more positive toward it than I used to be, and I even own a few pinks these days. But no, it's still not a prompt I greet with great enthusiasm.

So you won't be surprised that I chose to use it as an accent color, and chose a nice purple for my base, Barielle's Jess' Champagne Toast, which is a frosty lilacy-lavendar color with pink microglitter that doesn't show up in the pictures or in real life well, unfortunately:

Barielle Jess' Champagne Toast

Barielle Jess' Champagne Toast, direct sun

Next, I stamped on it using Bundle Monster plate BM209, and Ana Hickman Escandalo, a pink I actually do like that was sent to me by my friend Janaina. Finally, I used my dotting tool to put Nina Ultra Pro Purple Xing, a darker purple glitter, over some of the dots:

So what to you think? I like it, other than the gritty look of Jess' Champagne Toast. I hoped that the glitter from the Purple Xing would somehow make the other glitter look more like glitter and less like grit, but it didn't quite work. However, other than that, I love the design, and I even love the pink!! :)

Thanks for looking, and please check out the other pink manicures, linked below. :)

Xoxox,
M.

Nails three ways: Literary Lacquers Generosity And Love + $1.87

Hello!!

Today's prompt in the 31 Day Challenge is 'gold'. When I saw it on the list, I knew I wanted to show you this series of pictures I took combining Literary Lacquers Generosity and $1.87 (One Dollar And Eighty-Seven Cents).

This glitter is designed to simulate coins, and so the 'gold' isn't necessarily technically gold. However, to my eye, it looks like an antiqued gold/copper, so I'm going with it. :)

When I reviewed these polishes a while back, Amy mentioned she likes Generosity and $1.87 together, and that she gets a lot of compliments on it. I can see why! I played around with it a bit, and ended up trying it out three different ways. In the first, I just did a light coat of glitter over Generosity:

One coat of $1.87 over Generosity

Next I tried a little bit heavier approach, and dabbed more on for fuller coverage:

Heavy dabbed coat look

I love the way this glitter looks at this angle :)

(I should mention that in the second shot, it looks like a few of the glitters might be curling. This is a trick of the light! All of the glitter behaved in a very lady-like fashion, and stayed very flat on my nails. :) )

Finally, because I've been jumping out into the world of glitter sandwiches, I couldn't resist putting another coat of Generosity over the top to see how it would look:

One coat of Generosity on top of $1.87

What do you think? Which is your favorite? Mine is definitely the glitter sandwich. I like how it gives just a bit of softness to the glitter, like a soft veil, but still lets the beauty of the glitter come through. :)

Also, I was just looking back over my posts for the past few days and noticed they've been very glitter heavy, and haven't had much stamping! I guess you can tell I've been having fun discovering the world of glitters...but I'll be returning more to my stamping roots again tomorrow. :)

Thanks for looking! And please check out the other gold manicures, linked below. :)

Xoxox,
M.

Before & After: 'Q' is for Quilted Nail Cheat and Queen Crown

Hello!!!

Today we're up to 'Q' in the Llama Nails alphabet challenge. I've been seeing a lot of quilted nails lately, and have wanted to try my hand at them, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Then, the other day when I was playing around with glitter layering, I had an idea--maybe I can stamp a quick cheat and get a similar effect.

I started off with China Glaze With Love, from the Holiday Joy collection; since I was just playing around, I didn't swatch it on its own, unfortunately. Over it I added a sparse coat of Laquerlicious Queen Crown (I reviewed Queen Crown here if you want to see it over a different polish):

Laquerlicious Queen Crown over China Glaze With Love

I left it a bit sparse and didn't take it to the full edge so that some of the underlying color would show though--please don't take that as an indicator of how the polish really looks or performs! Next, I stamped over the glitter using With Love again, and Cheeky plate 11, which is a diamond-shaped grid pattern:

Stamped on top with With Love again

What do you think? It doesn't have as much texture as the full quilted nails technique, to be sure. However, it was super mega fast to do, and got the job done pretty darned well. If I do this  technique again, I don't think I'll do it with a chunky glitter, because I think the effect would be smoother with either a regular polish or a smaller, more even glitter as the second layer. But given that, I think it's not too bad, and without the hassle of the nail tape! So when you're in a hurry, here's an alternate technique that can give you similar results. :)

Thanks for taking a look! Please check out the other 'Q' manicures, linked below. :)

Xoxox,
M.

Before & After: Whimsical Ideas by Pam Kismet's Pajamas

Hello!!

Today is day 2 of the 31 Day Challenge in the Crumpet Nail Tart group. Today's prompt is 'silver'.

For the prompt I chose to showcase Kismet's Pajamas, by Whimsical Ideas By Pam. I really feel this polish is nail art in a bottle all by itself, so I only did a small tweak to it. I'd like to believe that I could have come up with a perfect layering of glitters over black to make something this beautiful, but Pam put it all into one bottle so I didn't have to.

Kismet's Pajamas is a black-based polish with silver and purple hex glitters of various sizes:

Whimsical Ideas By Pam Kismet's Pajamas

What is it with me and side-shots of glitter? Idk, I just love them. :)

And a quick straight shot!

When I first saw the name, I was really intrigued by it...I thought 'How deep! Kismet/fate/predestination wearing pajamas...symbolically, what does that mean?! And the polish looks like a night sky with fantastical elements! So cool!' Then, when I read about it, I found out it's named after her cat, Kismet--and that made it even better somehow. :)

As I say, I love this polish as is, and I struggled with the idea of stamping something over it to add more silver, or something similar. In the end, I decided the best thing to do would be to play up the silver already in the polish, which I did by matte-ifying it:

Kismet's Pajamas with matte topcoat

I love it both ways, and this is one of those rare manicures I actually wore for 3 days before taking it off, and even then didn't want to. This definitely tops my list of favorite polishes and I see a lot of use for it in my future.

Truth be told, every polish I've had from Pam has been a stunner. You can find her polishes on her Facebook page here; she sells via e-mail and Paypal.

I'll be back later today with another post featuring my "'Q' is for..." manicure. In the meantime, please check out the other silver manicures, linked below! :)

Xoxox,
M.

(I purchased this polish with my own money.)

300 Follower Giveaway!!

Hello!!

I am so excited that somehow I've managed to reach 300 followers! When I first started this blog I thought I'd be lucky to ever get anyone other than my personal friends to read it, lol. My pictures were horrible, my cuticles really messed up, and my nail art was...well, let's not go there. My pictures are sometimes still horrible, my cuticles sometimes messed up, and my nail art is sometimes still not great, but I think I'm improving slowly. What improvement there has been has been due to your support and feedback, and I can't thank you enough for making this blog one of the high-points of my day.

So, I've decided to have a giveaway! The prize will be a $20 gift certificate to Ninja Polish!

I like the gift certificate option because that way the winner can get whatever suits their personal style; also it can be delivered by e-mail. Also, Ninja Polish ships to most of the world, except Italy and Russia, so the contest can be open and useful to most of the world, and I can make the contest open to everyone and anyone who has a use for the gift certificate. :)

I'm using Rafflecopter for the giveaway; this is my first time using it, so please be patient if I mess something up along the way, lol.

The contest will run for one week, and will close on January 8, 2013, at noon.

I also want to work on improving the blog, so I've incorporated questions about what you like about the blog, and what you'd like to see more of about the blog. I'll definitely be paying attention to the feedback you leave, so thank you in advance. :)

Okay, so here goes:




a Rafflecopter giveaway

Again, thank you so much for your support! I can't tell you how much it means to me!!!!!

Xoxox,
M.

NOTD: Black & White

Happy New Year!!

I hope you had a wonderful New Year's Eve and are recuperating accordingly! I'm feeling very optimistic about this coming year, so much has transformed in my life and there is so much beauty and joy coming to all of us, I truly believe. :)

With this New Year, I start a new challenge, a 31 Day challenge that runs the length of this month. The first prompt is 'Black & White', and I've been stumped on this one for some time. I started working on this challenge about mid-December, putting together manicures because I've heard from experienced challengers that the way to do these successfully is to get a head start. Well, I've completed about half of them, most toward the beginning of the challenge, but this one was giving me fits and starts. Finally I came up with an idea for it two nights ago as I was falling asleep:

You see, it's not about races. Just places, faces.

I've seen the bright get duller...

I'm not going to spend my life being a color.

I started with a base of two coats of Sally Hansen White On. Over that, I did a gradient with a blend of Sally Hansen White On and Wet n Wild Ebony Hates Chris. I learned quickly that a white/black gradient may be the hardest gradient in the world to do, lol. :)

Over that, I put a coat of China Glaze's Whirled Away; I dabbed for placement a bit so I could get one big white hex on the black part of each nail, and black glitter all over so that it 'disappeared' into the black polish. The original idea was to do this with a smaller more overall glitter (I was thinking Dandy Nails Colorblind Squared), but when I went to get the glitter my eyes landed on this and I just had to use it.

I'm glad I did, because as much as I dreaded this manicure and had a horrid time coming up with a manicure for it, I am IN LOVE with this manicure. I didn't want to take it off, but I had to in order to do my New Year's Eve nails. It just looked so cool on, and I'm going to wear it the next time I wear a black-and-white outfit. And I still want to try the Colorblind Squared version of it too, so hopefully you'll see that soon.

On a final note, as of this posting, I have 299 followers on GFC, and am hoping that I get my 300th on New Year's Day, how cool would that be! Regardless of when it happens, I'll be holding another giveaway, and will be taking my first leap into RaffleCopter. :)

I hope you had a wonderful New Year's, and thanks for looking! And please check out the other black & white manis linked below. :)

Xoxox,
M.

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