Glequin Gradient

I tried something new on my nails last week with some various Glequins, stripe tape blah blah blah.

My favourite nail of this experiment has become my favourite pattern of all time

Glequin Gradient dark to light

These are my sisters lovely fingertips =]

The camera doesn't do the dark pink justice at all or the light pink for that matter.

Stamping + Glitter Disaster

A cautionary tale of over designing

I knew from the beginning I wanted this to be a blog for me, to show my improvement and what not...
So I feel its only right I show off when I have a disaster too.

Thank you Ebay finallllly got my hands on OPI Absolutely Alice!!!! - excellent what on earth can I go with this...

Experiment time!





Barry M Matte White
Barry M Gelly Guava
Barry M Gelly Plum

These should go nicely with this polish, I thought,what could go wrong, I thought

The addition of stamping, that's what...
I painted 2 coats of  White on my middle 3 fingers
and 1 coat of each the Purple and the blue....so far fine and dandy =]

nice ombre nail in the center.... beautiful

So for the first time ever I sat down with a theme in my head (Alice in Wonderland) and got a planning
my early plan had me painting Absolutly Alice over plain nails except my ring finger I would do a swirly partern....wait a second don I have a swirly stamp plate???? (this was my first mistake)
so out came the stamp plates...ooohhh thisone llooks a little like a bottle - I could add drink me to it
oooh I dont have a cake I could use for eat me.... ooof cupcake- perfect agian
mmm a key there was a key in that scene I guess I could free hand a lock hole no RESULT I have a key stamp tooo and so the design was coming along nicely

Gradient Stamping.... never tried this before ring finger went gorgeous but my pointy (index) finger the design I chose was little and fiddly so I thought ahhh ill just layer it
it look fine the glitter will cover the imperfections (next mistake)

NOT ALICE ENOUGH!!!

 

Cup cake with wiggly EAT ME =] yumyum             and the drinks bottle - DRINK ME sure why not

 And here was the downfalll

I added the glitter - well this glitter is SOOOO densly packed it did not just cover the imperfections it basically covered up the design as well =[=[=[

sooooo after trying to fix it and stamping on the top I found this to be a massive fail too- OPI Absolutely Alice does NOT dry fast

ANYWAY

Alice does (as I originally thought) look fabbbb over the Plum - the dark purple background realllly makes the blue glitter POP and overr the Guava it looks lush - njot only does the blue look great the lighter blue blackground blends theblue glitter slightly and the gold stands out amazinggggggg

all in alll this was an experiement that I guess suceeded becuase I found out that Alice looks gre t over solid colours and perhaps over gradient and terrible over anyting else!!!!

Purpley Goodness =]

I Love Purple (if yellow wasn't my favourite colour purple definitely would be. But yellow is definitely NOT an easy colour to wear so purple is definitely my go to in all situations - I have more purple going out dresses than I do anything else)

So obviously my new purple varnishes seen here and here are my go to colours this month 

Discovering my Rimmel Salon Pro is ok for stamping was a GOD SEND!

My Thumb I waited till the next day to stamp and it basically had a fingerprint on it before stamping so it didn't stamp too evenly, but I thought it was quite nice being more distressed.

My index and ring fingers I did an ombre effect and I didn't wait long enough for the polish to dry before gel top coating so it went a little bobbly, to be honest I thought it added to the ombre effect (aren't textured nail varnishes in at the minute???)

My middle finger might be my favourite nail. nice and easy to do and looks great. 5 simple stripes of nail tape and a little purple gem to hide the join =]

CAVIAR NAILS - problem getting it to stick??? I don't think so ... problem with colour leeching???  Learn from me... DON'T APPLY A TOP COAT.

I've got many many many micro beads in varying colours. For this I used black and purple and light purple and pink, in a reverse ombre to the nails. These looked FAB until I painted the dreaded top coat. As you can see the colour ran hilariously. The sad part is a top coat was defiantly not needed.

If you're wondering I am writing this 2 days later and the balls are still ALLLL stuck. How you ask??

GEL!!! I know there are a lot of swarovski crystal YouTube tutorials suggesting they stick better with UV gel, so why shouldnt this work with caviar?? YOU'RE RIGHT it works perfectly.*

*if you don't have a UV lamp please don't go to boots and spend £70+ on a UV lamp kit you can get them on eBay soooooo much cheaper.

last but not least

my iddy biddy finger

After doing my sisters Butterfly nails I liked the butterfly (previously this finger was just plain purple) so stampy stamp stamp

 

Purple & Butterflies

How to Blog when you have nothing to say?

Let the picture do the talking

When I buy new nail varnish it is a wonder I haven't tried it out before getting to the car.
Barry M is easily my favourite Brand of Polish. Any company that can do what the big company's do for half the price is OK in my book =]

Ye Olde Nails

Back before I knew how to take care of my cuticles and how to really clean up my polish and fun stamps where new too me. These where my two favourite manicures. I have since repeated the idea of the white on pale pink with other full nail stamps and it is still one of my favourite looks =]

Simply Matte

So here are some Photos of yesterdays Matte Nails =]