Here’s a gallery of all the halloween manicures that I did for 2013!
I still haven’t tried free-hand painting flying bats. And I sorta wanted to do some vampire fangs dripping with blood. I guess there’s always next year!
Are you dressing up for halloween this year? Or do you not celebrate?
I already did spiderwebs a few weeks ago, but those were hand-painted. These nails I’m showing you now are stamped! I hope you don’t mind some more halloween cobwebs from Crafty! This is my last mani for the October NAIL Linkup. Oooh that means that the November themes are right around the corner! Do you want to join us in a fun, no-pressure nail challenge? Brijit, Eeeek and I will be announcing the November NAIL prompts soon. But here’s a spoiler:
Alrighty! Well, let’s take a look at my Halloween-themed nails for Oct! I did these nails for a halloween party. I wanted something festive but I didn’t have a lot of time beforehand to do crazy nail art. That’s when stamping comes in handy, for sure! Do you clean your plate in between stamping each nail? I don’t. I get the same results with or without cleaning. So I don’t even bother. I just pound right through and do each nail one right after the other! In just a couple minutes I have a cool stamped mani. 🙂
♥ Sally Hansen Maximum Growth as my base coat
♥ three coats of green ‘no name’ glow-in-the-dark nail polish from Rite Aid
♥ MoYou London Pro Plate 05 XL
♥ China Glaze Smoke and Ashes for stamping
Have a happy halloween everyone! It’s the one time of the year that you’re allowed to take candy from strangers LOL! Here are all the NAIL entries for October-
28th Oct – 3rd Nov Hallow E’en :
21st-27th Oct Treats and Sweets :
14th-20th Oct Things That Go Bump in the Night :
7th-13th Oct Autumn Trees :
30th Sept – 6th Oct Breast Cancer Awareness :
Let’s talk about VISION BOARDS, or Dream Boards as they are often called. These boards are supposed to help you harness the power of the ‘law of attraction’ and basically if you think positive thoughts, then they will come true. Have you ever tried this? Well, I did. I even read the book The Secret about five years ago so I could learn more about the law of attraction before I started my very own vision board. Eventually I put together a board and I’ve had it for more than 5 years now. I’ve updated and revised it a few times already since then. Well, this past weekend I realized that a couple of years have gone by without me tweaking my board. So I decided to re-vamp it and I wound up removing 6 things from it. I was thinking of adding more things to it now, but is it even worth it?? Out of the 6 things I removed from my board, only one thing came true! The others things are outdated, never happened, won’t ever happen, etc. I look at the board everyday too… it’s right next to my bed. WTH?
I like to stay positive and open-minded, but I really don’t think these boards work. If you are planning to use one to attract a hot man, win the lottery, or build your dreamhouse…think again. But if you want to use it to motivate yourself to achieve a few little things, then it could be helpful, especially if those things are within your control. I accomplished a few things that I put on there over the years, but they really weren’t biggies. I’m still not fitting into my old jeans, growing an herb garden, wearing sexy cowboy boots, going to bed by midnight, or waking up by 7am…. so whatevs!
While we’re talking about wishes and dreams… I want to mention red nail polish. I never wear it. I realized that in my year of blogging I have never posted a red manicure. Ever! (I should put red polish on my vision board!) I gravitate towards blues, greens, and generally funky and bright colors. But why no red? For starters, I dress very casual, and I think maybe I perceive that polished red nails would clash with my outfits? Yoga pants and fancy red nails don’t really jive well together, ya know? I also think red makes my skin look pale. BUT… I vow to get over it! I solemnly swear to hereby wear more red nail polish. Which means I need to buy more, right? So I recently added some reds to my stash and the first one I tested out was a creme Essence Colour & Go polish called Fame Fatal. Shown here is one coat of SH Maximum Growth, two coats of Fame Fatal and one coat of seche vite.
I didn’t really like it too much while I was wearing it….but now that I look at the pics- I like this red on me! You may notice that my hand looks different too. Yup, that’s my right hand. Cute, huh? My poor left hand that I usually photograph experienced a break so I’m showing you my other hand instead. These pointy nails are a little tricky. I’ve actually broken two tips in the last few days so I had to shorten my pointies. Now they look like little shark teeth. haha! I’m wondering how long I can keep these pointies going? If the tips keep cracking off I might have to go back to a more squoval shape. Boooo. 😦 Cuz I really am having fun with them.
Do you wear a lot of red?
It’s getting close to halloween and there’s no shortage of halloween nail art in wordpress land! Lacquered by BlueVanilla blog is running a ten day halloween nail art extravaganza filled with spooky designs and guest posts. They asked me to share one of my halloween manicures with them, and I was more than happy to oblige. I did some super fun sugar spun mummy nails and I just love how they came out! Be sure to click on over to see my guest post on Lacquered by BlueVanilla right here!
Here’s a sneak peak of my nails…
The theme for Nail Art Ideas Linkup this week is TREATS AND SWEETS. This time of year I think of trick or treating- and aaaahhh those lovely little bite-size candy bars and single-serving packs of candy!! When I was a kid I remember dumping out all my halloween candy on the floor and I’d gauge how successful the night was based on how many chocolate and peanut butter treats I had. If I had 6 or more full-size peanut butter cups then I hit the motherload!!! Throw a bunch of mini snickers on top of that and I’m in heaven. Chocolate and peanut butter- I LOVE YOU.
Well, since I love PB so much I felt inspired to do some Reese’s Pieces nails! Check me out!
My cream-colored nails were easy to do- I made some some simple dots with a large dotting tool- hopefully the dots look like little Reese’s Pieces! I also wanted to spell out the word REESE’S. But I thought it would be hard to paint directly on my nails so I painted the word on a plastic baggy instead and made my own peel-off DIY decals. Here’s an example of how I’ve done DIY decals in the past: Hunger Games Mockingjay Nails. The word REESE’S came out kind of long and a bit too-stretched out to fit on one nail, so I had to snip the word into three segments. This allowed me to span the word across three of my nails. If you apply a decal like this on top of tacky or still-wet nail polish then it will stick pretty well. Unfortunately I got some bubbles at the end when I applied my seche topcoat. But it still looks cool and I guess the bubbles aren’t too noticeable.
Here’s a list of what I used
base coat ♥ Sally Hansen Maximum Growth
off-white ♥ Fresh Paint Coconut
bright orange ♥ Zoya Paz
light orange ♥ AVON Orange Creamsicle
bright yellow ♥ Sinful Colors Pull Over
light yellow ♥ Butter London Cheeky Chops
brown ♥ Sinful Colors Nirvana
top coat ♥ Seche Vite
I also had to add this cute prop to my photo. Reese’s Pieces were one of E.T.’s fave snacks in the movie, right? Well, check out my authentic E.T. movie stickers from 1982! It’s hard to believe that I held on to these for 31 years! I’m only 36 right now so I’ve been in possession of these stickers most of my life. Crazy, right? Here’s a little movie trivia for you- I just read that the movie production company wanted E.T. to eat M&M’s instead, but the Mars brand turned them down on the free product placement. Their second choice was Hershey’s… who said YES, of course. That’s why E.T. was always munching on Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces. Apparently, Reese’s Pieces sales skyrocketed after the movie was released! Who woulda thought an alien would persuade us to eat more candy like that?
I hope you like my Reese’s Pieces nails!! Feel free to create your own TREATS AND SWEETS mani, or try out any of the other October NAIL themes! The links are open all month:
Breast Cancer Awareness :
Autumn Trees :
Things That Go Bump in the Night :
Treats and Sweets :
Hallow E’en :
One of our NAIL themes for October is THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT. I was really drawing a blank on this one. Which is kind of ironic considering I suggested this theme when Brijit and Eeeek and I were corroborating about the October NAIL prompts! I just had too many ideas swimming in my head- bats, vampires, creepy crawlies….so I turned to google for some inspiration. I found an artist named Vicky Scott who created this illustration called..
wait for it..
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT! How appropriate. You can see her cute print here on Hire an Illustrator. I really liked the image she created- especially her spooky eyes floating in the darkness. Eyeballs seemed liked they’d be easy to paint on a small nail canvas so here’s what I came up with…
I applied Sally Hansen Maximum Growth as my basecoat, two coats of Essence Grey-t To Be Here, and then I hand painted the black accents and eyes using red white and black polishes. I waited a good 20 minutes before I applied my seche topcoat because I would’ve hated to smear the eyes if they weren’t dry. I didn’t do too much nail art on this mani so I didn’t want to ruin the little bit that I did do!
Breast Cancer Awareness :
Autumn Trees :
Things That Go Bump in the Night :
Treats and Sweets :
Hallow E’en :
I have this inherent need to hoard things that I use regularly. Like shampoo, qtips, sandwich baggies for my lunch….. these are all things that I use everyday. I like to have good inventory on hand because whenever I get low on one of them it seriously stresses me out! Seche vite topcoat falls into that category too. So I recently made a smart purchase that will ensure me a steady supply of my holy grail topcoat. Check out my gigantic salon-sized bottle of seche vite!!
I found this item on amazon and it was around $15 with shipping included. It comes with a standard-size bottle of seche that contains the normal 1/2 ounce. It also comes with a ginormous 4 ounce re-fill bottle and a funnel. Because it has 4 and 1/2 oz it’s basically like buying 9 bottles of seche at once. And for $15USD…. not bad at all!!!!!!!! Here’s the contents of the box…
Instead of using the new little bottle of seche that came in the set, I decided to fill my old empty bottle. Hoarding tendencies forced me to keep the new bottle for later. 🙂 When re-filling your seche you’re supposed to use the funnel that came with the set. There were no instructions to indicate this, but it was a good assumption I think. The funnel has a little line etched in it, so I figured that’s where I’m supposed to snip off the tip with scissors. Well, that didn’t work, as you can see below. The seche would not flow through! I guess the formula is thick, so you’d need a bigger hole. So I snipped it a little lower- still no luck. I did this 3 or 4 times til the funnel was a blunt nub. It was pointless! The most that I got out of it was the one drip as seen in my pic. LOL! I ended up throwing away my funnel thing, and just poured the seche directly into the smaller bottle, which worked fine. 
Here’s the amazon listing if you are interested in buying a mammoth sized bottle of your own. When I bought it a few weeks ago it was $14.95 and free shipping, but now it looks like it’s $13.95 plus $5 shipping… but if you poke around maybe you can find a better deal online? If you happen to invest in a salon-sized kit like this I’d also recommend some Seche Restore thinner too, as seche tends to thicken up over time. I hated spending money on my Restore when I initially bought it…. it was the principle of it. Like why should I have to buy a topcoat AND a thinner to go along with it?? But I’ve had the bottle for about a year now and it proved to be a good investment. I have freshened up me and my mom’s seche bottles, as well as used it as a thinner for our goopy old bottles of lacquer. I still have about a third of the bottle left which isn’t bad considering it serves two of us.
So are you jealous of me and my ginormous seche? Or do you have another fave topcoat that you use?
Craftynail 