Nail Art Earrings part deux

I have my second pair of nail art earrings to show you!  The first one is here.  For this pair I used some little wooden pendants that my dad cut for me to use as earrings.  They are rectangle and circle shapes and he drilled tiny holes for the earring clasps. He sanded them, but I also used a nail file to smooth some of the corners.  Then I grabbed my nail polish and started decorating them!

I painted the wooden squares with black wet n wild nail polish called Ebony Hates Chris.  Then I stamped the rectangles using blue Keks by Butter London along with my MoYou Pro Collection 04 stamp.  The squishy stamper kinda went wooooosh sideways… you can see my stamps are a little off-center.  😦 But still, I love how the Butter London stamps over the black.  I tried this combo one time before when I reviewed some MoYou London items.  It looked wicked, but you couldn’t really tell since it was only on my thumbs.  (here’s a pic! check out my thumb!)  I just knew I had to try that black n blue combo again.  So I did. I also added a few rhinestones to my earrings that I stuck on with clear nail polish.   Lastly, I attached some fishhook earring clasps, and there ya have it.  My Butter London Earrings.

Thank for stopping by and I hope to see you tomorrow. I have a new underside mani to show you!  Then later this weekend I’ve got a gradient for our Nail Art Ideas Linkup.  Ta-ta!

Nail art earrings and other stuff!

Remember when I showed you those little wooden pendants my dad made me?? Here they are pictured on the left.  Well, I finally painted them with nail polish!   I like to call them my nail art earrings. 🙂  I painted them using all Essie winter shearling colors and I also used a bunch of easy nail art techniques.

• I painted them in three Essie colors
• then used a dotting tool to do some dots on one side
• used my MoYou stamping stamper and pro plate to decorate the other side
• swept on some clear polish and placed a line of rhinestones
• then I finished it with a coat of sally hansen topcoat

In case you are laughing at them, yeah I know.  They’re a little ‘busy’.  But in my defense, I wanted to try different nail art stuff on them … it’s my first nail polish & jewelry experiment!  They came out cool and it was a lot of crafty fun.  I def wanna do this again!  If you don’t have pendants like the ones I used then maybe you can find some earrings laying around that might work.  Or maybe the dollar store near you has some cheapo flat earrings that could use a fresh layer of nail polish!

This was a fun project for me, especially since I can’t paint my nails right now.  I am actually wearing some Incoco french manicure nail strips right now and I wanna see how long they last. I am loving them.  They look so great!  Here’s a sneak peek!  What a perfect french mani, right?  They are wearing really well.  No signs of chipping yet and I’m on day 6!  So in lieu of painting my nails for 6 days… I painted some earrings!  Oh, and I also made some diy nail decals using some of my cheeky and moyou stamping plates.  They came out so cute!  I made little yellow happy faces, multi-colored hearts, and little teddy bears!  Hopefully I can play with them soon.  I also have some news for my giveaways…..

Tomorrow I will announce the winner of my Moon Sugar Nails decal giveaway.  Make sure you enter for a chance to win a sweet gift certificate for some waterslide decals!  Giveaway closes on feb 9th.  Good luck! (oh, and once that raffle is over I have another one coming up- so stay tuned!)

Here’s the link to enter for a chance to win some moon sugar decals: a Rafflecopter giveaway 

Crayola Washable Kids Paint for Nail Art?

I usually do my nail art with nail polish…but I wanted to try out something different !  How about some Crayola Washable Kids Paint? The pack I have contains 18 awesome colors… so why not?  Just look at them all… aren’t they pretty?

Before I started my nail art I wanted to lay down some good base colors so we can see how the kids paint builds up over top of varying shades.  I painted two of my nails with a cream nail polish, two with a black polish, and red for my thumb.  Then I put seche vite topcoat over all my nails since my quick-dry black polish was slow to dry. (The irony!)

After my base colors were down I tested out my kids paint.  I used a skinny detail brush.  The paint was kinda thick, but not overly opaque.  So if my brush had a big blob of paint on it and I tried to dab it off, then it would thin out and not appear opaque when applied to the nail.  Because of this, I had to slather on healthy amounts of kid paint when hand-painting my nail art.  This means it took a little while to dry.  The right two nails have leopard, the left two have roses, and my thumb has poker suits on it.

They were easy to work with, and the paint washes right off if you make a mistake.  But there was a big problem lurking.  Apparently water-based paints like Crayola don’t behave well under a topcoat!!  I covered my nail art with one coat of seche vite and it dried so weird!  The crayola-painted areas looked dull, bumpy and matte, and the rest of my nail looked normal and shiny.  Let’s check it out….

Also, one layer of Crayola wasn’t quite enough.  The cream-colored nails looked okay, but the black nails definitely needed a double layer of kids paint.  I painted the below roses just once, and after applying topcoat you can see just how translucent the design came out.  Also, lookit how the water-based paint seeped through the seche vite!  It looks so strange and bumpy. ↓

Before I applied topcoat to my thumb I decided to re-paint the designs so they had two layers of crayola paint.  2 layers was better as the designs look much more defined than on my black nails.  Also, they didn’t smudge when I applied topcoat.  But eww, the bumpiness! ↓

So there you have it!  Water-based paints do NOT work well for nail art!  I tried a second coat of seche vite, and that looks much better.  But still, that’s a hassle, and I probably won’t use these much for nail designs.  Maybe with a matte topcoat?  I don’t know.  I guess I will stick with nail polish or acrylic paints.  Too bad, because the 18 colors are so pretty and I love that the pots are connected so I won’t have a zillion paint tubes cluttering my space.  Does anyone know of any sets of acrylic paint that look convenient like this?  Or will I have to buy a zillion different bottles/tubes of acrylic paint?* each sold separately LOL

Decorate your nails with tin foil!

It’s metallic day in the nail art challenge.  When I heard the term metallic– I thought about aluminum foil!  Why not?  I’m sure I can decorate my nails with that stuff!

I used one of those paper-punches (the ones designed for decorative paper crafts).  I think I got it at Michael’s Crafts Store in the $1 bins by the registers.  I used the paper punch on the tin foil and out popped a cute flower shape!  I painted my nails pink, applied a topcoat, then placed my flowers to my tacky nails. When they dried a little bit I pushed down any foil pieces that were sticking up and applied topcoat to seal them down.  Pretty cute and easy!  Oh and the pink polish I’m wearing in these photos is called Sweet by Zoya. 🙂 I also want to let you know that I’m out of town at a work conference right now. So plz forgive me if I don’t comment back right away. I am super busy all day with sitting… then eating… sitting …then eating lol! Luckily I had this post ready before I left town. Now, tomorrow’s gradient design for day 26, now that’s a different story! Not sure when I will have the chance to do that one! But, I hope you like my tin foil… and keep the comments coming! It makes me smile in between my financial aid sessions! Ciao 🙂

Silver Feather Fowl Play

Day 17 of Julie’s April nail art challenge is dedicated to 3D nail art!  I love that this nail art challenge makes me try new things. I don’t have a lot of nail embellishments in my stash so my best bet was to think outside the box!  I have a lot of jewelry findings and beads so surely I’d be able to find something to decorate my nails with.  When sifting through my beads I came cross these lovely silver-plated feather charms from Fire Mountain Gems.  I used to love these things!  I don’t make myself a lot jewelry- usually I give it to family and friends…but I made myself these aqua chandelier earrings with the silver feathers and they turned out to be my absolute faves!  I wore them all the time!  Until I lost them 😦   Here’s a pic of them on the left.  I really should make myself another pair… but first, lemme put these feathers on my nails!  I cut them with my wire cutting tool and secured them to my painted nails with a clear top coat.  They looked really awesome, but I kept scratching myself with them!  So I didn’t get to wear them too long lol.

If you are wondering about my purple base color… it’s called Fowl Play by Orly and it’s part of their Birds of a Feather Collection from 2011 maybe.  It has a dark purple jelly base with a thick suspension type formula… and it’s got all kinds of crazy shimmer, micro glitter and small flakies.  Lotsa colors in here!  I like deep complex colors like this.  In fact, the whole Birds of a feather Collection is beautiful- check out Orly’s promo shot for the collection.  Don’t you love this bright metallic peacock blue polish that the model is wearing?  I know this collection is old news… but this blue is so pretty!  And so is my purple Fowl Play- I hope you like it too!

Embellished Nail Polish Easter Egg

I love painting easter eggs with nail polish- it’s my new fave spring project!  If you’d like to see my first attempt here’s the link to my other egg.  My first egg was decorated with just nail polish.  But today’s egg has a few other embellishments- fimo clay flowers and beads on top!

I took a few days to complete this egg because I’d paint a section… then wait for it to dry.  Then paint another section and wait for that to dry.  I set the egg on a soda cap while it was drying.  I also added some orange fimo clay nail art flowers and stuck them on with some clear nail polish.

Since I drained my egg before I painted it… it had a nice little whole on top which was perfect to slide a eyepin into (an eyepin is the metal stick that jewelery-makers use to slide beads onto when making drop earrings).  I simply placed two silver beads onto the eyepin and then slid the pin into the whole on the top of my egg.  I secured it with glue so they wouldn’t slip out.  I really like the beaded accent on top- it adds a nice touch and almost makes it look victorian.

I hope you get a chance to do some spring crafts too!  I can’t believe Easter is tomorrow!

In recent news, I have set my blog up on the Bloglovin site!  So if you use Bloglovin to view your favorite blogs- then you can add Craftynail to your list of followed blogs by clicking this link-  Follow my blog on Bloglovin!

If you have not yet setup a Bloglovin account then you can read about it here – I think it’s a great way to view all your favorite sites in one spot!

How to decorate easter eggs with nail polish!

Lately I’ve seen tons of cool web photos of eggs painted with nail polish.  This little project has Craftynail written all over it!  It combines two of my favorite things- easter eggs and nail polish.  I am like a little kid at easter time!  I still color eggs every year even though I am 35 yrs old and I don’t even have children yet (I know, I need to get movin on that)! 

HOW TO DRAIN AN EGG- Use a sharp craft knife, a sewing needle or anything sharp.  I used a heavy duty safety pin.  Basically, you hold the pin over the top of the egg (cradling the egg in your hand as to evenly distribute pressure on it) and then tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap a bunch of times until one small hole breaks the shell.  You can stick the pin in and softly move it around to make the hole a little bigger.  Then do the same technique on the bottom of the egg.  Try to make the bottom hole a little bigger than the top hole.  Once it has two holes- then you can position your mouth over the top hole and carefully blow the liquid egg out of the large bottom hole.  I’ve heard that this part can be tricky. ( I cheated a little because I found a damaged egg in my dozen that already had a decent-sized hole/crack in the bottom.)

LET THE EGG DRY- Rinse your egg out with some water and then set it somewhere to dry.  This was the hardest part for me since I wanted to paint it ASAP!  I waited about two days and it seemed nice n dry since no water dripped out when I rotated the egg around.

HOW TO PAINT YOUR EGG- My egg was brown so I chose dense/opaque polish.  The easiest way for me was to hold the egg on the bottom, and paint the top section with nail polish.  Then I set the egg down and let it dry for a half hour or so.  Once the polish seemed dryish, then I grasped the egg on that painted part and began painting the rest of the bare egg. I’m sure there’s a way to do it all at once, but after smudging it and getting polish all over the pads of my fingers I decided to let half of it dry first.  Patience is a virtue!

EMBELLISHMENTS- I chose not to embellish my first attempt.  I’m sure you could jazz your egg up in a million different ways though- konad nail stamping, rhinestones, stripers, etc.  Next time I really want to glue on some tiny beads or loose glitter!  You could also put a topcoat on if you choose.  I considered applying a layer of laminating glue to make it nice n shiny.  But the glue bottle says it takes 24hrs to dry- and ain’t nobody got time for that!

DISPLAY- I placed my egg on a tealight candle holder which seems to cradle the egg nicely.  Or you could cutup and decorate a toilet paper roll as an egg holder.   My pretty egg is now on display by my nail polish stash.  I get to admire my eggy artwork everyday now!

 I can’t wait to try this project again!  Oh, and in case you’re wondering- I’m wearing Orly Coffee Break on my nails! Or as we say in New York- Cawfee Break.  Got the urge to see more nail polish eggs?  Check out the Small Things Made Significant blog… she has created several awesome posts with pretty eggs. 😀

CLICK HERE TO SEE MY OTHER EGG CREATION!