Easter Egg Nails for #NAILLINKUP

It’s almost Eastertime!  I feel like the holiday really snuck up on me this year.  Last year by this time I did a bunch of easter posts, including an embellished nail polish egg (see the prop in my pic below), a tutorial on how to decorate eggs with polish, and also some cutesy chick nails. I was really on a roll.

But so far, this is all I’ve come up with for 2014.  It’s a french manicure with tiny colored eggs painted over top.  Fingers crossed that you can tell that they’re eggs!

I started with a classic french mani that I free-handed.  Then I stamped a green basket weave print over top using AVON Garden Green and my MASH-39 stamping plate.  Then I made some bright easter eggs in pink, blue, purple and yellow using a dotting tool and a small brush.  I did a sparkly coat of Wet n Wild Kaleidoscope on top and then some seche vite.  I think my eggs would’ve looked more pronounced over a solid white background.  This was kind of a waste of a nice french mani since you can’t even really see it!  On the bright side, this got me in the easter mood!  And it’s just in time for our week 3 theme for the April Nail Art Ideas Linkup.

Are you planning on doing some Easter nail art?  If so, you should it add it to our inlinkz for the April Linkup >>

14th – 20th April : Easter

Dotted and stamped! Another holiday manicure…

I love nail stamping with my Konad, Cheeky and MoYou plates… but sometimes a solid-colored stamp is just too boring for me.  I’m always looking for fun ways to complicate a simple stamp manicure.  Then it hit me: why not do a dotticure, then stamp over top of it!?

I like the end result!  It has a sorta country-appeal to it.  Kinda like shabby chic wall-paper or something.  It didn’t take long to do, especially since my MoYou XL stamper is soft and squishy so I don’t need to press very hard.  Which means my underneath layers of polish don’t have to be dry when I stamp.  That saves me a lot of waiting/dry-time.  I hafta say, since I got my MoYou stamper- I haven’t even touched my old Konad one at all!

Here’s what I’m wearing:

♥ Sally Hansen Maximum Growth – as my basecoat

♥ OPI My Vampire is Buff – three coats

♥ AVON Ruby Slipper & AVON Garden Green w/a dotting tool – for the dots

♥ Black Konad polish and my MoYou London Festive 03 plate – for the stamping

♥ Seche Vite – as my topcoat

When I topcoated my thumb it seemed very prone to smudging.  So I had to really slather the seche vite on super thick as to not drag the brush across my design.  I hate how stamping smudges so easy.  I’m wondering if different polishes smudge differently?  I dunno, but Konad polish surely smudges!  I SHOULD DO A SMUDGING EXPERIMENT WITH DIFFERENT BRANDS!  I’ll put that on my blog to-do list.

Only two days left til Christmas!!  You ready for it???  Tonight we just need to make a big batch of cookies and then we are all set for the festivities!

Day 24 of OMD Challenge- Multicolored Mani

Hi to all the nail fans out there!  I’m excited for day 24 of our challenge because the theme is INSPIRED BY A TUTORIAL!  I follow a lot of blogs and I’ve see so many great nail art tutorials- there’s no lack of inspiration for today’s theme!  Do you follow the Polish Alcoholic?  I always think of her as the ‘Queen Bee’ of WordPress nail blogs!  She was also the VERY FIRST blogger to follow my blog when I started blogging 9 months ago.  So naturally, today’s design was inspired by the sweet and sassy Polish Alcoholic.  Check out her tutorial that inspired my mani:  Blue Manicure for Autism

I chose 6 rich colors for this mani:

Blue ♥ Sweet Peacock by Orly

Green ♥ Garden Green by AVON

Silver ♥ Bring on the Snowflakes by Sephora by OPI

Black ♥ Smoke and Ashes by China Glaze

Gold ♥ Golden-I by Sally Hansen

Purple ♥ Dutch ‘Ya Just Love OPI by OPI

I’ll have to ask the Polish Alcoholic what the name is for this technique.  I just love it and I think it needs to be a real official ‘thing’.  Everyone needs to try this one out!  You don’t need special tools to create these scales- this one is considered a ‘bottle brush’ design!  What do you think?  Are you tempted to try it?

24. Inspired by a Tutorial :

Day 14 of OMD Challenge- Daisies

Day 14 of the Oh Mon Dieu Challenge is FLORAL. I usually think bright springy colors when I hear the word FLORAL… so I went the opposite way with this one.  Today’s manicure is a nice warm earthy daisy design!

I started with a few base coats of a unnamed peachy color called Sally Hansen Maximum Growth Nourishing Nail Color from my SH french manicure kit.  Then I sponged some Garden Green by AVON on my tips.  Garden Green is such a spectacular polish- it’s a deep natural looking green with slight shimmer that makes it glow.  And it’s uber-opaque which makes it perfect for nail art.  In fact, some of my favorite polishes for nail art are from AVON.  I could do a whole post about a yellow called Inspire that I’ve used 7 times already on my blog (wonder if anyone noticed).  After all my tips were green, which looked pretty cool BTW, I dotted on some daisies using NYC French White Tip.  The center of the daisies was then dotted on using a mustard yellow called Pull Over by Sinful Colors.  I added some Revlon Quick Dry Top Coat et voila!  Earthy floral french mani with daisies!

View the other floral creations here:

14. Flowers :

Petal Impressions Gradient

Hey nail lovers!  I have a gradient manicure to share with you for Day 26 of the Nail Art Challenge! I did this mani in a hotel room, late at night, without proper tools… so hopefully it’s still craftynail-blog-worthy!

Last month I bought a bunch of AVON Nailwear Pro+ polishes from their recent Petal Impressions collection.  So I tried a gradient with with the blue, green and nude colors from this shimmery collection.  The polishes are called:

Forget-Me-Not-Blue (blue)

Garden Green (green)

Sweet Pea Dreams (nude)

  Even though these polishes look great paired together- the champagne color is a lot lighter than the blue and green.  I figured it could be a challenge to get Sweet Pea to blend in naturally.  So I decided to make my gradient heavier with the Sweet Pea polish just to throw off the balance of the three colors.  I only reveal a bit of the blue and green and I like the way they pop!  It looks cool in real life! Too bad my cuticles are a wreck though!  I have been moisturizing a lot while out of town this week for work- but they have still gotten really rough and dry!  In my luggage I packed my normal lotion and my rarely used tube of Onsen Cuticle Conditioner.   I bought this Onsen stuff in Las Vegas from a high pressure sales rep in 2011.  It was pretty expensive but it came with a buffer, a file, and a makeup bag so I thought WHY NOT.  Well, I never really ended up using it religiously.  Until this week.  And I found out– it kinda sucks!  It’s too watery, it doesn’t feel very moisturizing, it just rubs right in and seems to evaporate and disappear.  My cuticles are in worse shape than they’ve been in months.  In these pics I’m trying to cover up a hangnail- but it hurts!  I just typed up a negative review on their website.  I’m curious to see if they approve and publish it cuz they haven’t yet!  Now that I’m back at home- I’m going back to my oil and LUSH cuticle butter!  I guess I will slather some good stuff on my cuticles tonite and try to enjoy my pretty gradient.  Hopefully I’ll be back to normal soon lol!

Rainbow Nails

The theme today is RAINBOWS!  It’s day 7 of the 30 Day Nail Challenge for April and I’m happy to use a bunch of polishes all at once!  My AVON order just came in this week so I’m psyched to try out my new yellow, green and blue!  Here’s what I used for this nail art:

Zoya ♥ Carmen

AVON ♥ Orange Creamsicle

AVON ♥ Inspire

AVON ♥ Garden Green

AVON ♥ Forget-Me-Not Blue

OPI ♥ Dutch ‘Ya Just Love OPI?

NYC ♥ Black Lace (and a striper brush to apply the accents)

Hope you’re all having a great weekend!  My weekend has officially plateaued- now that my nails are done I really need to start preparing my federal taxes.  What a downer!