I’ve done a bunch of valentines nails so far this year, but I had to squeeze in another for our February Nail Art Ideas Linkup (more info on N.A.I.L. right here)! To make it sexy for the holiday I wanted to incorporate some red, a thermal heat-activated polish, and some hearts! The two main polishes I used here are Nicole by OPI Challenge Red-y and Black Sheep Lacquer Enter Sandman. I also did a white accent nail with a red heart outlined with black dots. The black dots make it look like a digital 8-bit heart! I really like it!

thermal hearts by craftynail

The thermal polish that I used over all the red nails, even over the white ones, is a translucent light grey color called Enter Sandman. It’s a thermal topper by Black Sheep Lacquer which is supposed to transform your base color and give it a black thermal effect. I didn’t get too much thermal effect in my pics though, sorry. It’s been so cold here in NY (huge snow storm in effect as I write this)! However, I did notice more thermal action during my kickboxing class yesterday when I was nice n warm (that’s a nice way of saying ‘dripping with sweat’)! I love the vampiness of this color combo. The red Nicole by OPI polish with the indie thermal on top looks really hot! Even the thermal over the white looks kinda cool! It has a grey faded newspaper look.

If you wanna see the other valentines manis for the N.A.I.L. Linkup then here are the links. They’re open for the whole month of feb if you’d like to enter your nails too…

FEBRUARY 2014

Red :

Valentines Day :

Gradient :

Glitter :

Hey everybody ! Happy weekend! I’m so glad it’s friday night…. woohooo! I have been a little stressed lately and I thought I’d type up a spam post for fun. To bring the blogging back to blogging. How about a conscious stream of random nail stuff???????

I just got some Nicole by OPIs in the mail! For free. Well, sorta kinda. I had to buy 8 boxes of Special K cereal to earn them. They had a promo here where if you had 3 UPC codes from their cereal boxes you’d get the red polish. But if you collect 8 UPC codes you get all three bottles (red, blue and pink). I entered my 8 codes onto their website and then they mailed them right out to me! I only had 2 Nicole by OPIs in my stash so I’m really glad to have 3 more. I have well over 300 bottles of polish but I only owned 2 Nicoles? I know, I don’t get it either. Here’s the three colors I got: ♥ Challenge Red-Y, ♥ Pros And Confidence, ♥ Be Ama-Zing!

Nice trio right?? Moving on to valentines day stuff….I was looking through my old pics and I found this cute photoshopped pic of an old valentines manicure. I used regular stickers on my nails for this design. The original post is here: Easy Valentines Day Nails. Lookit my cute little squared off nails! Awwws! They look so cute and funny compared to my current shape!

I have this MoYou London plate that I haven’t used yet and I wanted to show you! MoYou London sent it to me for review along with a pro plate and a scraper. It’s called Back to the 60’s – 01. I love all the funky hippie designs on here (it’s so reminiscent of the artistic hippie town that I live in). Since a lot of the designs on this plate are small and have blank spaces in them- they may be perfect for some diy decals!

The other two items I received for review are posted here. I must say, the MoYou Large size stamper they sent me is literally the bomb, I use it exclusively now. I never use my konad stamper anymore. Someone recently commented on one of my posts that MoYou carries a new grey stamper. It’s described as XL on their website so I guess it’s bigger than the one I’ve been using. You can check out their three stampers here: MoYou London NAIL ART TOOLS.

Also, MoYou has been pumping out more new collections …it feels like every week now! The most recent ones are SCI-FI and SCHOLAR. They even carry jewelry findings so you can stamp onto jewelry and make your own wearable nail art! Here’s the link for MoYou’s Stamping Jewellery. I love this idea and I’ve been thinkin of making my own stamped jewelry now too! My dad is a woodworker and when he has little scraps of wood sometimes he’ll make me pendants for earring n stuff. He just surprised me with a pair in fact (see pic below), so I think I’ll give it a go with nail polish! I will def post the results. OK, I feel extra Craftynail all of sudden!