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!

Patterned Native American Nails in Red

I’m excited that today is day 1 of April Nail Art Challenge!

Julie from Short And Sweet In Texas organized this month-long nail painting extravaganza!

The theme of Day 1 is RED.  So here’s my red manicure:

I used four different red polishes and a dotting tool to make the native american pattern.  To avoid having the glossiness distract from the design I then topped it off with one coat of my MASH matte top coat.  This was pretty easy to do… but because of lighting I couldn’t get a good pic!  It’s one of those manis that looks better in real life … we’ve all had them before! lol  Here’s the red polishes I used-

OPI ♥ Grand Canyon Sunset

Zoya ♥ Carmen

Orly ♥ Naughty

AVON ♥ Ruby Slipper

If you are interested in joining the nail art challenge – it’s not too late!  Just paint your nails and post them online!  It will be fun!   Here’s the info.

VIEW THE OTHER SUBMISSIONS HERE!!!!

Cool AVON products and Ruby Slipper polish

Let’s talk about AVON.  I have been using AVON products since I was a wee lass!  The catalogs are jam-packed with cool new products and they’re cheap!  Recently I have noticed that AVON has jumped on the nail art bandwagon and I couldn’t be happier.  I’m not sure why we don’t see more blog posts about avon products!?! Especially since they have a lot of cool new stuff like…

Nail Glitter in Iridescent or Brilliant Chrome-

Avon Nail Glitter

Crackle polish called Mosaic Effects Top Coat in 9 different colors-

Mosaic Effects Top Coat

6 different Matte polishes called Suede Nail Enamel–

Suede Nail Enamel

NAILWEAR PRO+ Nail Enamel in a ton of great colors and a new special collection called Femme Fatale-

Avon NAILWEAR PRO+ Nail Enamel

They also have a polish on their website called Change Artist Transforming Nail Color.  WOW what’s that all about??   The description says ‘Dual-ended package includes base color on one side and clear transforming top coat on the other’.  Man, I really hope my mom got me some AVON for Christmas!!

One last pic to share- here’s a pic of a holiday mani I did using Avon NAILWEAR PRO+ in Ruby Slipper.  I’m not usually a big fan of red polish… but Ruby Slipper is my cup of tea… it’s so pretty and shimmery!  I wore it by itself for a few days before I decided to jazz it up with some festive green n white.

Avon Ruby Slipper

Happy Holidays all… and let’s hope that the end of the Mayan Calendar doesnt put the kibosh on all our nail polishing and blogging.  See you again soon, I hope !