You Set My Soul Alight

The genius of this name with this polish leaves me breathless!  Get it?  It's a lyric to the song "SuperMassive Black Hole" Behold the pictures and maybe you'll agree, it's a beyond perfect name!

And, I'm a twihard...  and the song is a part of a gorgeously shot scene in Twilight :)  

It's a black polish with marvelous little sparkles... 

 

The sparkles have a way of looking simply white in most circumstances.

 But if you get up close...

and the light is just right...

and your camera is cooperating, you can see lots of multi-color sparkles being sooo pretty :)  

A spectacular black polish if you don't like solid black.  SV tops off You Set My Soul Alight from Sandy's lil' company on etsy, Dandy Nails. I came across this polish on on Sheila's Pointless Cafe. She's got it bad for Dandy Nails and has swatched oodles of them!  Go check both sites out!  

Super fun awaits you!

xo

Removing Sparkle Polish

My friend Alona heard about this method to remove those impenetrable sparkle polishes...  And great googly-moogly, I was impressed!  So I took pix after the first two nails came out clean to show in case you've never heard of the technique.  I'm taking off the previously blogged Captivated mani!  Gosh these sparkly polishes really last!

You'll need yr nail polish remover, aluminum foil, scissors and cotton balls.  The ones sent with Cult Nails orders work perfectly!!!  Cut the foil so it's large enough to be wrapped around your finger tip.

Get some polish remover on a cotton ball.  Put the cotton ball over a nail and wrap your finger tip in the foil.  Repeat 9 times like a boss.   (a nutty boss trying to accomplish something with tin foil on her fingertips)  

Now look like a dorky boss as you flip through Pinterest.  

After 10 or so minutes, or a blink of an eye Pinterest time, firmly grasp a foil tip and rub it across your nail a few times, to rub off any remaining polish.  Remove foil from fingertip...

And hopefully you've got something like I did!  Upon removing the foil it's not immaculate, some cleanup is definitely necessary.  But the last time I removed a heavy sparkle/glitter polish it took a solid hour of rubbing and rubbing and rubbing my nails.  This cut my time by half at least!  I wrangled the hubs and got him to take pix, so who knows how long this takes normally! :D

I'm definitely going to do this again!

Color Me Captivated

Now that I have this dreamsicle of a lacquer from Cult Nails (SV on top), I can't beleive that I debated on whether or not to get it!  

The color is Captivated and it sings "Summer!!!!!!"

Makes me think beachy thoughts!  

 This is one of those polishes that when you see you hand in the middle of some mundane task, it makes you smile :) 

Once again, sparkly happy-making from Cult Nails!

Do you have any Cult favorites?

Hello Kitty!

The 5 year old girl's Hello Kitty birthday party needed a special mani.  But I was also making 2 cakes and doing the planning.  Enter press on nails!  I saw these while collecting goodie bag items and they seemed to be perfect for my needs!  Quick and easy!  ...and QUICK.

Cute lil' Hello Kitty press ons.  I did these this morning.  We just finished up the party and they are coming off of their own accord!  Well I didn't expect much more than that to be honest and I don't need them anymore either!  So the timing if short lived is pretty much right on!

Just used the press ons on my accent ring finger nail.  Painted the others with a base coat and then my newly acquired OPI La Paz-itively Hot - Matte!  I ♥ e-bay! You need at least 3 coats of that btw.  I noticed while taking these pix that I could see streaking and I did one coat with touch-ups.  But I love the matte and hot pink color together!  No top coat here of course or I wouldn't have that matte effect!  -which after all the buttercream frosting my fingers had to deal with, you can barely tell that this is a matte any more!  ha!

Isn't the glitter french mani part of the press on so fun?!  I thought about doing the rest of the nails like that and then I realized I could do that or we could get to our own dang party on time.  So I chose the latter :)  What a fun 5-year-old birthday party we had with you, Hello Kitty!

*************************************************

 

Addendum the next day:  Succumbing to peer pressure, I now post pictures of the cakes!  Hello Kitty is joined by her bud Chococat!

I've long had a passion for baking.  There's a personal reason I use "frosting" in my blog name!  :)  So my little girl's birthday is the perfect time for me to have fun.

 

Cray Cray rainbow cake inside both!  And Yay!  It turned out really well!  This is Kaitlyn's website for the rainbow cake.  I followed a link from there to Martha Stewart's website to get the recipe Kaitlyn used while doing a demo on the show (great clips from said show too).  This here is a separate site for a spectacular buttercream frosting.  Its a must!!!! The website is phenomenal.  I've also used the marshmallow fondant recipe with great success. (A passion = over sharing ideas with others. lol)

Ciao & Meow!

Seduced by the Cult

I spazzed out the most when I first saw Seduced! Have to do this sparkly first! Sweeet!

Red and Blue and Goldie Flakies having a party on my nails!

I left the Nail Magic on as an undercoat.  Put on my Sinful Black On Black.  Then Seduction!  Seche Vite on top naturally :)

 The deck = the perfect place for a party

Fun times are being had by all nails...

*sigh* I ♥ the Cult!

I'm in Cult Nails Heaven!

Weeeeeeeee!  Cult Nails had a sale and today I took delivery of 3 gorgeous laquers!  I'm all head in the clouds!  So after wiping many a galaxy off my nails I realized they could prolly use a break.  I put my Nail Magic Nail Hardener on there and am letting them be!  

Buuuuuuuut I'm soon going to have tough decisions to make!  Which brand new pretty shall I put on first?!?!?  Happy happy troubles! :)

 This is a close up of Seduction!  And the pic and following description is straight from Cult Nails

"Seduction - A sheer purple/red jelly top coat polish loaded with red and blue multichromatic flakes."

You'll find this under the "Limited Edition Colors" tab!

Up close and gorgeous Iconic.  Pic and following description straight from Cult Nails

"ICONIC is a deep berry creme with gorgeous red flakes and hidden gold shimmer throughout. Iconic is destined to become an instant classic." 

 Color me Captivated!  This pic from Cult Nails

can do all the talking.  No description even needed.

What AM I going to do? ;)

Galaxy Nails

So after the epic fail Sarah and I decided to go for galaxy nails!  I'm not even going to tell you how long we spent on the mani that-shall-not-be-named and this one.  But we had a spongetastically good time! We used so many colors I'm not even going to list them all. :p  I wish I took more than one pic of Sarah's nails in retrospect... What was I thinking?  It's so cool to see how other people do their nails!

Excuse me Sarah, your nebula is showing...

Wow!  All these galaxies came together in one dining room. 
How ever did we pull this off?

I wish I didn't dot on the additional stars!

Have fun in your own corner of the galaxy! TTFN!

Ack The Horror!

Seriously, first time water marbling is not for the faint at heart...
My friend Sarah and I talked a lot about primordial sludge as we laughed our way through this mess.
"At least we suck together" is a memorable quote of the day.  We think it came down to not using distilled H2O.  We're resilient, or exceptionally thick, because we do plan on trying again...  Sorry for the ugly hurt on your retinas...:)

Apparently friends do let friends paint their nails like this. 

  Look at this ancient worm fossil I worked so hard to recreate!

Lookin' Good!  and by good I mean not good at all...

 This was my best nail.

 This was Sarah's.

This is what we hope to never repeat.

And after I took the pic of this one Sarah hollered "The polish is still moving!"  

Next time will be better.

Fiery Frosting

I got to go see Hunger Games today!!!! Finally! I'm a big geeker so I knew I had to do something extra special with my nails...

 Thumbs up for Katniss Everdeen, the girl on fire!!!  Hee hee!!!! 

Did I ever have fun with this mani!

I used a sponging technique for this.  

 First I painted the cuticle side of my nail in Sally Hansen's Insta-Dry 

Lightening yellow.

Then I got out the makeup sponges and tore a small bit off.  Instead of tweezers I wound up using my cuticle clippers.  Before the yellow could dry I put a 2 drop puddle of SH Complete Salon Manicure Kook-A-Mango orange on paper (my work surface) and dabbed the sponge, held by the clippers, in it. 

You can see how I dabbed the excess off the sponge and onto the paper so I could control how much I was applying.  After the orange was as I liked it I maaay have put some SV on.   Next was making a drop or two puddle of Revlon's Top Speed Cherry.  Sponge, sponge, sponge and SV!  After that I went back and sponged some more orange on every nail, because it got lost between the yellow and red. You couldn't see it very easily.   It was a big improvement to sponge more on.  

 The above pic was taken at the wrong light setting so you can't see the different colors as well as in the later pix when the mani is done.

So now enters the little colored dots that most people use to price their stuff at their rummage sale.  

I drew flames, and cut them out using an Xacto knife. 

Then pressed the sticker onto my nail and painted over it with SH Xtreme Wear 

Black Out.  I peeled the sticker off immediately so the polish 

didn't get a chance to dry.  Then SV.  Repeat 9 more times!

Ta Da!  One geek ready to go to the movies!

As I was taking these pix, the hubs opened the door, leaned out and said "You are such a dork". 
Yeah and your point is...?
:)