French fleur

ooooo, I wanted something pretty today...

basecoat of an ANCIENT Orly Top2Bottom.
Fenchie in my Grammie's favorite: Revlon Cherries in the Snow.  

Konad plate m20 with Sinful Colors Snow Me White.  And last but never least SV!

I posted the camping trip pix about a week after the fact.  

Since that mani I've been in mommy mode running around getting the day to day stuff done with nakey fingernails.  

Today I screeched to a halt to spend some time making my nails pretty again.

It reminds me of a Meryl Streep line in the movie Death Becomes Her....

 "(sharp intake of breath in surprise and delight)   I'm a girl!!!" 

♥

Camping = Manis

A camping trip with a nail polishy friend means Manis!!!!  (My girlfriend prefers not to be named on the blog so we'll just call her Voldemort from here on out.) 

It's doing Mani's outside on lawn chairs while our hubs and kids are swimming!  

What could be better!!!! 

These were the lovelies we chose....  once again Cult Nails My Kind of Cool Aid... essie's Shine of the Times... Sally Hansen's Rockstar Pink... & Sinful's Dream On.

On the way to the camp ground we made a pit stop at Target where I just happened to find myself running through the nail polish collections and I spotted Shine of the Times!  It's reputation preceded it!  I'd never seen it in Target before!  To say I pounced on that last bottle wouldn't be an overstatement!  :D  

Camping was off to a REALLY good start!

 Voldermort was smitten too! What's not to like after all? 
Right over the way cool Cool Aid.

Shoot.  I don't even know how to describe what's going on here!  

Here goes a try: Chunky, iridescent, transparent, dusky loveliness!

Voldemort is rockin' this look, don't you agree?

I was feeling less subtle, more I'M CAMPING AND LIFE IS GRAND!!!    The florescent Dream On was my good start!

 Topped by the crazy little silvery gold, blue and pink sparklies in RockStar Pink!

I love camping, don't you?  

:)

Pinky Glitter French Mani

I've been having difficulties with my manis lately!  I don't think anything I put on there looks good!  I doubt I'm the first to whom this has happened. What cha gonna do?  So I finally settled on this one last night after running around with nakey nails for a week!

Put some Sinful's Easy Going on first.  Am kinda disappointed with how streaky it was/is.  Needed at least 2 coats, and some of the brush strokes still visible even after drying.  Not too fun!

Got outside to take pix during the "golden hour" or dusk.  On the tips I wanted a sparkly pink.  Sinful's Pinky Glitter fit the bill! 

It was honestly difficult to get a pic without a pock mark or stripey streak, even with the Seche Vite! 

But overall I do think it's kinda cute and better than au natural-with-nail-strengthener nails :)

Be well y'all!

Crackalackin!

My girl is in the other room watching Madagascar so "Crackalackin" is on my mind!  

This is my first Crackle purchase!

First I bought Sinful's beeeyooootiful color shifting polish.  I put it on and, hmm.  The tone wasn't quite right on me.  So I purchased Sally Hanson's blue Crackle and put that on top.  

Well it sure adds visual interest!

Funny, this hand seems more stringy than crackly!

I suppose Crackles have their place and I'm glad I did this.  But I'm still not exactly a crackle enthusiast.  :)  Seche Vite on top of course!  I think I'll always be a Seche Vite enthusiast!

Chickie Doodles

This past weekend I went camping with some awesome friends who all own chickens!!!  Backyard Chickens is the website on whose forum we all met.  What a blast.  The general kookiness of my nails suits the group's mentality to a T. 

This was after 2 days of camping so I didn't even bother to show the chickies on my other fingers.  They started to find their way off my nails long before this pic was taken.  

These pix are in front of my chicken tractor/coop/run!  There's Daisy Mae between my fingers and Ginger above my thumb!  My other thumb in the previous pic (with it's chickie footy prints wandering away from mama over to my ring finger) was the last one I did the lines for the footprints.  And it shows!  Used a push pin dipped in a drop of Sinful's Black On Black.  An Embossing/Dotting tool was used to create a flower on each pinkie nail.

Being impressed with the chickie and mama is not allowed cuz they're stickers!!!! (This chickie's foot has had enough apparently!)  A scrapbooking friend suggested stickers and I'm not good with fingernail art by any stretch of the imagination, so stickers and a topcoat of SV it was!

This was so much fun to do.  Revlon's Dreamer provided the blue backdrop. 
Chicken Dreamer.
ha ha ha ha!

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!

Wet n Wild Funky French

Wet n Wild is on sale for .99! For some reason I exhibited restraint and grabbed just one! Something about finances, was it? Pheh... let's get back to the important stuff... I nabbed a pink glittery named "Sparked"! I had my mani idea in my head before getting to the checkout...

I started with a base of SH Complete Salon Manicure "Purple Pulse" and I gotta say, I was rather disappointed that it took 3 coats to get it opaque. And is it just me or does this take a while to dry? Pretty enough color though, right?

Covered it with SV and then I got to put on the new Sparked! gasp!

Wow! Sparkly mayhem in a bottle! This is only one application! (this is going to be such a mess to take off! hee!) It was a real trick to get the camera to agree with what I am seeing. This next one is the closest I got. We gotta look at a few other lighting situations too...

The camera has gone completely awol for above pic, btw and is on the verge of completely making things up.

Ok, we've got the Wet n Wild. And another layer of SV. Now how about that funky french? Sinful's Black on Black is my pick!

I always use tape for frenches. For this one I made sure to put each strip of tape on my arm first.

Why in the world? Well hopefully any natural oils from my skin means the tape won't be as likely to remove sparkle! See the tape on my fingernail? Getting level tape lines, as opposed to slanted, can take a couple tries. Carefully press down the tape edges.

Paint over...

And yay! I'm glad the tape seems to work on the glittery layer!
Another coat of SV (gee my bottle is getting low, don't they make longer brushes?)

Cray cray mani love! WooHoo!

Pink & Black Funky French

This weekend had many nail polish experiments with lessons learned. Hoo boy but certainly NOT any I wanted to take pix of! ;) Although my nails are growing longer (unheard of for me in the winter season) a couple seem to be getting ready to peel and/or chip. So I threw some nail hardener on all of them tonight. But I still wanted to have fun so it occurred to me to do a nude sort of funky french.

There's SH's Insta-Dri in Instant Iris along with Sinful's Black On Black. And plenty of scotch tape and SV were also employed. One coat of SV after the Iris and another after the Black. What a difference it makes!

Must figure out a light box... it's a bugger trying to find reasonable lighting for my night-time manis!

Until I'm ready to take off this mani I'm going to carry my daughter's Hello Kitty notebook around. Who knew I was creating a manicure to go with Hello Kitty?!

All you other nail polish bloggers out there are so inspirational! Muwah!