Copper Pattern

Nothing to Disclose

Hello lovelies!

Welcome to Saturday! At least, Saturday where I am. 

Today I have a very simple look for you, because I'll have to take these off sooner rather than later to do my ABC Challenge prompt (Q for quilting). But I kind of like them anyway!

This started with two coats of Lights Will Guide You, an almost black green with flake emerald shimmer and copper hexes in three sizes. It's a beautiful polish (I'm all over anything copper or rose gold, lately) but it stained my touch-up brush something fierce, so I'm somewhat wary of what'll happen to my nails. I will update this post tomorrow after removal to tell you how it went!

The designs were all done with a liner brush, a dotter, and a medium detail brush and Penny Talk. I don't know where I was going with this pattern, it just popped into my head randomly! I would have liked for Penny Talk to be more yellow-toned to go with the hexes better, but from a distance you can't really tell.

Here is a thumb macro to show you the depth and the flake shimmer!:

Polishes used:

Cadillacquer - Lights Will Guide You

Essie - Penny Talk

butter LONDON - Nail Foundation (base coat)

Glisten & Glow - HK Girl (top coat)

liner brush

dotting tool

medium detail brush

You know what I like about Saturdays? PANCAKES. My current partner makes pancakes for his kids and I. I love pancakes almost as much as I love waffles, and I actually own a waffle maker, so that should tell you something.

xo,

J.

Puzzle Pieces

Nothing to Disclose

Hello lovelies!

Today's post is all about my Follow the Devil ABC Challenge prompt: P for 'puzzle'.

This is a pretty straightforward look. It took waaay longer than it should have, though.

I started with a base of two easy peasy coats of Where the Wild Things Are. It's a beautiful polish, but it's subtle, so you won't get the full gorgeousness of it through my photos. There's a macro down near the bottom that will hopefully help with that. I am always drawn to greyed-out blues / blue-toned greys like this. Add in tiny silver glitters and iridescent glitters and micro-shards and, well, you have a polish with my name written all over it. Plus it applied like a charm, requiring almost zero cleanup.

I then painted on the squares in white acrylic paint. And here's where it took forever: I had to go over them three times to get them to opacity. (And they still aren't COMPLETELY opaque.) Argh! Once done, I used a dotting tool to place the 'interlocking' bits of the puzzle pieces in mostly random order. So long as you have a dot per side of a square, you're good to go.

Finally, here's the macro I promised you. Check out the golden/green shimmer, too!

Polishes used:

Cadillacquer - Where the Wild Things Are

Duri - Rejuvacote (base coat)

Glisten & Glow - HK Girl (top coat; two coats to smooth out the bumps from the dots)

white acrylic paint

one-stroke brush for painting the squares

dotting tool

This cold I've got just won't kick the bucket. I'm a snifflemonster. I'm making tons of soups to try to rectify this, and I'm sleeping like a sloth, but still I sniffle. SNIFFLEZ 4 LYFE.

xo,

J.

Between Two Fir Trees

Nothing to Disclose

Hello lovelies! How are you doing today? It's -40˚ here (which is the same in Celsius AND Fahrenheit -- did you know that?) with the wind chill, so I'm hiding out inside by the fireplace and not moving if I can at all help it. ;)

Today's mani was a bit of a saga. It started chipping almost right away, which has nothing to do with the base polish -- Between Two Fir Trees, a stunning nude-pink base with speckled green and gold metallic and holo hex micro/mini glitter -- and everything to do with the layer of Glitter A-Peel I used. Something about that base and my nails are no longer getting along, it's like trying to stick two magnets of the same polarity together...

Anyway! Between Two Fir Trees went on amazingly well, especially given its pale base; two medium coats was all I needed for opacity. It isn't very rough, but you'll probably want two coats of top coat for better smoothness. I then used the name of the polish kind of literally and used acrylic paints for the fir trees, the snow, and the black cable between the trees. The little lightbulbs are done with nail polish.

I'm actually really digging this one. It wasn't super laborious to do, but it's nonetheless very cute. It helps that I had such awesome inspiration! I ordered four Cadillacquers altogether and this made me very excited to use the other ones...

Polishes used:

Cadillacquer - Between Two Fir Trees

Nina Ultra Pro - Punki Pink, Orange Flame, Solar Flare, Lime Light

Nail Pattern Boldness - Glitter A-Peel (base coat)

la couleur couture - 2013 (top coat)

acrylic paints

detail brush

long striping brush

Are there any seasonal designs you'd like to see me take on? I have one ABC Challenge prompt for this weekend (P for Puzzle), and then next week is Digital Dozen week again (yay!), but I'm totally curious as to what kinds of things you'd like to see throughout December. I'm a bit of a Grinch if I'm being totally honest, and don't much celebrate Christmas, so sometimes these things are not obvious to me...

xo,

J.