Summer nails for my winter blues.

Hi everyone! I finally sat my butt down and did a quick mani last night before i headed out to a hockey game. I wanted something bright and colorful as i am very tired of winter.

I received some fimo fruit slices i ordered in the mail and i have been very excited to give them a try. They applied a lot easier than i thought they would. Sometimes when i take a quick glance at my hand i think the watermelon is a lady bug and the rest of my fingers are leaves. Maybe that will be a mani in the future!
I apologize for the state of my cuticles, i did not clean them before i took the picture. =(

 I went to a Wal Mart near my friend Mandy's house and hit the mother load! I have been looking for the Wet n Wild Coloricon palettes everyone has been loving but i haven't been able to find any for the life of me. That all changed as I found two last night that i've been wanting, I'm Getting Sunburned and Don't Steal My Thunder. I think i may have done a little victory dance when i saw them, i hope no one was watching!

The colors are so shimmery and they are also very pigmented. You can enlarge the photo for better detail. Wet n Wild always surprises me with the amazing quality of their products, especially for how cheap they are.

I also picked up a Wet n Wild polish "Party of Five Glitters" and Sally Hansen Salon Effects in Check It Out. This is the first time i have seen the Salon Effects in a store in Canada so i was extremely excited when i saw the display case. I sure hope these work better than the ones i bought on eBay.

The Wet n Wild polish has five colors of glitter in different sizes. If you look at the full size image you will be able to see it closer. I can't wait to use it!

SUPASTAR!

First time attempting to paint the tips of my nails. Pretty stoked that i actually got them straight on both of my hands first try! I have really shaky hands so i am pretty amazed with myself.
My ring finger is Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in "Rockstar Pink" and all of my other fingers are Nicole by OPI "Yellow, It's Me". I added a top coat of some glitter and a layer of Seche Vite and voila! I picked up these colors the other day and thought they really suited each other. 

I had a pretty productive day today, ended up cleaning my whole house and purged my closet. My sister will be super happy about that. I was planning on hitting the treadmill today but yesterday i injured myself being an idiot. I thought it would be a good idea giving my boyfriends chin up bar a go. Pretty sure i pulled every single muscle in my armpits haha. I have been walking around like Mary Katherine Gallagher with my hands in my armpits.

I just purchased a lot of plain fake nails from eBay. I am going to give fake nail painting/decorating a go. I see so many lovely designs out there but i know there is NO way in hell that i would be able to replicate a design using my left hand on my real nails. I have never used fake nails before so hopefully they are decent!

My poor bank account.

A glimpse at a few things i picked up today at Shoppers Drug Mart. All the polish i picked up today was on clearance! I am a super cheap shopper so if i see a bargain bin you better move out of my way because i will plow you over.

From left to right:
- Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear "Strobe Light"
- Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear "Rockstar Pink"
- Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear "Shooting Star"
- Nicole by OPI "Yellow, It's Me"

The Nicole polish is a matte which i am really excited to try as i have never used a matte polish before. All the Sally Hansen polishes have crazy amounts of multi color glitter in them, if you enlarge the picture you will be able to see it better.

I also picked up a few other random items. There are a ton of products out there for hardening & strengthening your nails so i thought i would give one a try. I picked a brand called Witchcraft which i have never heard of before. It is a protein hardener that you can wear under your nail color or on your bare nails. The box says this formula will help stop nails from splitting and flaking. The tips of my nails tend to flake a bit after wearing polish for long amounts of time so it will be interesting to see if this formula helps.

Next in line is Sally Hansen's Insta-Dri drops. I have seen people using speed dry drops on their nails and was interested in using them as i always have a tendency to smear and ruin my polish when i think its dry and it really isn't.

I have been looking for a good hand repair product and i came across Sally Hansen's Manicure In A Minute. I am extremely low maintenance so if a product claims to work in minutes i am all for it. The formula contains vitamins A, E, C, grape seed oil & chamomile. The consistency is very gritty like the feeling of rubbing sand on your hands and it smells like oranges. It actually reminds me a lot of the hand scrub you would find in a mechanics shop, if you have ever used that stuff. It smells exactly the same. I used this product tonight and it did make my hands feel extremely soft. You can definitely tell there are a lot of oils in the formula because your hands become super shiny.

Last is a gloss stick by Quo in the shade Blaze. It's a shiny/shimmery coral color, sorry i didn't think to take a swatch of it. This lip gloss smells SO good and it goes on really well. I have never used a lipgloss in stick form before and I would definitely buy one of these again.

Tomorrow i am going to post how to make and apply a honey & aspirin mask. I came across this nifty little trick a few weeks ago and it really is amazing for your skin. I was skeptical when i first read about it because it sounds super weird, but it has cleared up so many red spots i had on my face and gives me this really great glow to my skin!

Practice makes perfect, right?

I tried out the Konad stamping system last night. I didn't realize it was going to be such a messy pain in the butt! Everyone makes it look so damn easy. I was getting pretty frustrated, then again i was trying it at 10pm, and decided instead of doing all of my nails i was only going to do a couple accent fingers. Before i received my kit I searched google on what brands of polishes work with Konad, as i did not buy any of the special polish. The list i used can be seen HERE.

A lot of the Sally Hansen Xtreme wear colors were listed so i tried a few of those first. I tried Black Out and found that it was too sheer for me. I happened to have another black, it was an Art Deco nail art bottle. I figured why not give that a shot and it actually worked a lot better. The Art Deco polish was a lot thicker than the Black Out. 

I used Konad plate M56. I chose the middle image as well as the heart shaped pattern on top. For my base coat i used two coats of Xtreme Wear in Twisted Pink. I then applied the Art Deco black to the heart shaped print and applied it to the tips of my index and thumb on both hands. It was really hard trying to figure out the best way to line up the stamp to my nail but after a few tries i started to get it straighter and straighter. I have a feeling this stamping shiznit is going to just take a lot of practice but eventually i know i will make it my bitc....female dog.

I then used Xtreme Wear White On to apply the bow. I placed it on my nail so that it was overlapping the heart pattern just a tiny bit. The white polish i used was a little sheer as well but i had no other whites to try. You can see a bit of the black hearts underneath the bows but nothing too crazy. Ontop i added a layer of Wet n Wild Kaleidoscope and then added a top coat of Seche Vite (I LOVE THAT CRAP!).

Once again this photo was taken on my phone.... I do have a nice camera i swear! It seems every time i do anything with my nails i am either running out the door after wards or going to bed. I guess i really don't have an excuse to go to bed early anymore, as i am jobless. Maybe i will end up being the next Nick Twisp and have a rebellious alter ego, hopefully without the gross mustache.

My corneas are on strike.

As some of you may know i have recently become jobless, my choice of course. This decision has ended up leaving me extremely bored which has ended up forcing me into intense hours of web surfing. I'm talking really intense, when you've gone cross eyed and you get that burning sensation in your eyeballs. Probably not healthy for someone who is already as blind as a bat. 

There was one positive thing that did come out of all the hours of frying my brain cells, i somehow stumbled upon many blogs focused on nail art. It was weird i was so intrigued as i have never really been interested in my nails, especially intricate designs & applications that would usually involve going to a nail salon for hours. I think what appealed to me most, a lot of the techniques i used when i painted canvas i could use on my nails. Weird to compare two totally different things, but it's true. The reason i gave up painting was because of time constraints and the fact no one ever wanted to pay you for the amount work you put into each piece. It was so frustrating but with this new found love of nail art i can still express my creative side which really has been trying to escape for a long time.

After reading many tips and tricks i went out and bought the supplies i needed, tried a few techniques on my nails and ended up getting a lot of compliments on the results from friends and strangers. People keep asking me "HOW DID YOU DO THAT!?" so I decided why not start a blog that every one can see so i can share my experiences with others!

Anyways, enough rambling (there will be a lot more to come don't you worry). Here are two pictures of my first attempts at some nail designs. I am sorry these pictures are so awful, both were taken on my phone.

 First attempt at water marbling. I followed tutorials here: http://www.youtube.com/user/SimpleLittlePleasues. The videos are super easy to follow and the result is always a lot of fun. For the colors i used Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in "Black Out" & L.A Colors Color Craze in Live and a deep hot pink.

Here i used Love & Beauty in "Unique" as the gold base coat and then when that was dry i did a dark glitter purple tip in L.A Girl "Dark Purple". I did not like how it looked so i created a fade down my nail using the tip of the polish brush like a sponge. I added a top coat of Wet n Wild "Kaleidoscope" and then stuck on small round loose glitter i bought at Michaels on the tips. It created a gradient effect with the glitter which is kind of hard to see in my awful picture.

After seeing so many awesome designs made by using nail stamp sets,  I ended up ordering a Konad stamping set off eBay, which arrived today! I am going to play around with that and hopefully come up with something worth showing off. =)

Thanks for reading everyone!