A little twist on a classic look

Today I am showing you some pictures of what I've been doing with my time lately. I finally got around to taking some photos. These are available for sale on ebay.

I really liked the Christmas Tree designs with the zig zag style trees and decided that would be perfect to do with mirco-beads since I have so many left from the Fish Egg Mani trend that was so hot last spring. I also took the time to use the Gelish Structure Gel to overlay the bead design. It makes for a smooth nail and keeps the beads completely secure! I have about a bazillion designs in mind for beads and other little nail art doo-dads along these lines.

Now, to the pictures!!

Freshening Up

One of the things I like the most about UV Gel polish is the fact you can wear regular polish over it. Three weeks is a long time to wear the same look. If you're anything like me, you need to change it up a little bit, at the very least from week to week.

One of my favorite ways to freshen up a UV Gel polish mani that feels "old" or boring is to use regular polish for nail art OVER your base color. I did just that to freshen up my wedding mani! Here it is on my wedding day.

Here it after a quick stamp with little glitter dot flower centers added. 

One of the most common things I see in my business is young ladies who cannot wear nail art during the week because of job restrictions. However, they come see me Friday afternoon - and I'll add nail art using regular polish for the weekend which they then remove using regular polish remover before going back to work on Monday morning. 

Freshening up your mani doesn't always have to be done to hide wear and tear! Have some fun with it!! 

Blue Ombre Gradient

Good Morning fellow nail art fans! I'm back to my obsession with blue and this time I'm really diving in to the color! I have blue ombre gradients that go from light blue to an indigo blue! Of course, I included glitter and shimmer galore because I can't help myself.

This is another one I tried the other night but changed it just a little bit because deep down I was unhappy with the original concept. I originally had the colors going from white to blue to dark blue to indigo and I think that was just too many colors and my nails aren't long enough to give a proper graduation to the color.

I genuinely love love love this gradient and I have a few sundresses this would go fabulous with come summer time!! I hope you enjoyed today's post and Thanks for reading!!

Blue Foil French

Good Morning and Happy Friday. No #FishEggMani today, I'm still a lot burned out on it after wearing it for five whole days. Instead, I'm bringing you a twist on the french mani that I did last night but the pictures didn't come out. It turns out that it's just as well they didn't. I came up with some tweaks to the original thought I had by alternating the colors.

I'm still in love with Orly's "Snowcone" and I was dying to try it as a french. Originally, my thought had been to just do the blue with the foil at the end, separated by the blue glitter stripe. Tonight I had the thought that it would be so much cooler to alternate the foil and the blue.

I'm definitely pleased with how much better these came out than my original design. I've long been a fan of adding color to the old fashioned "french" and dressing it up a bit. Apparently that's really trending these days and that makes me a little giddy to know I've been way ahead of this trend. 

I hope you enjoyed today's fun twist on an old favorite and thank you for reading!

Gel-ly Sandwiches

Good Morning and a wonderful Saturday to you! I'm soo excited about today's Nail Art. After removing my Emeral Fish Egg Mani, I also removed all my Gelish polish. Time for a new Gelish Manicure! After seeing the many "jelly" themed tweets and blog posts by Jeanette at the swatcholic I was completely inspired to see how a  "Gelly" sandwich would look using my Gelish.

For those that are not familiar with the term "jelly sandwich" it's a layering technique involving using "jelly finish" polishes with a layer of glitter in between. Now Gelish doesn't have a "jelly finish", however, it does have shades that are sheer which would work like a 'jelly', and some very nice glitters. You'll have to pardon the low lighting here - using flash and bright light, you just couldn't see any of the glitter or the effects that it actually has.

For this one I used my old favorite "Taffeta" and layered it over "June Bride". The silky finish of "Taffeta" over the glittery goodness is just stunning!! I love love love this!! So I'm going to show you another photo.

If you want to get a really close look - just click the pictures and you can see how great this effect is.

Then I decided to go ahead and stamp over it a tiger pattern using a berry polish and the glitter shows through that too which is just as amazing.

You can clearly see one of the larger pieces of holo glitter shining through the stripes on my middle finger and it's just amazing. I love this look and I think I'll be sporting it more often!

I hope you enjoyed today's Gelishicious Gelly Sandwich and thanks for reading!!

Emerald City Caviar

Good Morning and Happy Friday!! The weekend is finally here!! It has been a tough week for me as myself and the little one have been suffering from a lingering cold. We're finally on the mend and looking forward to getting out in the sunshine over the weekend!

I am doing another #fisheggfriday post today. I thought I'd do something just a little bit different than my normal post. Reading all the posts that have been done in the past few weeks, the single biggest complaint is how impractical it is. Beads flying off everywhere and it catching on everything. Which got me to thinking, what can I do to make the beads stick really stick?? I had a few ideas and decided I'd try them out and see how it all holds up.

Here is my nails just done with Sally Hansen's Xtreme Wear "Emerald City", on my right hand.

The same on my left. You'll notice I clearly do not take pictures very well using my right hand.

Here's my left hand after applying microbeads. I did this a little different than most of the DIY steps you see in the blogs. I let the entire mani dry and then, one nail at a time, used one thick coat of Seche Vite and sprinkled the microbeads, while it was still wet. I then pressed the beads down and trimmed as needed. I repeated the process for each finger. Once all the nails on that hand were covered in beads, I dabbed on a goat of glitter by laying the brush parallel to my nail as I dabbed rather than at a  perpendicular angle when I'm brushing on polish. I let that fully dry. Finally, I lightly brushed on a coat of old thick Seche Vite to really secure the beads. Here's my right hand.

My left hand, I apologize for the poor picture quality.

You can really see on the picture of my left hand that the final coat of thick Seche Vite took away some of the texture of the beads. This was not much of a surprise.  I noticed some times ago that old thick fast dry top coats can be great when applied to nail art that has texture and you would rather it not. You simply use your fresh fast dry top coat to seal in the design and when it is dry - apply the old top coat to give your nails a slick smooth appearance and texture. Sammasaurus also uses this technique. I was not unhappy with the look of this though. 

By the end of the day, I hated it. The beads really did catch on everything and it just felt awkward and wrong. I seriously regretted doing this on all ten of my fingers. The blue and green colors that the clear microbeads brought out of the polish were awesome, I managed to keep the beads on my fingers and not all over the place but it was still completely unwearable like this. Here it is again, three days later.

Virtually no difference in how it looked but still not nearly as wearable as I'd hoped. I think this is a doable as an everyday look if one restricts it to just an accent nail on the ring finger, which is our least used and weakest finger.. It truly was annoying because it was on ALL my fingers. 

I want to note here that I did remove it and I did NOT use acetone or any nail polish remover to remove this. I used my Gelish remover to get the beads off my fingers. I simply soaked a cotton ball with Gelish remover, laid it on my nail and wrapped the whole finger in foil. I let it soak for a full five minutes and the beads and most of the polish simply wiped off. It's also great for removing glitters the same way. I often use my Gelish remover to remove old acrylic enhancements for clients as well the Gelish polish it's designed to remove. I chose to use this product instead of Acetone because it's not nearly as rough on my nails and cuticles as Acetone is. The product is too expensive to be used simply as a polish remover - but it certainly save time and work when removing more difficult things like a nail full of microbeads that are swimming in that much topcoat or glitters and jelly sandwiches. The remover is available on Sally Beauty Supply's website. Larger sizes are available through independent distributors of Nail .Harmony products.

I hope you enjoyed reading about my experiment today and Thank You for reading! Don't forget you can follow "Fish Egg Friday" on twitter with the hashtag #fisheggfriday. 

Hearts and Brides

Good Morning! I hope your Sunday is going well, I apologize for the lateness of my post but I'm a bit sick. With that in mind, I'm going to really short today. Enjoy!

Here I stamped the hearts in red, then stamped over them again in white to give the design the illusion of depth.

That's all I have for today, I hope you enjoyed. Have a great day and thank you for reading!

Bridal Roe!

Good Morning and Happy Friday!! Well after all the fun I had last week doing "Fish Egg Friday" I decided to do it again today. Also, I am starting a new theme for all my nail art - Bridal! So today, you're getting a little bit of a two-fer!

On to the mani!! I named this one "Bridal Roe" because firstly, it's a bridal mani and secondly because salmon is pink and today's fish eggs are definitely pink!

The base color here is OPI's "Kiss Me On My Tulips" and the beads are actually clear which lets the underlying mani colors show through. I've seen how awesome clear beads are over white (for winter/christmas) but they are even more stunning over color!

Here's a few macro shots of the "fish egg" part.

There is a little trick to getting the beads to lay flat and neat on the nail. The pictures below are the "tool" you need to do it and how to use it. 

I have no idea what the tool is called but I have several that came with nail art kits, like dried flowers, rhinestones and even a few puffy nail stickers. It looks similar to a cuticle pusher but rubber end makes that impractical. They are sooo handy for applying anything other than polish to your nail!

Do this step after you've sprinkled or dipped your nail in beads and tapped off the excess.

I got the inspiration for this one from last week's Fish Egg Friday Rant. French Manicure or Pink and Whites - it just seemed the perfect thing to make my statement! All this week has been a variety of Bridal Runway shows reminding me that Bridal season is here!! Yay! "This coming week, I'll be showing you the "Bridal Manicure" I"ll be sporting at my own wedding this summer! Have a Groovy Fishy Weekend! Thanks for reading!! If you did a fish egg Mani - let me know in the comments where to find it and I'll link to it here!

Other ladies posting for Fish Egg Friday:
NailArtAddict
Salla at Polish 'em
The Lacquerologist
Color is Magic
Thoughts of a Midwestern Girlie Girl
Nail Loopy
The Rock Chick Rambles
I Like To Talk Alot A few days old - but she did more than one rockin fish egg mani!

I'll be updating throughout the day since today's Fish Egg Friday is not an organized event like last week's. You can also share/follow FishEggFriday Mani's on twitter with the hashtag #FishEggFriday

Who doesn't love a good matte look?

Good Morning and Happy Friday Eve!! I stayed up a little late last night doing this mani and my mani for "Fish Egg Friday". Starting tomorrow, the theme for all my nail art for the next week (if not longer) will be Bridal! What better way to start than with a caviar mani??

That all begins tomorrow, I have not forgotten today's Nail Art!! I have been dying to try a matte stamping design and I finally worked out one that I really really like!! I hope you do tooo.

I am just sooo in love with this look!! That's "Riveting" from China Glaze's Hunger Games Collection. It's second only to "Ruby Pumps" as my favorite polish. Adding the matte top coat was really what made this look for me.

You know I took more than a few pictures of this, so I'm going to show them all.

That's all I have for you lovelies today. Don't forge that this week is bridal week and spread the word to those friends looking to get married this summer! ;)

10 Little Bunnies in a Row

Happy Saturday everyone! I hope your Holiday Weekend is off to a wonderful start! Tonight is the big night when many parents and children will be gathering around the table to color eggs to hide tomorrow! I know that's what we're doing tonight. This will be the first year that my youngest child will get to color eggs. Because of the huge age difference between her and her next oldest sister, it has been a few years since I've done this. I'm very excited and looking forward to this family activity!

In honor of the Big Hunt to begin tomorrow, I have Easter Bunnies for you!! I don't have very many pastel colors in my collection and where I was lacking, I mixed up some acrylic paint to fill in the voids!

I easily could have taken 10 pictures of these cuties, but I think I will stop at just posting these two. The other two I have are pretty much identical to these two.

I hope you enjoyed my little bunnies today and tomorrow's nail art will try to include everything that makes Easter special to those that celebrate it.

Easter Chicks

Happy Good Friday everyone! All Friday's are good though, aren't they? I guess today is just an extra Good day then!

Today's Nail Art is another simple but adorably cute one. It really does make me go "Squeeeeeeeeeeee". Not just because they are cute on  their own, but I love lil chicks and we do have chickens that we let run free across our property and every so often we don't take the eggs and let a chicken roost on them to get cute little chicks!   Now on with the cutness!

This is one of those nail arts where you can see how the length of the nail really changes how the design looks. I did it the same technique across all the nails but I especially love this on the short pointer finger. The design is clearly ideal for shorter nails!! You don't see that very often either!

I hope you enjoyed my cute little chicks and if you have short nails, you now have some hope for wearing some fun nail art!

Pop Goes the Chickie

Good Morning and Happy Friday Eve! I've just about exhausted my ideas for Easter Patterned nail art and now I'm moving onto other things within that Easter Theme. Today's nail of the day is Easter Eggs with a hatching chick as an accent nail. I'm going to just get right to the pictures today and let them speak for themselves!

I have no name for the purple, it was part of a "Sally's girl" neon collection but I felt this one should have a bright color rather than a pastel color. The yellow for the chick is Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear, , and the rest of the chick I did in acrylic paint as well as the designs for the "eggs"

That's all for today's nail art. I spent quite a bit of time getting this chick right. I am not telling how many times I had to re-do that nail. I was determined to get it right, even going so far as to looking up tutorials about doing chick nails. I am glad I stuck it out,  I'm more than happy with how it finally came out. Always seems to be worth the effort to do and re-do as many times as I need until I'm finally happy with it.

Will you be coloring eggs this year? 

Eggs-cellent Pattern for Easter

Good Morning and Happy Hump Day!! I hope your Wednesday is off to a groovy start. Today I'll be spending my morning teaching at my daughter's cooperative pre-school and we'll be making Easter Baskets for our Easter Egg Hunt next Monday! With that in mind, today's Easter themed pattern is going to be eggs!!

Please forgive the visable dryness of my skin in these photos. I spilled some acetone on my hands while refilling my remover pump and it took several days of soaking my hand in hot oil lotion overnight to get my skin re-hydrated! 

That's all for today and the end of the series of patterns. I'll be continuing the Easter theme but taking it in a different direction!

One Little, Two Little, Three Little Bunnies

Happy Tuesday! I hope your week is off to a great start!!

Today's Nail Art is along the same line's as yesterday's! I used a similar technique and instead of little orange beaks, I did little bunny ears! This is pretty self explanatory so I'll just get to the pictures!!

I did these over a super light pink frosty Gelish but you can use a bolder color to really make the pattern pop.  You'll notice that this week my pointer finger is short and although it gives me fits to have my nails so uneven, I did it to demonstrate how each of this week's design look on a short nail and a longer nail in one picture. It's not such a dramatic difference on these patterned ones, but it's much clearer on some of the other nail arts I have in store for you this week.

Have a great day and I hope you enjoyed!

Chickie Chickie

Good Morning and Happy Monday!! Today is the first day of Easter week and I'll  be doing an entire Easter themed series of nail art this week. I'm going to start with Easter Patterns. All of these are hand painted and not stamped unless otherwise indicated.

I'm going to start with a lil chickie pattern I saw on YouTube. I thought this was the cutest thing ever!!

Not very complicated but I thought this was just too cute to pass up!! Who doesn't love a buncha baby chickens?

Fly Butterflies Fly

Happy Saturday to you! This morning's nail art is inspired by a few different things. The first one is the gazillion of butterflies we have everywhere happily flitting around a bunch of flowering weeds we have here and there. It adds to the ambiance, love to sit in my yard and just read a book in the sunshine! Add that to the many butterfly tutorial on YouTube and pinterest - there's no way I can NOT do at least one.

I think I went a little too over the top with the dots, but I can always do less dots going forward. 

That's going to be it for today - I hope your weekend is off to a great start!!

Toning it down!

Good Morning and Happy Friday Eve! Today's nail art is not super bold and a bit toned down. I had a suggestion from an animal lover friend of mine who is not allowed to wear super bold nail art at work. A challenge!! Show the animal love and still be work conservative. This is what I came up with.

This is another one that depending on how conservative you need to be, you can do this on one accent nail and then just a regular french on the rest or you can do all ten fingers like this.  I am considering doing a version of this on all ten fingers...we'll see.

Black, White and Dotted All Over

Happy Hump Day! Today I bring you another nail art from my pinterest "to-do" list".  I seriously considered doing this one using microbeads, but decided against it until I was sure I could do it using a plain old dotting tool.

There is something just inherently cool about the design and the fact that it's all done in dots. Simple but funky at the same time. What I find interesting is that you could use this design as an accent nail and do the rest of your nails with just the bottom dots........or do all 10 of your nails using the whole design like the pinterest photo.

I think if I do this design using micro-beads, I'll have to modify this design a bit, make the top "half" into a whole and center that on the nail more. Maybe use rhinestones for the large dots across the free edge? Definitely add that to my "to-do" list. 

Funny how I keep doing designs from my list, but the list keep getting longer!!

Wallpaper Butterflies

Good Morning and a groovy Tuesday to you!  This morning I have another attempt at a nail art I saw on pinterest. I really enjoyed doing this one. I have a fab striping brush that is perfect for doing straight stripes. It doesn't work well for anything but stripes but today that's an awesome brush to have! Now on to the pictures!

One more just because I can.

This was relatively simple to do. I painted the nails white, then using a striping brush, I painted stripes on each nail in different colors. Using a stamping plate, I then stamped on a few butterflies. Can you see which one has an upside down butterfly? I did do that on purpose, really I did. 

You'll notice that I'm back to using lone nails rather than my own. I just couldn't bear to give up my Tiger manicure just yet. Hardly anyone has even seen it, so I'm going to wear it a few more days!! 

I'm feeling Tigerish..How About You?

Happy Monday everyone!! This morning's nail art manicure is one I'm genuinely excited about!!  I was inspired by an comment on my personal facebook page about yesterday's blog post. I am so happy with how this came out that I got a little more creative with my pictures than I usually do!!

I'm holding a hand carved gazelle Tommy's parents got in Africa. I thought it fitting  for the theme.

There I'm holding a carved Lion. I cropped the head out of the picture since it's not actually a Tiger and to maintain some halfway decent proportions to the photo.

This one was relatively simple to do. I have the perfect golden/orange nail polish by Milani, Metallic Mango. Using a make-up sponge, I sponged on Milani's Golden Goddess  at a diagonal. Finally, using another make-up sponge, added white to the corner of each nail.  Using one of my newly purchased stamping plates I stamped on the stripes in black. A nice top coat of Seche Vite and *POOF* I have Tiger Nails!

I hope you enjoyed and if you gave this a try - post the link to it in the comments!! (Links to anything other than Tiger Nails will be deleted so be good!)