31 Day challenge: Roses and Lace

Hello Readers!

Today's prompt for the 31-Day Challenge is flowers! For such a seemingly easy prompt, I kind of had a hard time pinning down exactly what I wanted to do. Finally I decided to go with a look inspired by a tea cup.

My base color here is Sinful Colors "Mint2beCool". 

I have a small collection of pretty little teacups. There's just something about pretty teacup patterns that makes me swoon a little bit. This manicure was loosely based off of this teacup pattern:

wayfair

My roses pattern came from a Bundle Monster plate from the "Secret Garden" collection. I have a lot of different flower patterns, but for this mani I really wanted roses that  I could fill in, and apparently this is the only plate I have that has that:

I also used a plate I got for about $.75 off of Aliexpress. I bought it for all of the beautiful lace patterns, but the quality of it is not fantastic. Half of the time when I was stamping the lace onto my nails it didn't pick up completely. I noticed that the plate doesn't seem to be as deeply etched as the name-brand plates that are available. Here it is, though:

 It seems like ordering off of aliexpress is kind of a mixed bag. I've purchased plates that are of great quality, and then plates that are... not so great, but usually at least usable. This one fit that category: definitely pretty, useable, but it takes a little extra TLC.

Thanks for stopping by! Be sure to check out the other floral manis for the challenge over here:

An InLinkz Link-up

31 Day Challenge: Soft Gradient

Hello Readers!

For today's 31-day challenge, the prompt is gradient nails. The last of the "color" challenges, gradient is a lovely theme to wrap up this section of the prompts.

 I used a few Sinful Colors shades to create my gradient nails: "Lie-lac" (pictured), "Mint Apple" (green) and "Beaches and Cream" (offwhite). In the past I have been a bit heavy handed with my gradient attempts, so I decided to go with lighter colors this time since they always seem to be so lovey when other people do them. 

For my stamping, I used a plate I bought from Aliexpress (not sure if it's a dupe for anything):

So this plate was the inspiration for this mani- I thought the colors would mesh well with the lovely top row of patterns. But you notice... the top row of patterns do not appear on my nails. Unfortunately, the "love" and ampersand surrounded by leaves are all much too wide to fit on my nails. I suppose I could have attempted to shrink them, but I didn't think of it when I was doing my mani and I've never actually tried to shrink an image before. I did try to get the cute arrow images on my nails... and failed a lot of times. It turns out those long, skinny lines like to bend when you try to stamp them. I later realized that I could have fixed this issue by turning the image into a decal to make it all stay put. Still, I will note that the images on this plate are etched well and I didn't have any problems getting them onto the stamper, I just need to work on my stamping skills. >_<  

I did, however, manage to get the cute little rose and vine pattern onto all of my other nails. 

In the end I decided to use a swirly image from Bundle Monster's Secret Garden Collection on my accent nail:

Thanks for stopping by! Be sure to take a look at the other takes on a gradient design here:

An InLinkz Link-up