Crumpets Nail Tarts: Under the Sea

Hello Readers!


It's Friday again, which means it's time for another 26 Great Nail Art ideas post, and this time around the prompt is "water". An appropriate prompt for the beginning of summer, am I right?

I decided to take this opportunity to use the cute octopus images on the MoYou London "Animal" plates, because I've been wanting to use them forever!

So I started this mani with two fingers painted with "Cinderella" (3-4 coats) and two "Let's Playa" (two coats).

As previously mentioned, the octopus images come from the MoYou London "Animal 01" plate. I've previously used the flamingos and the colorful fish on this plate, but have never tried out these adorable octopi so I was excited to get to do that!

Of course, I had to use the Bundle Monster + Twi_star plate for the water pattern on my middle two nails. I've been using this plate a lot lately, especially for that specific pattern. It's so darn useful- not only can it make water ripples, but it's also great for making an easy marble look.

So then, let's talk about the middle finger. I decided to do a composite here of some different stamping images, and this time I figured it would be easiest to do this off of the nail. This is because the images with long, skinny lines are really easy to warp when stamping them onto your curved nail, and I really didn't want to have to deal with wiping them off and re-stamping, especially since I had the water patteren stamped onto my nail.

So, here's how I created this look. First, I stamped the "Under the Sea" phrase from the twi_star plate onto my silicone mat. Normally I wouldn't stamp images with words onto my mat, because if you are reverse stamping the image will end up backwards, but since I wasn't filling the images in at all it didn't matter.

Next, I took one half of the double line image and stamped it above the phrase, the below the phrase. The middle space in the double line image (second image on the top row) wasn't quite wide enough to fit the phrase, which is why I stamped the top and bottom halves separately.

Finally, I simply added topcoat to all of that, and when it was dry I applied it over my nail in one piece. Much easier to do that stamping on the mat than on the nail- because when you stamp onto the mat you can just stamp straight down without worrying about warping the lines or having them fold on you.

So, I really wanted to try using the chameleon flakies from Born Pretty that I recently reviewed with a masking technique. So after my nails were completely dry, I put liquid latex over the middle part of my middle nail and sponged some flakies onto the top and bottom portions. It's kind of hard to tell, because the flakies have a subtle effect over light polishes. I want to try this again another time over a dark polish though, as it seems to have worked even though it's hard to see.


I hope you enjoyed this oceanic look for today's Crumpet's Nail Tart's post! Be sure to check out the link-up below for more water themed looks!

An InLinkz Link-up

Simple Sunday: Purple Iris

Hello Readers!


It's Sunday again, so I have another Simple Sunday manicure for you today, that uses only the basic stamping technique this time.

Actually, my original plan for this mani was to do some double stamping on my ring finger nail, but I didn't like the way it looked on my right hand so I decided to ditch it for the left.

I have a pretty simple color palette here as well; I decided to use the Sinful Color "Easygoing" to stamp with as well as for the base for my ring finger.

The ring finger image comes from this Born Pretty Store plate, which has a ton of lovely, detailed flower images. I chose the iris image because irises in the spring always make me smile. Growing up, my mother had the whole front garden filled with beautiful purple irises and day lilies. I remember when we sold the house she decided she wanted to re-do the garden and tasked my siblings and I with removing them. Have you ever tried to remove a huge patch of bulb flowers? We quickly found it was not an easy task. Those flowers have staying power!

The sort of geometric/tribal print on my remaining fingers is from a Bundle Monster/ Blogger collaboration plate with Beaching Nails.


I hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend, and that my American friends are having a wonderful Memorial Day. Do you have any special plans for the holiday tomorrow? Let me know in the comments!

City of Rome ft. MoYou London Scandi

Hello Readers!


Today's #clairestelle8challenge prompt on instagram was one that really made me stop and think, browse through my pinterest board of the stamping plates I own to find inspiration, and even do light research on google. I knew I wanted to choose a specific city for the "cities" prompt, rather than doing a generic city look, but I had no idea which city to choose!

In the end, I was inspired by the Colosseum image on my Scandi plate to base my mani after the famous city of Rome. I decided to pair my images with a marble pattern you might expect to see there, as well as a flower popular in Roman mythology as well as the city itself: the poppy.

I started most of my nails with two coats of Sinful Colors "Snow Me White". On my ring finger, I have 4 coats of "Cinderella" for my base.

The Colosseum image comes from the MoYou London plate "Scandi 03", which has a lot of great landmark buildings from around the world. I've used a few of them already in previous manis; the Golden Gate Bridge, La Basilica de la Sagrada Familia, and some of the textures, so I wanted to choose something I hadn't done before.

My poppies come from a Bundle Monster plate, from the blogger collaboration collection. This is a really gorgeous plate that I've also used a ton of; one of my favorites was this spring daffodil look.

To get the marble texture, I used a different Bundle Monster plate from the Blogger Collaboration plate; this time the Twi_Star plate with all the mermaid stuff. It's supposed to be a kind of water texture, but I thought it would also be perfect to do an easy marble look.

I finished the look off with a couple of studs. I hope you enjoyed this look! If you'd like to see more city themed manis, you can find them on the #clairestelle8may tag on instagram.

30 Days of Color: The Rainbow Fish

Hello Readers!

Today's post is for the 30 Days of Color Challenge, where there are weekly prompts and we are encouraged to break out our unused polishes to fulfill the prompt.

This week's prompt is "Rainbows". Since I recently did a rainbow-themed mani, I really wanted to do something different than the classic rainbow look. I ran through a few ideas in my mind (Noah's Ark? The Reading Rainbow?) before settling on a "Rainbow Fish" theme.

The Rainbow Fish is a children's story about a fish with very colorful scales.  Here's a picture for reference:

For this mani, I started out with a base of the Sinful Colors polish "Kommotion." This is a seriously gorgeous polish! I did two coats here; at first it looks like it's going to be a little sheer but after two coats it wasn't a problem at all. 

All of my stamping images for this mani came from the Bundle Monster Blogger collab plate with Twi_star. I simply made decals out of the scale image and filled in some of the scales with jewel tones, which was really fun to do, and then stamped the water and fish patterns on my other nails with silver stamping polish.

Be sure to check out the rest of the "rainbow" themed manis in the link-up below. :)

26 Great Nail Art Ideas: Red and Pink

Hello Readers!

Today's post for 26 Great Nail Art Ideas is based around colors: red and pink. Although it's not quite February yet, red and pink together made me get stuck on Valentine's Day themes so I went with it.

I also decided to try a little bit of assisted freehand because it's been a while since I've done any kind of freehand on my nails. This is another mani that uses a few plates, but let's get into the polish first:

So pretty simple here. The OPI "Red My Fortune Cookie" goes on a bit sheer at first; it's a sort of jelly formula, but at two coats it was enough for me and super shiny! 

Simple Sunday Jan 1, 2017 with Bundle Monster Blogger Collab

Hello Readers!

I almost didn't end up doing a Simple Sunday post today because of New Year's Eve, but our plans fell through so I figured I might as well paint my nails. ;)

Today's mani is simple in that it uses only two polishes and just one stamping plate, but fair warning about stamping these images- it is helpful to have a few tricks up your sleeve for these delicate designs!

For one, clear stampers definitively help when you are going for a half-moon type look because it's a lot easier to see what you are doing. But the other issue is that these delicate lines can be finicky and they like to come up off the nail when you lift your stamper back up after applying them. To remedy this, you can press the stamper straight down (with no rolling) over the nail, and hold it there for just a couple of seconds before lifting back up. This will give the stamping polish a chance to stick down firmly to the nail so it won't lift back up with the stamper.

My polish palette is super simple today, with just the periwinkle color and my favorite white. I did three coats of the OPI polish, though I might have been able to get away with two.

Finally, I used images from this plate for my stamping. I love the little half-moon lacy shapes on this plate.

Happy New Year to all of you! Here's hoping 2017 brings you lots of joy.

26 Great Nail Art Ideas: Christmas Preperations

Hello Readers!

Today's post is for the 26 Great Nail Art Ideas challenge. The prompt is "Christmas Preparations", and one of my favorite ways to prepare for Christmas is to make festive sugar cookies! So my mani today represents a holiday cookie jar of sorts, with a few varieties of sweets:

I have some macaroons and two varieties of sugar cookies on my nails. I kind of ended this mani feeling like maybe it was a little too busy, even for me (ha ha), and wishing I had done things a little bit differently. I should have included a "white space nail", maybe painted white with just a snowflake design stamped half-way down to give a little bit of a rest to the eyes. Maybe instead of the Christmas tree cookies. But, I don't really have time to change it now so it's staying as is, like a peek inside of a cookie jar. 

Here is my polish palette:

I started off my cookie decals with a jelly/glitter polish to add some extra fun to the design. I will say, these sugar cookie designs were a pain to fill in. The teeny tiny border around the frosting was the part that gave me pains. I filled in the frosting first and I figured it wouldn't be too bad to fill in the thin border since I could err on the side of the frosting and it wouldn't show there, but it was still quite tedious. 

I got my sugar cookies from this MoYou Lodon dupe from the Festive collection:

And my macarons come from this Bundle Monster plate from the recent blogger collab:

This plate has some really adorable food images- doughnuts, cupcakes, candy... perfect for sweet tooth manis! 

Be sure to check out some more Christmas preparation inspired manis in the link-up!

Simple Sunday 10/23/16 with Bundle Monster + Tanya Wish plate

Hello Readers!

Every Sunday, I post a Simple Sunday nail art post where I go back to a more classic, formal nail look rather than the crazy, cutesy, or kitschy stuff I usually like to post. :) I like to have my nails be church appropriate and I also like to do something more "pretty" once a week. This week I am really excited to be using a new Bundle Monster plate from the Blogger Collaboration that was released recently. This plate was designed by Tanya Wish, and features some really lovely floral designs that I thought would be perfect for Sunday nails. I bought this plate during the awesome buy-2-get-1-free deal a couple of weeks back.

Here I've used the rose design and filled it in with just a couple of polishes. I painted a little round stud with the same polish I used on my pointer/thumb/pinky fingers- Sinful Colors "Soul Mate", which is a lovely dusty, rosy pink. On my middle finger is Sinful Colors "Krop Top" from the Kylie Jenner line, and it does have a textured finish to it. 

Here is a look at the beautiful plate I used:

I just love the variety of the flower images on here. The second image on the bottom is the one I used for this mani, and if you look closely you will notice that I only fit a small portion of it onto my nail. These floral images are the XL size, so if you have shorter nails it is possible to vary the look of the flowers on your nails by shifting the placement and part of the image you use. I used the two medium sized roses together, but I could have also used the larger rose image towards the top of the image. You can play around with it a little to get the look you want, which is fun. I love a little bit of flexibility!

ABC Challenge: T is for Trick or Treat

Hello Readers!


For the letter "T" of the ABC Nail Art Challenge, I decided to go with the seasonal "Trick or Treat" theme. For one, I am taking the kids to a Halloween Carnival thingy tomorrow and I thought my nails should be appropriate. For two, I am loving making Halloween manicures and want to squeeze in as many as possible before the season runs out. So today's is definitely on the cutesy side:

I am just loving the little chocolate bar. It is just a really cute stamping image, and I love the little fold in the wrapper. 

He comes from the appropriately named "scary cute" plate from last year's Bundle Monster fall plate set:

 I used this hehe plate to add texture to my middle two nails:

And those candies came from this new Bundle Monster blogger collab plate, which is super cute:

It has doughnuts. Cupcakes. Macaroons. And I love it.

Be sure to check out more manis brought to you by the letter "T" in the link-up! Happy Halloween! 

An InLinkz Link-up