Nail Crazies Unite: Red and Black ft. Bundle Monster Mystic Woods

Hello Readers!

Today's post is for the Nail Crazies Unite group on Facebook, where the bi-weekly challenges fill in the gaps between the prompts for the 26 Great Nail Art Ideas challenge group. Today's challenge is "Red and Black". I had some fun and tried a new technique this week that I really enjoyed.

I have been wanting to use these mushrooms for a while now, too, so I was pleased that they were going to work out for the "red and black" challenge. I tried to keep the other colors in the mani pretty neutral to make the red and black stand out as the main colors.

The Sinful Colors "Velvet Ribbon" was from this year's Christmas collection. I put on just one coat of it; Sinful Colors tends to do a really good job with these foil finish/shimmery polishes. I will note, however, that this particular polish chipped faster than your average polish.

30 Days of Color Challenge: Sodo Mojo (ft. Bundle Monster Work it)

Hello Readers!

As promised, today I am sharing my baseball themed mani for the 30 Days of Color Challenge. The prompt is "recreation", and for me, baseball holds a special place in my heart. It's the only sport I really ever played as a child, and the only sport I've ever taken an interest in at a professional level.

As such, this mani is dedicated to my baseball team, the Seattle Mariners. I don't live in Seattle anymore, but I did spend quite a bit of my childhood there as well as a few of my adult years. We used to go to the Mariners games as a family and also as a church youth group, and I have some very fond memories of cheering on the team, and the excitement we felt when our team won. One of my favorite memories was in 2001 when the Mariners made it all the way to the playoffs, and the whole city was excited. This was back before smart phones, so everywhere we went strangers were talking to each other about the current score; listening to the game on the radio in public spaces. I just loved the sense of community I felt during that time.

So this mani is done in Mariner's colors, with the compass which is a symbol for the team.

As part of the challenge, we are encouraged to use untried polishes in our manis. My untried is the Sally Hansen "Tempting Taurus", which I really really loved! Great formula, great opacity, and a really lovely color. 

30 Days of Color Challenge: Calm

Hello Readers!

Today's post is for the facebook group 30 Days of Color, where nail enthusiasts are encouraged to reach into their pile of untrieds and follow a prompt. There's a new prompt each week, and you can do as many manis for each prompt as you wish. This week's prompt is "calm".

I used an untried plate and an untried polish for this prompt. I picked up this Essie polish at my local discount store at a deep discount. It's a really unusual polish- it's the only kind of forest green in my collection- so I was happy to find it. I paired it with a plate from Bundle Monster's "Into the Woods" fall collection for 2016, as well as a couple of other plates. I though the deep green would go well with a calm, serene forestry theme.

I wasn't super excited about most of Bundle Monster's fall release this year. It was pretty, but I felt like I already had similar images as a lot of the plates. This plate, however, is so beautiful and unique I decided to pick it up. I wanted to use all the images on my nails today, but I decided that wouldn't be very "calm" so I settled on just one. The lovely hourglass, mostly because I wanted to feature the roses nestled up against it. So lovely!

One thing about this image, however, is that some of the fine detail lines on it are very dainty. I wasn't able to use my usual Sinful Colors "Black on Black" to stamp this; it just wouldn't pick up the tiny details of the sand inside the hourglass. So I broke down and used actual stamping polish. I normally prefer to use the Sinful Colors just because this Born Pretty stamping polish is so highly pigmented that it is a huge pain to clean up off your skin after stamping.

The roses on my middle finger come from this Bundle Monster plate from the Time Machine collection. This is one of my favorite rose images- so nice and big for decals! I used it for this purpose once before during the 31-Day Challenge last year to do yellow roses.

Finally, my tiny vines come from MoYou London's Enchanted collection.

You can check out some more calm manis for this challenge in the link-up below!

An InLinkz Link-up