Inspired by my Job: Motherhood Mani

Hello Readers!


Today's post is the second for the #clairestelle8june challenge, and this time around the prompt is "inspired by your job/hobby". At first I latched on to the "hobby" part, and had a bunch of half-formed ideas, but nothing really jumped out at me until I decided to shift focus and create a mani based on my job.

I am a stay-at-home-Mom, and at first I had no idea how to make a mani based on that. Being a stay-at-home-Mom is so many things. So many small things wrapped up together into a bundle of mild chaos. In the end, I decided to run with that idea and represent some of the many elements of my day-to-day life with this mani.

It's band-aids and boo-boos and conflict management between siblings. It's lullabies and 50 repetitions of "Mary Had a Little Lamb". It's keeping calm in the face of poop on a daily basis. It's frantically googling the structure of an atom for inquiring minds who *neeeeed* to know. It's wonderful and exhausting and I wouldn't trade it for the world.


And, much like motherhood, this mani was a jumble of... many different things, ha ha.

I started by painting all my nails with the Sinful Colors blue, which was pretty awesome at two coats. Then it was time to get to work on stamping and decals...

So for my first finger, I used an image from one of the Bundle Monster "Kawaii Emoji" collection plates, because I figured band-aids and crying faces were a perfect representation of my daily life with two rambunctious boys and their toddler sister.

Now, behind the decals on both my pointer and ring finger, I added the sunburst design from this Bundle Monster + Nailstamp4fun plate. I actually did this on the silicone mat that I was using to work on them instead of adding it to my nail, and it was probably easier that way just because I was already doing the decals and it's easier to stamp onto a flat surface than onto a curved nail.

I simply stamped the design onto the "back" of the decal after filling in all of the images.

The music design comes from this cute Born Pretty Store plate. I actually stamped this upside down on my first try because I wasn't paying attention and thought it was just notes, which don't really have a "right side up", but upon further inspection, I saw the treble and bass clef signs and those do have a right side up. So, I had to remove the stamping with my clean-up brush and acetone and stamp it again.

The poop emoji comes from this MoYou London "Geek Collection 13" plate, which has a lot of cute and fun images! I was a little sad when I realized that they did the poop emoji in a solid state (heh) instead of a line art image, because I was hoping to fill it in. I did still fill in the eyes and mouth, of course added the background. I felt like it still needed something though, and wanted to add some kind of phrase. I had no idea what, so I searched through my plates until I found something suitable...

...which ended up being from the Bundle Monster "Time Machine" collection. I just used the top part of one of the "keep calm" phrases. This nail now makes me chuckle; it's just so appropriate because Motherhood is nothing if it's not dealing with poop. Lots and lots of poop.

So then, my final image- the atoms- come from this Born Pretty school-themed plate, which is a newer plate from the Born Pretty site. Just some simple stamping on that nail.

Simple Sunday 2/19/2017, with new Sinful Colors Stoned Crystal Shimmer

Hello Readers!


Today I am very excited to finally be trying out a polish from a new Sinful Colors collection that I have been trying to get my hands on for weeks. I finally spied it at Walgreens, and somehow half of it was already gone but I managed to grab up a few of the colors. This is the "Stoned Crystal Shimmer" collection, which has some pretty unusual shades that all have little shimmery flakies in them:

So here I used the color "Just Deserts", which is kind of the perfect nude color for my skin tone, so I was excited about that. I've been searching for a good nude for me for a while; nothing ever seems to be quite right but  I like this one a lot. I have two coats for the nude base on my pointer and pinky fingers here, though a lot of YouTubers said they needed 3 coats of this polish.

I used a stud on my middle nail and ended up painting over it for a subtle look.... I'm a little on the fence about whether I like how this looks or not.

I also found "Off Tropic" in the clearance bin of my Walgreens a couple of weeks ago. I'm always excited when I find polish in Walgreens' clearance bins because they always have really great clearance prices, unlike some other retailers I know... *cough cough TARGET*  This polish was a true one-coater for me, which is always awesome, and also means it's probably an awesome polish to stamp with.

I did something a little bit different for this mani, because yesterday I didn't have a design in mind or a specific plate I really wanted to use, so to find inspiration I flipped through the pages of a VOUGE copy that I recently received. I thought this picture would be fun to translate to nail art so that is what this mani is based off of. MoYou London has been posting all kinds of fashion-inspired manis this week and it made me want to try it out too! It was really fun to do so I may try basing a mani off of fashion again next time I'm feeling uninspired. 

My lacy patterns that I stamped over the nude base come from this Bundle Monster plate from the first blogger collab that they did. 

My roses also came from a Bundle Monster plate, this time from the Secret Garden collection. The roses on the right side of the plate here are kind of small, but as you can see it is possible to get a full nail image out of them. I used the pretty florals on the left side of the plate as a full nail image in another Simple Sunday mani awhile ago, also on shorter nails.