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.

Simple Sunday- Easter Lilies

Hello Readers!

I'm popping in with a super quick Simple Sunday, since it's Easter and I'm celebrating the holiday with my parents. I wanted to do a classic white Easter lily on my nails today, so I pulled out one of my favorite floral plates:

The image comes from this Bundle Monster plate from last year's Blogger collaboration release.

I hope everyone is having a lovely Easter Sunday!

Simple Sunday 4/9/17- Spring Daffodils

Hello Readers!



It's time for another Simple Sunday post, which for a change this week is actually fairly simple because it only requires stamping on one nail. I was inspired by this daffodil image because daffodils are, to me, the quintessential spring flower.

 See? Mostly just polish, very little stamping. ;)

The main featured polish here is from the Sinful Colors "Stoned Crystal Shimmer" collection which was released this spring. The green, "Super Cooper", is more difficult to find than the others but I was lucky enough to spot it at my local Albertsons.

For my middle finger, I started with a gold polish for a base and then sponged on a gold flakie polish to get a more saturated look. I did use liquid latex to protect my skin, because glitter is no fun to remove from your fingers!

My daffodil image comes from this gorgeous Bundle Monster plate. This was part of the blogger collaboration release last year- I loved all the flower images that are so perfect for reverse stamping! If you'd like to see a couple of other examples of these flowers being filled in, you can check out this mani where I used the roses, or here for the bluebells.

26 GNAI: Blue Floral ft. Bundle Monster Blogger Collab

Hello Readers!


Today marks another week of the bi-weekly challenge at Crumpet's Nail Tarts, and this week's prompt is "blue floral". For some reason, I thought I was doing this prompt a couple of weeks ago so I created a different blue floral mani at that time, and here I am doing another one. The fun thing to me about nail art- any kind of art, for that matter- is the world of possibilities and different looks you can get using even the same colors, the same themes- and the same stamps!

I had done a wood grain in the previously mentioned mani, and I was inspired by a different sort of wood grain I saw in a mani at Polish Those Nails. She has a lighter sort of wood grain going on in that mani, and I thought it would be really fun to do.

So I started off with a white base and stamped the woodgrain pattern over it in a Taupe color.

I used the exact same wood grain as last time, because I like it and I also thought it would be fun to create a totally different look with the same stamp. This plate is by Bundle Monster, from the CYO 2014 collection.

The flower images come from this Bundle Monster Blogger Collab plate, from the newest collection released last fall. I used the bluebell type image on the bottom, the second to last image. But to get it into the curvy shape, I used my Bundle Monster stamping guide:

I used the smallest "french tip" guide and placed it over the image. Originally I thought I would use the flowers as kind of a half-moon or french tip look, but I didn't really like how it was looking so I tried turning it sideways and loved it, so it stayed. 

Thanks for stopping by! Be sure to check out some more blue floral manis in the link-up!