Simple Sunday 11/6 featuring Bundle Monster Fuzzy and Ferocious

Hello Readers!

It's Sunday again, so that means another more formal manicure for wearing to church! Today's manicure features a very lovely plate from Bundle Monster's Fuzzy and Ferocious collection. The plate has some lovely animals in an Art Deco style. I decided to pair these images with darker polishes today to give a fall vibe.

I decided to make the rabbit pop a little more by layering a decal over the basic stamping image. I basically just stamped the image onto my nail in gold, and stamped it again and removed all the decorations around the rabbit, colored it in, then stamped it over the original image.

Here is my color scheme, using an OPI that I found at my Dollar Tree recently. When I was there yesterday, I noticed they still had one of these left so if you are wanting to get a $1 OPI there is still hope. 

Here's a peek at the plate I used:

I was originally going to use the deer image, but then I realized that with these colors a deer would make this mani lean very Christmas-y, and it's not quite late enough in the year for that, ha ha!

31 Day Challenge: Inspired by Fashion

Hello Readers!

Today's 31-Day challenge prompt is to be inspired by fashion. Nothing came to mind immediately, and I considered googling "fashion week" to look for a photo to pull inspiration from, but then the idea to base it off of one of my daughter's outfits came to me. Baby clothes are some of my very favorite clothing items, because babies.

This is one of my favorite outfits, modeled by my muse herself:

And I thought it would be really fun to abase a mani off of this look. So, here is what I ended up with:

I actually wore this mani while helping run crowd control and persuading small children to sit still during a practice session for a children's program. Part of the reason I chose this mani was because I hoped they would be entertained by it, and I have to say it did come in handy. When the children were getting restless, I showed them my nails and it was instant fascination and quiet while they delightedly examined them. I also used this trick for my toddler, and she was pretty excited about the cat. She kept pointing to it and saying "meow! meow!", and then she tried to eat my nails. Not sure what that was about, ha ha. 

I used a born pretty plate for the basic leopard print, and my cat face comes from this Bundle Monster plate (bottom left):

I also recieved happy nail mail today- my first MoYou London order- hooray! And so I employed this very useful plate from the Holy Shapes collection to outline my thin leopard print stripe on my middle finger:

I'm so excited about this plate just for its sheer usefulness. Also, this plate is incredibly well etched. Even with the large open shapes, it stamps beautifully every time.

Thanks for stopping by today! Check out some more fashion-inspired manis over here:

An InLinkz Link-up

ABC Nail Art Challenge: O is for Old MacDonald

Hello Readers!

It's time for another entry in the ABC Nail Art Challenge, and this week's letter is "O". Because this week is the county fair in my area, I decided to go with that theme and do "Old Macdonald" for the letter O.

Here are the polishes I used:

Pinky- Sally Hansen "tan-acious", stamped over with Milani "Morning Coffee"
Ring- NYC "Skyline blue", Sinful Colors "Beaches and Cream", Sally Hansen "Tan-acious", and LA Colors "feverish"
Middle- NYC "Skyline Blue", Wet N Wild "Do Pass Go", LA Colors "Feverish", Sinful Colors "Beaches and Cream"
Pointer- LA Colors "Feverish", stamped over with Wet N Wild "Black Creme"

My thumb matches my pinky. ;)

After I knew I wanted to go with a farm theme, I debated for a while about what to do with my other fingers... the ones I wouldn't be doing reverse stamping on. I thought about going with blue to represent blue skies, and considered doing yellow with black stamping to represent straw, but in the end I decided to do a woodgrain on my thumb and pinky and something to represent the side of a barn (using this stamping plate) on my pointer.

And finally, the plate I used for my chicken and "farm" images:

This is Bundle Monster's plate BM-S169, "From Farm to Nail", from the Fuzzy and Ferocious 2 collection. This is such a cute plate with so many possibilities. I love that it has apples and carrots on it, and the little windmills are super adorable! 

Well, thanks for looking, and Happy Polishing!

-The Midnight Stamper

Check out what the other ladies did for the letter O:

An InLinkz Link-up

ABC Nail Art Challenge: N is for "Nope"

Hi Readers!

I was so excited to do the letter "N" for the ABC Nail Art Challenge, because I knew exactly what I wanted to do for it.

I recently acquired the bundle monster "Fuzzy and Ferocious" nail stamping plate collection, and this particular image has been calling for me to use it.

Grumpy cat! And it even says "Nope" right under him. 

Here are the polishes I used:

-Sinful Colors "lavender" for the deep blue-purple shade on my thumb, index, and pinky

-Sinful Colors "Lie-lac" for the light purple under my stamping

-Wet N Wild "black creme" for my stamping polish

-Sinful Colors "beaches and Cream" for grumpy cat himself, and Wet N Wild "The Gold and the Beautiful" for to color in a few of the triangles

-LA Colors "splat" is the black and white glitter polish

Here is the stamping plate I used for these images:

I honestly love all the images on this plate. It is so much fun! In fact, the collection is just full of awesome animal images. 

Thanks for checking out my mani and happy polishing!

-The Midnight Stamper

An InLinkz Link-up

Nail Fails: Learning from your mistakes

Do you ever have a great idea in your head, but it doesn't come out quite the way you envisioned it in your mind's eye? As someone who is pretty brand new to the world of nail stamping, I expect to make mistakes. The most important thing to me when evaluating my designs is to see the flaws, and to also see how I can avoid the same mistake in the future.

I have a couple of what I personally consider to be "nail fails" for you today. These are designs  I was excited to try out, but for different reasons I wasn't pleased with the end result.

Here is the first one:

Polishes used: Sinful Colors "Tempest" (light purple), Sinful Colors "Yolo yellow", Sinful Colors "Mardi Gras" (coral/orange), Sinful Colors "Poisonberry" (deep purple), Essie "going guru" (light green), Sally Hansen Xtreme wear in white (for stamping)

This was inspired by all the gorgeous advanced stamping people are doing with the more abstract patterns. I was excited to try it out, but the end result just isn't very pleasing to my eye. I think part of it is the open spaces on ring finger design that just look a bit empty to me, and the other part is the fact that I used a white polish for my stamping polish. When I filled it in, I found that white polish is not very forgiving. My mistakes were really obvious, where a black polish would have hidden them a bit better. I think there's something a little off about the color palette I chose, too. 

Here's the plate I used:

My second nail fail was one I was a bit sad about, only because I spent so much time making this mistake. 

I really love Bundlemonster's Fuzzy and Ferocious collection, so I was excited to use BM-S165, Jungle animals.

Polishes used: Sinful Colors "Call me" (dark purple), Sinful Colors "Kool as a Kukumber" (light green) Sinful Colors "Yolo Yellow", Sinful Colors "Tempest" (light purple), and Revelon Gel Envy "High Stakes" (dark green)

The adorable elephant! That swimming hippo! I thought that Sinful Colors "Call me" would add depth and round out my color pallette. Unfortunately, I didn't consider how dark that polish is and the fact that the black stamping on top of it would get totally lost. I also haven't tried advanced stamping over a dark polish before, and I have now learned that it's not the best idea. The lighter polishes have a hard time popping out with dark polish behind them. You could use a white polish underneath to help that, but the black details would still get lost against the dark background.

I did really love how the stamping over the light green (which is Sinful Colors "Kool as a Kukumber") turned out.  I was tempted to remove just the purple nails and keep the green, maybe paint them in the purple and yellow from the flowers, but in the end I decided to just try something completely different for my next mani. 

Desert Dwellers

Hi all! Today I have a desert inspired mani using bundlemonster's BM-S168, "Desert Dwellers" from the Fuzzy and Ferocious set 2. I just love all the cute animals on the plates in this collection- they are a lot of fun to color in. For the southwest image on my green nails, I used a born pretty XL plate, BP-L009. It has a lot of fun southwest inspired designs.

Because sometimes I want to use all the images, but I don't really want to spend hours stamping, I do different images on each hand. I had a bit of a hard time getting the southwest design centered-  I guess I need more stamping practice.

For the main green color I used Essie "Going Guru", and the terra cotta color is Essie "Taj-ma-haul". I also stamped over the green with "Taj-ma-haul". I basically grabbed a bunch of random greens from my collection to color in the desert images with, along with a couple of pinks for the cactus flowers.