Crumpets Nail Tarts: Green Freestyle ft. MoYou London Festive

Hello Readers!

This week's prompt for Crumpet's Nail Tarts  is "green freestyle", so green is what I did! At first I was kind of interpreting "freestyle" as anything you feel like you wanna do (*gosh*) but then somebody posted saying maybe it means techniques such as dry brushing, blobbicure, fan brushing, etc. I had already been planning on doing a Lady Liberty themed mani, and I thought a fan brushed background would actually be perfect for it, so I ran with that.

Besides, it's been a while- ok, like a really long time- since I've done a fan brush mani. And they are fun! I have done dry brushing more recently, but I though fan brushing would give me the kind of distressed look I was going for here.

I basically raided the "green" section of my nail polish shelf to grab several shades that I though would be statuesque, and added in a gold for good measure. I started off with the Sinful Colors "Works Like a Charm" (two coats) and then just placed one green polish at a time onto my silicone mat and then applied it to my fan brush, then brushed it lightly over my nails.

My Statue of Liberty image comes from this MoYou London plate, from the Festive collection. I really liked the idea of having the stamping images be silhouettes against the green background, so I had to scrounge through all my plates to find images to pair with this that were also solid.

...but, while scrounging, I found this plate and the "I <3 NY" image, and I thought it would go perfectly with my theme. Finding a silhouette of a cityscape was a little trickier, however- apparently I just don't have any traditional ones. I almost had to resort to freehand (which may have been scary) but I found this:

A hehe (most likely knock-off) plate from the Harry Potter line, with that image of Hogwarts. Yeah, it's not actually a cityscape, but I figured it'd do.

Thanks for stopping by today! As always, links to the rest of the Crumpet's Nail Tart participants are in the link-up below!

Simple Sunday 3/12/17, ft. MoYou London Pro

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Today's Simple Sunday is truly simple as it features no reverse stamping; only simple straight-to-nail stamping with a few different plates.

Clairestelle8: Holi; Festival of Colors ft. MoYou London Artist, Festive

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Today's prompt for the #clairestelle8challenge over on Instagram is "Holi", the Festival of Colors. I had heard of Holi before doing this prompt, and have always enjoyed seeing the pictures of people covered in colorful powders (as is the tradition here, because it's typically not warm enough to use colored waters). But, I didn't really know what it was about so it was fun to do some research to learn more about it. One of the main themes in the celebration is forgiveness and strengthening relationships, so I decided to add a "love" theme for a focal point in my mani.

I started off with a base of the "Lavender Soap" polish, and simply added splashes of color using a very fun MoYou London stamping plate from the "Artist" collection.

I chose my colors based off of a picture of different colored powders that were set to be used for a Holi celebration. It was fun to work with such a bright and colorful palette!

Here's a look at the "splat" plate, from MoYou London's Artist Collection. This plate is so much fun to play with. I broke it out once before to create splashes of water for a fish mani, but I've been dying to use it with different colors of polishes.

For my ring finger, I used this plate from MoYou London's Festive collection. I actually bought this plate after Valentine's Day because I just fell in love with the fun designs and I figured I'd find a way to use it even if it wasn't February. I stamped with BMC's "Straight up Black" polish, which is very highly pigmented so it gives a nice saturated look.

Valentine Turtles ft. MoYou London Animal

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Today's mani was a wish-fulfillment type mani that didn't quite turn out as I hoped it would. When I first laid eyes on this MoYou London Animal plate, I noticed that a lot of the animals on it had tiny hidden hearts or more obvious hearts, so I thought it would be a great one to use for Valentines Day. Unfortunately, I kinda made a rookie mistake with my pattern mixing and I'm not crazy about the mani, but here it is anyway:

So the "rookie mistake" was trying to put together the hearts and the small turtle image. I feel that because they are so close in scale and from a distance, they are kind of a similar image, having them both on there makes the mani a bit too "busy". I wish I had painted my pointer/pinky fingers just the straight dark pink and maybe added a little stud to them or some light pink stamping of just a tiny triangle, or simple stripes. BUUUUUUT  I really wanted to emphasize the hearts because I wanted it to be more valentines-y.

So my base color is another one of those light, shimmery, sheer pinks but this time it's a Revlon Gel Envy, which I always find to have excellent formulas. This was better than most polishes in this color family, and I only had to put on 3 coats. If you squint you can still see the faint outline of my nail line, but I was ok with that.

So my turtle images come from this MoYou London plate, as previously mentioned.

And the texture images I used for the nail with the turtle come from this plate. First I stamped arrows in pink, then placed the turtle decal. Next I added a swipe of dark pink polish to give the turtle something to stand on, and I felt like it looked empty so I added stamping over that in black.

Simple Sunday 2/5/17 ft. MoYou London Valentine's Day plates

Hello Readers!


Today I have a very subtle Sunday mani. It ended up being a bit more subtle than I intended, but hey sometimes you need a look that can fly under the radar, but you still want something a little *extra* going on; this mani is for those kinds of occasions.

My main intention with this mani was to try out this new Sinful Colors polish. It's part of the Kandee Johnson line that's been slowly coming out over the last couple of months. Now, this is a super light pink shimmery polish that preforms exactly how you would expect it to. I put on at least four coats of this, and possibly five coats, to achieve full opacity. But at least it's pretty! Ha ha.

I paired it with a shimmer polish from this year's Valentine's Day release, because I have found that these particular shimmer polishes in this collection stamp super well, which is really useful. (To see one of the purples in stamping action, check out this post.) So I wanted to see how they would preform with a really intricate stamp, and it seems like it did a pretty good job! 

My images come this MoYou London plate, from the Festive collection. I've used this plate once before in a more cutesy mani, but I really wanted to try out the more intricate images and go for a more sophisticated look with this plate. At first I thought it would be fun to fill in some of the images with the large heart in the center surrounded by patterns, but let me warn you: those images in particular are super unforgiving; especially if your stamping polish is on the lighter side like the one I used here. I think the best ones for that technique would be the ones on the left-hand side; their borders have some substance. But the ones in the middle... hard pass, or use a nice opaque black stamping polish. 

Anyway, I hope you are all having an awesome Super Bowl Sunday! I will be spending it *not watching* and painting my nails but we are at least acknowledging it by having loaded nachos for dinner tonight.  What are you all up to this evening? Rooting on your team, having awesome snacks, popping in for commercials only, or ignoring it entirely? Let me know in the comments! 

26 Great Nail Art Ideas: Red and Pink

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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! 

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!