Simple Sunday 3/26/17, ft. MoYou London Minimal and Trend Hunter

Hello Readers!

Today's Simple Sunday is inspired by those little tutorial videos the official MoYou London instagram account is always posting. I really loved how they used the corner of an image to make a triangle shape and then added another triangle shape on top, and wanted to try the technique for myself.

I really love the versatility of this technique- you could use almost any retangular or square design to do it and add more mileage to your images.

I started off this mani with 3 coats of the Sinful colors "Peaches and Cream" shade, which is part of the collaboration with Youtuber Kandee Johnson. This polish has a matte finish, which unfortunately means it's kind of a pain in the butt. Matte finish polishes have an extra long drying time as a general rule.  I put on a speed-drying topcoat to speed up the process, but I think I was feeling extra clumsy last night because I smudged my nails so many times and had to re-do several fingers. Sigh.

My lacy images come from the MoYou London "Trend Hunter" plate with all the lovely lace. One of my favorite images on this plate is the one I used on my middle finger. I picked an image that had a good consistent pattern on the corner for my ring finger so that it would look like a single pattern instead of two different ones- I wanted it more simple and straightforward. Then I simply stamped one of the corners onto my nail instead of placing the whole image over it.

Next, I pulled out my trusty Holy Shapes-05 plate, also by MoYou London. I used the equilateral triangle in the lower left-hand corner to stamp over my little lacy triangle with Essie's Leggy Legend. This particular metallic polish doesn't have the best opacity when stamped, so I had to stamp it a couple of times, just lining the images up using my clear stamper. You can still kind of see the white lace through the image, so maybe I should have gone over it with polish free-hand, but it just didn't bother me that much.

Finally, I stamped some of the arrows from this MoYou London "Minimal Collection" plate.

Thanks for stopping by today! I hope you enjoyed this look and that you are having a wonderful Sunday.

26 Great Nail Art Ideas: Pastel Christmas

Hello Readers!

It's time for another prompt for 26 Great Nail Art Ideas, and this time around we are working with "Pastel Christmas" nails. I decided to go with a simple, elegant design and pair some geometrics with a Christmas tree image this time around.

I started off with a coat of Sinful Colors "Snow Me White" to go under the Revlon "Powder Puff" so I wouldn't have to put on 5 million coats. This shimmery pink is seriously sheer! (Say that 5 times fast.) I still had to put 2 coats of the pink polish on, because it was a bit patchy otherwise.

For my stamping plates, I used a Born Pretty Store plate with lots of floral/nature inspired designs for my Christmas trees, and my favorite MoYou London plate from the "Holy Shapes" collection for my geometrics- the triangles and horizontal stripes. I used just the top part of the upper left-hand corner image to create a smaller triangle for my pointer/pinky fingers. 

Be sure to check out the other pastel Christmas ideas in the link-up below!

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