Wild West mani ft. MoYou London x Amit, Bundle Monster Botanicals

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Today's mani was inspired by a prompt on instagram for the Clairestelle8 challenge, which has always been one of my favorites. The prompt is "Wild West", which was timely because I've been itching to try out some of the cactus images on my new plates. Apparently I'm a sucker for cacti, because I bought 3 or 4 plates that were full of them recently.

I mean, they're a popular trend right now, but I mostly love them because there are a lot of cacti in the desert where I live. So it always seems appropriate to me.

My ring finger image is from this Amit/MoYou London plate (01) that has a lot of cactus images. I seriously love the little cow skull on this image though! Definitely unique to my collection.

For my pointer/pinky fingers, I colored some of these gorgeous cactus buffet images from the Bundle Monster "Botanicals" collection. I had been eyeing this collection ever since I've been getting back on the nail art wagon, but what made me pull the trigger was that Bundle Monster was having a 4th of July sale and also has plate grab bags- 20 XL plates for $20- and I wanted to see what came in it!

In case you're curious, it was mostly the generic XL image plates with XL versions of the older round plates, along with quite a few plates from the Polynesia collection and a few blogger collab plates and an around the world plate- at least that's what came in mine. I did get an accidental duplicate but I contacted customer service and they're sending me one to replace the duplicate; I was really pleased with the customer service.

Finally, my middle finger image is from MoYou London Hipster 16. I've had this plate for a while, and I thought that it would be a perfect source for a pattern to go along with my theme.

Rose Quartz nails ft. MoYou London Explorer 33

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Today's nails are a rose quartz inspired look, because ever since marble nails became all the rage I've wanted to try to do a rose quartz version.

This was a super easy mani to do, thanks to the newest MoYou London Explorer plate.

This plate has two different marble images designed to be layered together. 

I also used the Mandela 19 plate- I love all the bead strands on this one- like so many necklaces for your nails!

Painted Pebbles with Nail Art Supplies

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Today's post is a little- or, I suppose, a lot- different from usual. My kids keep finding painted rocks all around town, and it is so much fun! I had an idea to make my own painted rocks, but with a twist- using nail polish and stamping plates.

These were super fun and easy- basically you just do everything backwards on the back of a clear glass pebble. It was fun to play with some of my new images without having to do a whole mani based on them, and without having to worry about letting my nails dry. 

Here's a look at a few of the plates I used for the main images:

The cactus comes from the Amit X Moyou London 01 plate. There are a lot of images on this plate that would be perfect for making pebbles. I actually was going to also do one of the little carniverous plant, but my 7 year old really wanted to paint that one so I let him do it. 

The adorable llama comes from the newer MoYou London Explorer 33 plate. Love love love the llamas on this plate! I'm also planning on using the marble set of images for a mani very soon.

My unicorn comes from MoYou London Hipster 21. Some very cute unicorn and star images on this plate.

The dino and rainbow are both from MoYou London Hipster 19. I mainly bought this plate for the avocado images. I'm a sucker for food manis.

The galaxy image is from MoYou London Sci-Fi 10. Loving this plate- it has astronaut cats! The space image was also the perfect size to fit on one of those pebbles, so I was happy to get to use the whole image since it's too big for a nail.

Pikachu comes from a MoYou London plate from the "suki" collection, and the silly face emoji is on one of the emoji plates in the "geek" collection.

I used a few other plates as well for backgrounds, and a lot of glitter polish since I figured it would be fun on these pebbles and heaven knows I don't use it that often on my nails, since it's such a pain to remove unless you use a peel-off basecoat.

Tropical Night Sky ft. MoYou London Tropical, Bundle Monster

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Today I have yet another mani that uses the MoYou London "tropical" collection- with summertime being in full force I feel like I keep reaching for these plates!

This mani was inspired by one that MoYou London had done and posted in Instagram. Though I  think they went with a lighter blue, which made it a bit easier to see everything going on with the mani.

This mani starts out with that gorgeous star image from the Bundle Monster + Kelli Marissa blogger collab plate. I love all the gorgeous galaxy images on this plate!

I stamped palm fronds from this Bundle Monster plate from the oldie-but-goodie "Hangloose" collection. Such a simple, but versatile plate.

Finally, I stamped the "good vibes only" phrase in gold over the top of everything. I only wish it was a little bit more readable- it's kind of hard to tell what it says! Those more delicate words probably wold work better with two polishes that highly contrast each other.

A Hawaiian Shirt style mani ft. MoYou London Tropical

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Today I am posting details of this summery mani I put up on instagram a little bit ago:

I think since I've been away so long, I was hitting a little bit of a creative block. I wanted to do some nail art, but had no idea what to do. So I decided to look for inspiration in my collection of patterned papers that I use for scrapbooking/cardmaking. I found a beachy paper that inspired this look.

This mani starts with the MoYou London Tropical 33 plate. I love all the fun phrases on this plate! They make such a good focal point for a mani. I actually used the tiny stripes first to add a little bit of detail to the background.

Next, I pulled one of my favorite images from the tropical 17 plate. I had to do some image isolation for this mani, to get the little palm trees a different color than the decorative strips on the end of the image. I found that wrapping a little piece of packing tape around self-closing tweezers worked really well for getting into the tiny areas of this image to pick up the parts I didn't want to stamp.

After I did the finicky part, I went back to the first plate to stamp the "chill" image.

4th of July mani ft. MoYou London Mix & Match

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It seems I've gotten a bit behind on my blog, since it is a bit more time consuming to write about the mani than it is to just post it on instagram. I'm jumping ahead a bit to post these patriotic nails in time for the 4th of July tomorrow.

I seriously debated not posting these at all, since they turned out so crooked. But I didn't have another chance to paint my nails before the 4th, even though I came up with an idea I wanted to do (darn it!), so I'm posting these anyway. In retrospect I also wish that I had done a decal on the ring finger and made the "4" white to make it stand out more- I think it would have improved the overall balance of the design. I guess I'm still getting my sea legs back after taking a long break from nail art!

My geometric image for this mani comes from the MoYou London "Mix & Match 05" plate- I thought it would be the perfect image to just add a little color to get the red/white/blue color scheme. I used almost the same image  on a tropical mani last year- and I actually got the decals on straight that time so you can look at that if you want to see what that looks like. ;)

My ring finger image comes from the MoYou London Festive collection 27 plate, which has a lot of patriotic images. I did double stamp the nail with a swiggly pattern from the above mentioned Mix and Match plate before stamping the image from this one in black.

Do you guys have exciting plans for the 4th, or if you are an international reader, for your country's patriotic holiday? We're probably going to skip the big fireworks show this year, but hope to set some little ones off in the street tomorrow with the kids.

Tropical Lemons and life updates

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It has been a long time; a very long time; since I have visited my blog. I've been pretty busy making this little beauty:

She's not a newborn anymore, but newborn pics are the best and the squishiest so that is what you get. ;) It's been difficult to paint my nails since she's been born because she mostly refuses to sleep unless somebody is holding her, and as you can imagine it's pretty hard (impossible) to do nail art while holding a baby. BUT now she's been going down to sleep in the evenings for a few hours, so I've had some time... to do things like this:

So this is my first return to nail art for nearly a year. I've done some really simple stuff during my pregnancy that I didn't really photograph, mainly because I was trying to minimize my exposure to nail polish fumes during my pregnancy, blah blah blah, even though they swear it's safe, it just makes me nervous.

Anyway, on to the nail art-

For this, I used MoYou London's "Tropical 08" plate for the lemons. I had to do some isolation to get the lemons by themselves, but I didn't have any other outlined lemon images so it was worth it. I used a Bundle Monster plate with some palm leaves to stamp over my white polish before adding the lemon decals for a bit more detail.

The striped image on the blue nails (Sinful Colors "Rainstorm" turned out looking more purple than I anticipated on these) came from this Bundle Monster plate from the "Shape Nouveau" collection.

My original intention for this mani was to do a sort of lemon pattern with denim, but the blue wasn't quite a denim shade and I couldn't find a perfect "stitching" pattern in my collection. I still like how this turned out, though.