Simple Sunday Mani: Golden Pineapple

Hi Readers!

I'm back again with another Simple Sunday Mani, this time using some of Bundle Monster's adorable nail charms from the "Hangloose" collection.

Walgreens was having a 2/$3 sale on their Sinful Colors polishes this week, so I picked up a few new pinks since I don't really have a lot of pink in my collection. I decided to use one of my new pinks for this Sunday's mani, so I have on Sinful Colors "24/7" as my base. 

As I was trying to decide what to do for this Sunday, I knew I wanted to use the pineapple and I figured I'd do some simple stamping to go along with it, but I wasn't sure what color I wanted to use. I originally thought I'd use a more coral-leaning color. This style of mani would really work with almost any color, which I think is one of the fun things about it. 

I thought I would do a simple polka dot and a stripe, but when I pulled out my plates these images called to me and I decided it would be much more interesting with these instead. ;) 

My flowery image comes from BM-710, from Bundle Monster's "Secret Garden" Collection. 

Thank you for visiting me today, and Happy Polishing!

-The Midnight Stamper

Game Night Mani

Hello all! Today I have for you a game-night inspired mani, created for an upcoming session of good 'ole Dungeons and Dragons with some friends.

When I saw the 20-sided dice on this design, well, it was honestly one of the selling points for me to buy the bundlemonster 2014 CYO collection. I paired it with the octopus image from the CYO 2013 collection. I don't actually own the entire CYO 2013 collection; just the one plate because I loved it.

Here are the polishes I used on my nails:

Thumb, pointer, pinky: 3 coats LA Colors "Citron", stamped over with Sinful Colors "Navy I Do"

Middle, Ring: 2 coats LA Colors "Wander", followed by 1 coat Sinful Colors "Hottie", stamped over with Sinful Colors "Navy I Do."

I'm so impressed by how well "Navy I Do" stamps. This is the second mani I've used it to stamp with and I'm really loving it.

Here are the plates I used:

BM-602, "Pop Art Gamer", from Bundlemonster's Create Your Own 2014 collection. I've actually gotten quite a bit of use out of this plate- I used the "pow" image to create a 4th of july mani along with the top burst image. 

The typography image I used today picked up on my stamper really well; I didn't have any issues with the plate.

The octopus image on this plate is just so awesome. I had to try scraping the image from a few different directions to get it to stamp perfectly, but that's to be expected of an image with so much open space and once I tried scraping it from bottom to top I didn't have any problems.

Thanks so much for checking out my mani! Go out and create awesome things.

-Midnight Stamper

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. 

Pioneer Day

In Utah, we celebrate an extra holiday on July 24 called Pioneer Day. It celebrates the founding of our state, and is basically like an extra 4th of July complete with fireworks, parades, and festivities.

I did this manicure in honor of pioneer day.

For my base color, I used Sinful Colors "Navy I do" and "Beaches and Cream". I stamped the fireworks from Bundlemonster's Occasions Collection, plate # BM-S211, "OOH! AAH!", which is a really cute plate full of different full nail firework images.

I stamped these images with ORLY's "Don't Lasso Me Around", from the Wonder Woman Collection. I stamped the lady with the umbrella from a Born Pretty stamping plate, BP-L021, also in Sinful Colors "Navy I Do."

 Last, I added a few gold circle glitters from LA Colors "Dizzy" using a toothpick.

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.

Watermelon Nails

I love watermelon nails, especially in the summertime. They just feel so bright and happy.

For this mani, I used two stamping plates: one from Bundlemonster (BMS-408, "Summer's Bounty" from the "Hangloose" collection) and one for Born Pretty (BPL-008). I really like both of these plates- the Born pretty plate is such a great one for basic patterns, and Summer's Bounty has some super cute summer images that are perfect for advanced stamping!

I used NYC Fuchsia Shock Cream for the pink base, LA colors Fresh for the blue, and Wet N Wild Leaf Me Be for the green. By the way, that particular Wet N Wild polish doesn't have the best formula, but I tolerate it because I have a hard time finding that particular shade of green, and it really comes in handy in a lot of designs. I stamped over the green with Revlon Colorstay Gel Envy in High Stakes, which stamped beautifully.  

How NOT to do advanced stamping

So, I thought I'd try to be clever with this one. I thought I'd try to make decals the night before, and then apply them to my nails the next day. Yeah... that didn't really work out for me.

Maybe it would work better if I had used a nicer topcoat to create the decals (I used NYC's basic topcoat). Not really sure. But what I can tell you is that the decals became so brittle that they basically crumbled when I tried to pick them up from my non-stick mat. I managed to kind of get the pineapple one on my nails, but I had to piece it together. In the end I decided to completely re-do them, but by that time I was feeling impatient and didn't wait quite long enough to apply the decals to my nails, and they smeared a little bit.

But, there it is anyway. I really love the images, which came from Bundlemonster's "Hangloose" collection, plate BM-S408, "Summer's Bounty".

I used Sinful Colors Yolo Yellow and NYC's Fuschia Shock Cream for my foundation colors, and filled in the pineapples with Sinful Colors Let's Meet and Wet n Wild megalast "Leaf me be". I also stamped with the Sinful Colors Yolo Yellow, which showed up fine but probably wasn't as vibrant as a stamping polish would have been.

This was my first ever attempt at nail stamping. I had tried nail art before, but always became frustrated because I ended up adding too many layers, getting all goopy, and smudging my design because it never fully dried.

So, because of all that, I am so in love with stamping. The polish goes on in such a nice, thin layer that it dries super quickly and super thin, and the process is so much faster than trying- and failing- to paint things freehand. 

My first attempt didn't turn out perfectly, but I love it anyway.

The images are from Bundlemonster's CYO 2014 collection, plate BM-605 (Dreamcatcher). 

I used LA colors petunia for the base color, and stamped over it with Sinful Colors Easygoing. For the accent, I simply reversed the polishes, used a different background image and stamped the dreamcatcher in black (wet n wild black on black). I was pretty pleased at how well the LA Colors polish stamped, since it is such a cheap polish.