A Hawaiian Shirt style mani ft. MoYou London Tropical

Hello Readers!


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. 

Born Pretty Store Review: Metallic Nail Studs

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Today's post is another Born Pretty Store Review, this time for another little nail wheel full of fun studs!

This item is a 120 piece nail wheel with plastic studs, item #40767.  It currently retails for $1.99. I'm a little confused honestly now that I'm looking at it, because the item in the picture looks quite a bit different than the nail wheel I received. The colors on the website are more iridescent colors with a couple of metallics. In this nail wheel, there are four different metallic colors: the copper (which I used on the mani), the gold, a silver, and chrome.

So, for this main I decided to try out the copper studs. The studs in this nail wheel are all a lightweight plastic with a metallic coating on them. I decided to pair them with Sinful Colors "Copper Pot" for a copper based mani.

These studs are very pretty, and have stayed well on my nail using a "gel-like" topcoat and no nail glue. I'm going on the 5th day of wearing this mani now and they are still stuck tight. I am noticing this morning that the metallic finish on the studs is just starting to wear off a little bit. They have a bit of a distressed look to them now. I don't mind it.

Thanks for stopping by today! If you decide to make a purchase at the Born Pretty Store, you can always use my coupon code, RACHX31, for 10% off your items. 

Simple Sunday/ Born Pretty Store Review

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Today's post is a Simple Sunday post that is reviewing a couple of products from the Born Pretty Store. 

The first item is a purple foil/shimmer polish that currently retails for $3.49. This polish has teeny tiny shimmer pieces running throughout it, so I thought it would also be able to be used as a stamping polish.

I have used it on my ring finger to stamp with, and painted it straight onto my other nails. I didn't have any trouble stamping with it, so I was pleased about that. This color is a very deep, shimmery fuchsia. I have shown it here at two coats. It was pretty easy to apply, just as you would expect a foil polish to behave.

I also have used a metal stud from this nail art wheel from the Born Pretty Store. I thought these studs were really interesting- I like that the wheel includes a large variety of shape (each compartment has a different shape), as well as the texture on each of the little studs. This nail wheel currently costs $1.49. I used one of the largest shapes in the wheel, the longer triangle, on my middle finger.

If you would like to purchase either of these items, you can use my Born Pretty Store code (RACHX31) for 10% these or other items at the website.

Nail Crazies Unite: Sunflowers

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Today's post is for the Nail Crazies Unite group, where there are challenges every other week. This week's prompt is "sunflowers", which I was excited for since it seemed so seasonally appropriate and being a Kansas girl at heart, sunflowers always tug at my heartstrings a little bit.

I decided to pair my sunflower with a cheerful blue plaid print.

So, I started off with Sinful Colors "Quick Study", which is a matte polish but I ended up putting a glossy topcoat over the mani. I made a simple sunflower decal and placed it over the basic plaid stamping.

My plaid design comes from this very useful Born Pretty Store stamping plate. Love all the textures and the variety of plaids to choose from on this!

My simple sunflower comes from a different Born Pretty plate, with lots of lovely line art flower designs on it.


Thanks for stopping by today! Be sure to check out more sunflower manis in the link-up below!

An InLinkz Link-up

Turquoise inspired nails

Hello Readers!



I know, it's been forever since I've posted anything. Life has been just a little bit crazy lately with the start of a new school year and having my parents in town, but things are starting to settle down a little bit so hopefully I will start to have a bit more time to get to painting my nails and blogging!

Also, I had a bad break on my pinky nail and since then my nails have been having a rough go of it. I did this mani a while back and still haven't gotten around to posting it, ha ha.

This is a super simple mani based off of the semi-precious gemstone turquoise. I figured I would do something simple for my newly super-short nails!

I used the water pattern from the Bundle Monster + Twi_star blogger collab plate once again. I have really gotten a lot of uses out of this one pattern!