Vintage Floral ft. MoYou London Trend Hunter 11

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I have another fairly simple mani for you today, which I ended up liking quite a bit.

This mani was inspired by the plate I used for it, which is one that I hemmed and hawed over quite a bit before I finally bit the bullet and bought recently:

Moyou London Trend Hunter 11

I really like a lot of the MoYou London Trend Hunter collection, but I wasn't sure about this one. However, I ended up using an image today that wasn't even one of my favorites from the plate and I like it, so I am happy I ended up buying it after all and am looking forward to playing more with it.

Make Way! Moana nails ft. Bundle Monster Polynesia

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I'm really excited about today's nails. Honestly, this sort of mani, where each nail has a completely different design yet they look ok together, really intimidates me so it's not something I've attempted often. So I am so pleased that these turned out- I am just really digging this look!

Anyone who has seen Moana (and if you haven't, GO WATCH IT on Netflix because it is amazing) probably recognizes the themes on this mani. When I recently received a bunch of the Bundle Monster Polynesia plates in a grab bag Moana nails was one of the first things I thought of. That boat is a perfect Moana boat!

Polynesia BM-XL119

Also that swordfish pattern in the lower left corner is adorable. But these are not swordfish nails, no no. I immediately saw that boat and thought it would be the perfect centerpiece for a Moana mani.

Polynesia BM-XL109

My pointer finger hibiscus comes from the buffet plate from the same collection. I love buffet plates in theory, though honestly they often end up collecting dust in my collection. I guess it's more work to pick out images from them and figure out what you want them to do.

Polynesia BM-XL115

My pinky nail, of course, represents Maui's tattoos. The movie wouldn't be complete without a mini-Maui tappity tapping.

MoYou London Sci-fi 10

My middle nail is for measuring the stars, not giving the sky a high-five. I need to use this plate on more manis, so here we go. Though I still need to use those adorable kitschy space images, especially the cats.

There you are- some summery island nails and probably my favorites that I've done in a while.

Purple Daisies ft. MoYou London Flower Power

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Today's mani leans a little more traditional with a floral theme, and a chance to try out one of my newly acquired MoYou London plates.

I did this mani for a "chevron" prompt for Clairsetelle8 on instagram. I thought it would go nicely with the floral, but now I'm just not sure about the line going through the daisy paired with the chevron pattern. Maybe it's because the chevrons are horizontal and the line is vertical that I feel like it isn't quite meshing the way I want it to.

Anyway, I did a little gradient in purple and stamped a floral image from the Bundle Monster BM-XL112 plate, part of the Polynesia collection. My chevron is from a MoYou London Tropical plate, which I can't seem to locate the photo of.

Pink Dragon ft. Bundle Monster Around the World

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Today's mani is a simpler design, with the prompt "Far East" in mind. I wanted to do a softer, pinker far east mani rather than going for bold reds and golds this time... kind of like the lovely soft pink cherry blossoms of China.

My dragon comes from this Bundle Monster "Around the World" plate featuring China (sorry about the cloud on this plate- living in the Mojave Desert has perks like normally cloudless skies, but it's been a rainier summer than usual).

Side note: as I was painting tonight, my 7 year old watched me and asked to be included. So he now has the yin yan stamped onto his ring finger nails and is quite pleased about it.

The background of these nails has a tone-on-tone pink thing going on, with a kind of floral-esque pattern from this Bundle Monster plate. I was originally going to stamp the bamboo, but I didn't like how the starker lines contrasted with the dragon and though the floral would give the softer look I was going for.

Barn Cat ft. MoYou London Animal

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Today's prompt is "farm life", and no farm is complete without a cat in the barn to chase the mice away from the food! 

My inspiration for this mani started this newer MoYou London Animal 14 plate- so many cute cat images! I'm a cat person for sure, so I couldn't help picking this up to add to my vast library of feline images.

 My ring finger nail started out white with the cat face stamped over it and "meow" below, but it felt a little too simple so I painted a swatch of yellow onto my mat and stamped the face over it, waited for it to dry and used scissors to cut a straight line under it and apply it over my nail.

 Then I stamped a vine pattern from MoYou London's Mother Nature 16 plate on the seam between my yellow and white polishes. I'm thinking now it might have been better in gray instead of blue, or maybe just left out altogether. 

My little mouse faces come from the MoYou London Animal 08 plate. I really love the animal collection- they have so many stinkin cute images! I've already used the turtles on this plate as well as the bunnies on the tree trunks. 

The image for the hay stamped behind my mice comes from a Bundle Monster plate, BM-XL17. This was one I got in the grab bag sale recently, and it's a good one. I feel like this image in particular (bottom row, second to last) would also be great yarn or spaghetti. I also love the cascading line image (2nd image on top row). 

Final plate to show you- this one is from the newer Bundle Monster "Botanicals" collection, and in fact I used a different woodgrain image from this on my last mani as well. 

Seattle-Inspired nails ft. Bundle Monster Botanicals

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Today's mani was done for an Instagram challenge for "vacation" nails. I decided to commemorate the summer vacation I took with my family to Seattle earlier this season.

Seattle, to me, is a beautiful mesh up of nature and city. I wanted to represent a little bit of each on this mani, so I have the woodgrain pattern to symbolize all the beautiful trees and forests we saw on our trip, and the gray and silver for the bustle of traffic and the city.

So, this mani starts off with a beige base (Sinful Colors Beaches and Cream) with a woodgrain pattern from this Bundle Monster "Botanicals" collection plate. This plate is one of my favorite in the collection- I find myself reaching for wood grain patterns quite often so it's nice to have some new ones to play with!

For the half gray/half wood grain nails, I decided to do the entire gray half as a decal on my silicone mat. I've done a kind of dip-dyed nail effect before, and it's one of my favorite manis, but I wanted to try adding a little detail to the seam this time.

So I started by stamping the straight leaf pattern from MoYou London's Mother Nature 14 plate onto my mat.

 My next step was to paint a large area next to the leaf pattern with gray polish. I used the MoYou London Holy Shapes 05 plate to help me get a straight line to start, but then went over it with the nail polish brush to make sure it has good opacity. The leaf pattern has leaves on both sides, so I made sure to paint over half of the leaves since I only wanted them on one side of the gray area.

Next, I stamped the third pattern on the top row of this Bundle Monster plate that I got in the 20 plates for $20 sale recently. I thought that it had a bit of an industrial feel to it.

Finally, I used another of the Bundle Monster Botanicals plates to add Washington's State flower, the Rhodedendron. I always have loved seeing the beautiful Rhodies up in Seattle- just one more thing that makes that area so gorgeous.

Macarons in Paris ft. Moyou London Scandi

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Today's nails have a Paris theme to go along with an instagram "travelling" challenge. I thought it would be fun to put my favorite french treat along with the iconic tower to represent the romantic destination.

I know I'm not the only one with a soft spot for macarons. Yuuuuum!

Those cute macarons come from one of my favorite Bundle Monster collections, the "Kawaii Emoji". I'm surprised to note that I haven't actually used this image before, though I have used this plate.

The Eiffel Tower image comes from another favorite, the MoYou London Scandi 03. I love all the different looks you can make with this- you could make a totally different mani based on each image! I've used this so many times in so many different ways, and I just never get tired of it.

Finally, I used the classic MoYou London "Holy Shapes 05" plate for the stripes. I did make a decal with this stamp as the base, but I found that the light purple polish I used to stamp it in wasn't quite opaque enough to hide the other polishes I painted behind it. So, I used my clear stamper to stamp over the lines with the purple polish a second time and that worked out really well. I think it also helps a lot with these straight line images to do decals because it's really easy for lines to warp when you stamp them onto your nails, and much easier to get them straight with a decal.