Coral Franken

I made a frankenpolish! I had a small bottle of red nail polish, but I wanted to make an orange. I didn't have orange at all, so I added some yellow to my red. I ended up filling up the bottle and didn't have enough yellow in it to make the desired orange. Instead, I had to mix a bit on a plastic baggy, but I kept this colour in the bottle. I thought it was a beautiful coral colour.

Pi Day

I know that Pi Day isn't until Friday, but there were a couple of reasons that I wanted to do them early.
1. I work at a Math tutoring place so I wanted to celebrate it all week. Also, they aren't open on Fridays so I don't work.
2. I want to take part in a St. Patrick's Day 4-day challenge that starts on Friday.

First I had to take off my red nail polish that I had on the past few days.  This picture shows how I take off my nail polish now. You soak the small pieces of a cotton ball in nail polish remover and place them on your fingernails. You let them soak for a few minutes and then it comes off really easily.

My nails were SO stained! I decided to try some nail whitening thing that I saw on pinterest. I took a before and after picture. I soaked them twice and there really wasn't much difference.

 Before.

 After two soaks.

I wanted to do a neutral for my Pi Day nails. I had difficulties with finding a good neutral. I went with a champaign, but that was all clumpy and bumpy. (I didn't even take a picture of that.) Then I tried a pale pink. Apparently that was too sheer. I did four coats and you could still see the nail line. (Which is called VNL/ visible nail line.) It also didn't dry well and had big nicks and kept getting my fingerprints in it.

 I ended up borrowing some nail polish from my mom. It's called Barefoot in Barcelona. It's a nice deep neutral with a bit of a pink tint to it.

 This is my right hand. The glare makes it a little difficult to see, but it is a math play on words. It is the square root of -1, 2^3, Sigma, Pi. That means "i eight sum pi." My thumb says yum because what else would you say if you ate some pie? I decided to do this side in blue because blueberry pie is my favourite!

My left hand has the symbol for pi and my fingers were the first few digits. I went with green on this side because it's my favourite colour and I thought that it looked nice.

These were the polishes that I used. The clear is my base coat from a cheap collection that I got at a Christmas sale. The green is from Old Navy and doesn't have a name. The blue is Sparks will Fly from China Glaze Magnetix.

This is my new nail polish station. Before I was doing it in the bathroom because I had no room in my room. Now I've moved all of the boxes that I'm sending to Australia for the wedding and I was able to set up a card table with all of my nail polishes! The plastic bag is where I mix my nail polishes or dab a bit out so that I can use my small brush to do details.

Allow me to introduce myself... and show you my previous nail art!

I'm new to this nail polish thing. Before last year, I probably hadn't painted my nails since I was about 12. I had a cold and was feeling like crap, so I decided to paint my nails to see if that made me feel better to have pretty nails. It did! Fast forward to the end of 2013 and I was feeling really depressed waiting for all of my visa information to go through and be granted. (I'm getting married in July and moving there so I needed to get my visa granted and I haven't seen my fiancé since August) I decided to give painting my nails a try. That was helping to make me happy. I got into nail art because I went with my dad to a University of Michigan basketball game and I decided to paint Ms on my nails. It's all history from there!

I kept doing various nail art and I recently came across a blog about nail polish called www.morenailpolish.com. I thought that it was ironic that she lives in Canberra, which is where I lived last year and where my fiancé lives, and we'll be living, once we get married. Going through her blog and various sites that I've seen because of it have inspired me to start my own nail polish blog. Since I've been doing my nails for a few months and I'm just starting the blog, I'm going to post my nail art so far, in no particular order.

 I couldn't help myself when I looked up nerdy manicures to do and saw that someone had done Nerds. I had to do my own Nerds manicure! The purple is a frankenpolish (aka I mixed two polishes to get the desired colour since I didn't have one in my collection.)

 These were my nails for Mardi Gras. I painted them gold and then put tape over the parts that I wanted to keep gold and pained the rest of the nails the desired colours.

 My niece, Adrianna, turned five last month and she had a "purple party." Everyone had to wear purple. I decided to go further with a purple manicure. I even put purple sparkles on them because she loves sparkles. I also did my mom's nails, but I don't have a picture of them.

 I absolutely loved these penguins when I saw them online and had to recreate them before winter was over. Joke was on me because we're expecting another 6-10" tonight and I painted these about a month ago. I absolutely loved the bowties on the penguins. The blue nails had silver sparkly glitter over them to represent snow. The orange on the penguins was also a frankenpolish because the orange I have was too bright.

 When I was on the bus home from work, I decided that I wanted to do DNA nails. I decided to do them on my mom's nails. I did them in the yellow and blue because that is the colours of the University of Michigan, where she works. She took this picture at work and she is holding a pipette.

 These were on of my first nail art ventures, which is why the picture isn't very good. I wore them to the party for my alma mater, Hope College. They had a basketball game against their biggest rival, Calvin College. My left hand said Hope with an anchor on the thumb. The left hand said Dutch, which is our mascot. The orange is a frankenpolish because it was before I had an orange.

February 6th was my six year anniversary since I underwent brain surgery to remove a tumour in my cerebellum. I celebrated by painting my nails with gray ribbons, which is the colour for brain tumour/cancer awareness. The gray was a frankenpolish since I didn't have any gray.

For my six year anniversary, my oldest sister got me a set of 6 metallic nail polishes. I looked at the colours and they were perfect for the Olympics, which were also about to start. I painted them in the colours of the rings.

 My nails were starting to chip after my Olympics manicure, but I wanted to wait for my next manicure. I decided to try the taping technique. I did small strips and then painted black over them. I pulled off the tape and was happy to see how well it worked.

 We went to a bunch of different sports events for the University of Michigan so I decided to paint my nails according.

 This was my very first nail art. I painted an M on all of my nails.

 I tried to do a Saran wrap technique on my nails. I was kind of a mess because it was my first time doing it, but I'm sure it will be better next time.

 I painted my nails for the Super Bowl in a neutral way. My left hand was for the Broncos and the right was for the Seahawks.

Valentine's Day nails!