Least favourite nail polish

This was an interesting prompt. Not many times are you supposed to say your least favourite! But figuring out what was my least favourite was super easy! I now have a job, so I can actually buy nail polish when I want it. But up until then, I could only get ones that I REALLY needed. I needed a yellow and a green and I saw really cheap ones from Kmart.

It would have been worth it to get better polish. (and I really should now that I have a job and actually do use those colours.) They don't spread well because they're streaky. They smell unlike any nail polish that I've had. They're also pretty sheer. I had to layer some white (Snow Me White by Sinful Colors) underneath. The yellow is Bananarama and the green is Envious.

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Ice blue and white

I wanted to do a bit of a gradient for this nail art, but really more of a random sponging. I painted my nails with Bonna Blue by Fresh Paint. I used a make-up sponge with Snow Me White by Sinful Colours. I then added some random dots to represent snow balls.

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Nail party for our Rushing Waters debut!

The Christian a Capella group that I am in, Rushing Waters, had their first performances on Sunday at my church. I decided to use my nail art talent and invited the girls over on Saturday to do their nails. Only three of them were able to make it, but it was great fun!

The first one is a base colour is Sparks Will Fly from China Glaze magnetix and it has cascading dots of Bonna Blue by Fresh Paint and the shiny end from Pinstripe by Revlon.

The second one was music notes. The base colour is No Room for the Blues by OPI and the music notes are Sparks Will Fly from China Glaze magnetix. I included two pictures to get the thumb in.

I had a bit of trouble with this one. Or should I say treble? Haha. The problem was that I tried to do a tape manicure. I do like the idea, though. I had based it off of a paint chip. I'll just have to wait longer before I put on the tape since most of the white polish underneath came off when I pulled the tape off. The polishes that I used were Snow Me White by Sinful Colors, Bonna Blue by Fresh Paint, No Room for the Blues by OPI, Shark Attack by Sephora, and Blackest Black by Designer Brands.

Once they left, I did my own nails. I tried to do a technique that I hadn't done before, which involves squishing dots of nail polish down with Saran wrap. I started out with a base colour of Amazon Amaz-off by OPI.

Next I added dots of a bunch of different blues and greens. I forgot to write them down, but I believe it was Low Tide by Spa Ritual. Bonna Blue, No Room for the Blues, and Shark Attack.

After the dots, I put the Saran wrap over my nails and pushed down to make a marbled look.

 Then because this is a Christian group, I added a cross. This cross is a water decal from the Born Pretty Store that they gave me for previous review. I decided to try something new with it and paint the decal brown. (A-piers to be Tan by OPI) Since what you paint is the part that attaches to the nail, you could still see the intricate design of the decal. It ended up messy on my left hand, which I did first, but the right hand looked great!

I loved doing the other girls nails and it was great to see people walking around with manicures that I did. Plus one of the girls was up on stage to introduce our group and another did the rest of the singing at the morning service, so my nails were on stage! Our performances went really well and you can watch the videos here.

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Honour Nails You Love

I knew immediately that I had to do something from morenailpolish.com because I love her work and her blog inspired me to start my own blog. She's also from Canberra, which is pretty awesome!

I really love her fish manicure from May 2013, especially since it was the first jelly sandwich manicure that I had ever seen. But I sadly don't have a blue jelly and had to choose something else. I went through her blog and remembered how much I loved her dot manicure for this challenge. You can see it here.

There were a lot of colours involved in this manicure! A-piers to be Tan by OPI, Envious by Kmart, No Room for the Blues by OPI, Snow Me White by Sinful Colors, Glowstick by Wet n Wild Fergie, Summer Rose by boe, Plugged-in Plum by OPI, Con-fused? by China Glaze Magnetix, Bonna Blue by Fresh Paint, Belsize Park by nails inc, my unknown black, and Ginger Melon by Revlon Parfumerie.

I started with a background colour of Bonna Blue.

The original manicure from morenailpolish.com had a slight gradient, so I used a sponge with some more Bonna Blue and No Room for the Blues. I really do love gradients and they're so easy!

I added the clouds next.

My first dots were for the tree trunks. I forgot about the thumb when I took this picture, but I added it right after.

I used the three greens to make the grass and the trees. I just used Envious to make the flower stems.

I chose Belsize Park for the yellow here. The reason that I chose that instead of Bananarama was because I only had to use a bit. I only have a bit of it left and it's getting thick but I don't want to waste it.

Ginger Melon was a great choice for the pink flowers. Now my nails smell a bit yummy!

I then added Plugged-in Plum for the purple flowers and a bit of Summer Rose into the blooming tree on my pinky.

I finished off with adding the birds and cleaning up any stray dots.

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Flowers

There's been an idea for flowers that I've wanted to do for a while but since I was in a continuing winter, it just didn't seem right. Now that it's finally Spring in the Southern Hemisphere and the prompt for today is flowers, I finally did it!

The colours that I used are No Room for the Blues by OPI, Bananarama by Kmart, and Snow Me White by Sinful Colors.

I started with painting my nails blue.

The next step was to make daisies from white dots. I used Snow Me White because I didn't like how it paints when that's the base colour, so I wanted to see how it looked in nail art. I was happy that it worked well because it means that I won't be wasting a bottle of polish!

The final step was to add the yellow centers. If I do this again, I would probably use a smaller dotting tool to make littler flowers. I do still really like the design, though. It's just too bad that this prompt isn't next week when my in-laws visit because we'll be going to Floriade, which is a big flower festival in Canberra!

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Polka dots!

I just stared at my nail polish collection for a while before I decided what I wanted to do for today's mani. I knew that I wanted to make it so that you couldn't really see the base colour but just a bunch of dots. I finally decided to go with a bunch of shades of green.

The polishes that I used are: Coach Ella by Fresh Paint, Low Tide by Spa Ritual, Glowstick by Wet n Wild Fergie, Envious by Kmart, 42 by Fuso, Con-Fused? by China Glaze magnetix, Amazon...Amazoff by OPI, Candid Cameron by Nicole by OPI, and my unnamed green by Old Navy.

 I started with using Coach Ella. I wanted to go with something that wouldn't show up very much when I added the dots. That way it would look like just dots but I had a layer on top of my base coat.

I put the dots on in the same order as the picture above from left to right.

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Dotticure

I decided to go with a black and white dotticure over a neutral nail colour. I chose Canberra't Without You by OPI for the base colour. The white is Lily White by Ulta3 and the black is old and has the label worn off.

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Dark

The theme for OMD2 for the 5th is Dark. I did these on the same day as bright and I wanted to do something opposite. After I painted the base colour, I realised that it wasn't as dark as I thought it would be, but really more of a metallic colour. And I should have used the opposite colours from my bright. But live and learn. I still decided to do the dots on the bottom part of my nail to bring some opposite into it.

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Bright

It's winter in Canberra and my hands get cold easily, so when I found some cheap gloves in my old stuff, I decided to cut off the fingertips to let me paint my nails and keep warm. Also, look how much better my nails are looking. They used to be so yellow because I wasn't using a good base coat when I started doing my nails. The trick really is to always use a good base coat and then you just need to wait for the yellowness to grow out.

Day 4's theme for OMD2 is Bright. I decided to go with bright green and yellow because you can't get much brighter than that!

The green that I used is from the Wet n Wild Fergie collection and is called Glowstick. Despite my annoyances with Wet n Wild's Wild Shine colours, I do love this one. The only downside is that it is a bit sheer, which is part of the reason that I chose the nail art that I did. I hate visible nail line.

The yellow is from Nails Inc and is called Belsize Park.

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One last manicure

I'm leaving tomorrow to move to Australia, so I did one last manicure on my mom's nails. She even said that she got complimented on them by her weight lifting friends. I like hearing compliments on my nail art when I don't have to point them out to people. It was just a variation of what I did on my own nails last weekend. Unfortunately her nails wear easily and I didn't get a picture until a few days after they were done.

Wear Pink 2.0

On Thursday, my extended family decided that they wanted to have a party on Saturday for my aunt, who is battling breast cancer. She was starting to lose her hair, so it was going to be a head shaving party. Since this weekend was my last one in the US (I got my visa on Friday!) we were going to stay home in Michigan. Then on Friday afternoon we decided to head down to Ohio for the weekend.

Because we only had a couple of hours to get ready and I had to shower and pack in that time, I had to do my nails really quickly. I probably spent a total of 15 minutes on this mani, so I had to touch it up a few times over the weekend. I liked the idea behind it, but as I was so rushed for time the execution was pretty bad. Here's a pic of it.

Travel (to Australia!)

The theme for NAIL this week is Travel, in honour of Tourism Day tomorrow. Pretty weird holiday, but hey it gives me a good excuse to do the mani that I've been wanting.

Last week, I was planning to do some Australian Aboriginal-style art on my nails. I looked up pictures for inspiration and everything. But when I had done the mani before, I decided to change that to be for breast cancer awareness and kept that up until my mani last week for Tulip Time.

I decided to do my interpretation of this piece of Australian Aboriginal art that I found on a google search.

I like how my thumb turned out, but the rest of the sunrise/set looks pretty messy to me. I think it's mostly because I had a hard time making small enough dots using the dotting tool that I have, so they mostly overlapped. 

Right before painting my nails, I realised that it may be difficult to try to do it on both hands, so I decided to do other Australian symbols on my right hand.

My pinky is the Southern Cross, which is the constellation on the Australian flag.

My ring finger is flip flops, or thongs if I want to stay in the Australian theme. They didn't turn out quite as I had imagined.

My middle finger is Australia. It looks more like Australia and less like a blob in real life.

My index finger is the Sydney Opera House.

My thumb is the flag for the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The red represents the dirt, since the dirt, especially in the outback, is bright red. The black represents the skin of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The yellow circle represents the sun.

NAIL challenge

Wear Pink! Breast Cancer Awareness

Last week, I saw a dotticure on pinterest that I really wanted to try out. It was in black and white, but I wanted to use my UV nail polish that turns purple and with a pink polish for the dots. I was planning it out to do on Friday, when I realised that I should really paint my nails in support of those undergoing breast cancer.

My aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer a few weeks back and on Thursday she underwent surgery. We went down to visit family on Saturday, so we went to see her at my other aunt's house. She is doing great. If I didn't know that she had cancer and just underwent surgery a couple days before, I never would have guessed!

Here are a few pictures of my manicure for breast cancer awareness. The polishes that I used were Purple Haze from Del Sol and Koala Bear-y from OPI. The UV didn't change it as much as I thought it would because I put on drying drops without thinking about the fact that it would mean that less UV got through to my nails. They ended up turning a more silvery purple than how they show up without the drying drops.

I realise I am posting this before the week for the dotticure in the challenge, but I wanted to share it now. I may do another dotticure later this week, but I wanted to keep this one for longer than I keep most of my manicures since it's in support of a good cause.