Winter Mani

Hey Everyone!!! Happy Friday! I am definitely happy it is Friday. I have nail mail that is supposed to be en route to me which is a very happy thing. I discovered, thanks to the joys of Facebook groups, a couple of supply stores I didn't know about in my area. I can't wait until I have some fun money to go check them out. I am also looking forward to checking out the craft stores for some fun new toys. I have seen a few manis done with alcohol inks and I am dying to give that a try. For now though I have lots of new plates to play with and swatch into my book. I am also contemplating a new swatch book for my polish and perhaps one for polishes that stamp. I am also not done with project reorganization so that is a never ending process. Luckily there are lots of things going on so I will have some fun posts to write.

Today I have my first mani of 2014. This was actually my first three manis. I got Butter London Victoriana from a very sweet nail group friend. Now, I have a few Butter London polishes in my stash but they are all untried so I have no experience with the brand. I have been quite interested in several of their polishes over the years and figured it was about time to try them out. My major issue was that my newest goal is to use up all of  the various brands and types of base and top coats I have lying around. For some reason the first two manis chipped within 24 hours. Since I am stubborn I refused to give up and kept redoing the same mani until I could get it to last past 11am the next morning (I do my nails around 9pm) so that I could  take pictures. Try #3 finally worked which is good because I was getting frustrated.

After three manis I learned that Poshe base coat does not like me and that I really like the formula of Butter London. Poshe will be finding a new home soon. I finally got this one to stick using Barielle Hydrating Ridge Filler and Palladio Fuse Nail Bonding Basecoat over that. 

I used two coats of Butter London Victoriana as the base coat. For some reason I forgot that I needed to take pictures of just the base color. 

I used Funky Fingers Elsa sponged on my pinky and middle fingers as a gradient. I used a full coat of Elsa on my ring and index finger. Elsa is from the Funky Fingers Frostbitten collection. I really wish we had a Five Below located somewhere near me so I had easier access to these pretties. 

Elsa has an ice blue and white glitter mix that has both matte and satin glitter in it. The glitter is various sizes. One thing I didn't get on my nails with this mani is any of the snowflake shaped glitter that is in this polish. I totally forgot about the snowflake glitters until I used another polish from this collection and one happened to appear. The snowflakes definitely have to be fished out. Between two polishes (Elsa and Olaf, which I used on a different mani) and 20 nails I only got one snowflake and none for this mani. The glitter is pretty enough that I won't hold the lack of snowflakes against it. 

That's all for now :)