NYC Skyline and Funky Fingers Olaf

Hey Everyone!! Today started out like a Monday but has since quieted down a bit so that is good. Mr. Neil has a little infection in his mouth. His breath was beyond normal stinky so he had a trip to the doctor. Good thing the little guy likes medicine and has no issues slurping it down because he will be taking them for the next several days. I can't believe he is going to be 3 in April. He is so small that at 5lbs he still looks very much like a kitten. Apparently the new girls in the office have even heard of Bruce. I guess C said something about Bruce when he told them that Neil got a bath to go to his visit and the girls responded with how they have heard about him. Bruce the infamous cat! 

Today I have a nice blue mani that I did back in January. It still applies considering half the country is cold or snow covered. I wish it was a little cooler here so feel free to send some of that cool air down my way.

I started with 3 coats of NYC Skyline Blue. 

Skyline blue was pretty thin and definitely needed the 3 coats to look even.

I used one coat of Funky Fingers Olaf over top.

This picture is a little washed out but it has a great view of the snowflake glitter. I had to fish those bad boys out but at least I remembered they were in the polish this time. 

I used LA Colors Gel Like polish in Tempt to stamp. The polish stamps amazing. I can't rave about those Gel Like polishes enough. I love cheap thrills.

I used Gogoonly plate St. Merry for the flower like design. It looked sort of like a snowflake so I just went with it. I really wanted to test the plate out since it had just arrived.

I will have a better review on the Gogoonly plate in another post but I can say that it is a great plate and the price is really good too.

I believe I used my Creative Stamper for this mani and it was one of the first times I used it. There was a slight learning curve for me with that stamper so the images didn't come out as crisp and nice and I had expected. I was quite unimpressed over the hype of the Creative Stamper while doing this mani. I have since figured out the best way to use the stamper and it is back in my good graces. 

I love these two blues together. 

That's all for now :)

LA Colors Vampy Valentine

Hey Everyone!!! Today gets two posts since I am finishing up the Valentine's Day Manis. This one will be short and sweet.

This is the first, I should have probably posted it first, mani I did with the MoYou Festive 20 plate that I won from Karolyn of Nails of Aquarius. I was so excited to win this plate. It pretty much made my day, week and probably month! 

I started with a base of LA Colors Vampy. I absolutely love this polish.

The color is gorgeous and shiny and I didn't even have a top coat on the base for these pictures. 

The little bits and stuff around my nails are because I have been testing using hair glue around my nails to help with cleanup and I haven't quite mastered it yet. 

I need to find the rest of these Gel Like polishes because the ones I have tried are great. 

I used a random white polish for the stamping on this one as well as my Creative Stamper. There is a bit of a learning curve to the stamper and this was I believe the first time I used it so the stamping isn't perfect. 

I also messed up a bit on my middle finger so I tried to cover that up with another coat of Vampy and restamp. Unfortunately you can see a hint of the original stamping. Oops.

I love hearts so this mani was one of my favorites.

I love the cute falling hearts. Now that I have the hang of the stamper I need to try this image again and make it a little more crisp.

I still can't believe I won this plate. Karolyn is awesome and you should definitely check out her blog and facebook page!! She is super sweet and handled my extreme excitement quite well. I literally squealed when I realized I won. 

That's all for now :)

Sinful Colors Skylark Valentine

Hey Everyone!!! Is it Friday yet? Work has been so slow. Our theory is that it is due to all the snow and wonders of winter keeping people from working. Whatever it is, I hope it doesn't last long. The quiet makes me want to nap.

Today I am finally finishing up the Valentine's Day manis. I did this mani as well as the next one with MoYou Festive Plate #20 that I won from a giveaway. I don't win things very often so I was super stoked to have won this plate. Even more so because I love hearts and I had my eye on this one when it was released. The awesome Karolyn from Nails of Aquarius, which is who held the giveaway, made sure the prizes were received in time to do Valentine's nails and I was able to do two manis with the plate before Valentine's Day. So exciting. You should definitely check her blog out or check her out on Facebook here.

Since I was really over red by this point I decided to go with a little bit of a different twist. I used Sinful Colors Skylark for the base. This polish pretty much freaked my camera out. 

It was really hard to get an accurate picture of the base alone. It is more accurate in the pictures with the stamping but I wanted to try and show what the base color was anyway.

I used Festive 20 and LA Colors Vampy to stamp the rose pattern on my index and pinky nails and the balloons on my middle finger. I stamped over the middle finger with a white but wasn't really thrilled with it so I only did it on my left hand. 

I made a stamper decal and colored in the little envelops and hearts for my accent nail. If I had more time I would have made the whole mani that cute envelope image. Since I didn't think I was going to get too many manis in before Valentine's Day I used a few images for this mani. Luckily I don't think it came out too busy.

I had a little issue with my decals because I didn't quite let them dry enough then of course my top coat smeared them. I thought it was still cute though.

I have no idea why I only took one picture of the hand without the Happy Valentine's Day stamped on it but apparently I did. 

That's all for now :)

Sinful Colors Mesmerize and Love Sprinkles

Hey Everyone! What a week, what a week. I am glad it is Friday. I have yet another Valentine's Day mani for you. This one, at least, isn't over the top pink and red. I think I have two more but I might just post those two together. I still have to edit those pictures which will hopefully happen tomorrow. 

One of the horrible issues in life of a blogger is when we have the sudden outbreak of bad cuticles. I must apologize in advance for the cuticles. I don't have any clue why but they all decided to revolt at the same time. I have three very angry cuticles but the show must go on. They aren't too gory but I am still self conscious about them.

This year the craze was all about Sinful Colors and their glitter polishes for Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day. I was able to track them down after some hunting which made me very happy. There is nothing like hunting for a polish and finally being able to get your hands on it.

I forgot to take a picture of the base alone. I used three coats of Sinful Colors Mesmerize for the base color. It is a very pretty dark purple/ blue color and the formula is great. Sometimes it looked very deep purple and sometimes it looked like a dark blue. I loved the color and could have gone with two coats. I am guessing it will stamp nicely too.

I used one coat of  Sinful Colors Love Sprinkles over top of Mesmerize. I used the glob and drag method to get the glitter spread out in a more evenly.

I didn't realize until a couple nails in that I didn't get any hearts out of the bottle when I was applying the glitter. I had to do a little bit of fishing but they weren't too hard to get out at all. I love this glitter polish because it is a mix of both light pink and white glitter. You can tell better in person than it shows up in the pictures. It is quite a fun, cute polish.

That's all for now :)

Lots of Hearts

Hey Everyone!! I spent the weekend away from the computer so we are behind on the Valentine's Day manis. I guess this means we will be seeing a few more days of red and hearts and barfy valentines day stuff. Luckily I don't think I have too many more manis to post before we can move on to other things. 

I think the theme of my Valentine's manis this year is recycling holiday polishes and making them work for Valentine's Day. Today I have another Sally Girl polish from the holidays. This one was supposed to be scented however not once did I get a whiff of any scent other than your normal polish smell. The non scent didn't bother me in the least though. 

I used Sally Girl Peppermint for the base. All the junk on my fingers and cuticles is the remnants of hair glue which I tried to use to help with cleanup. My first experience with the hair glue was a bit of a fail as you can tell by the amount left on my skin after my mani.

I used three coats of Peppermint to get a nice opaque base. 

I decided to do some stamping but couldn't decide what color to use to stamp so I did black and red. At this point I was pretty much over the red and pinks of Valentine's Day so the black was a welcome change.

I used China Glaze Tip Your Hat and Wet N Wild black for the stamping.

I used Bundle Monster plate BM-H18 from their Holiday Collection for the heart image. 

That's all for now :)

Red Shimmer Hearts

Hey Everyone!! Happy Friday!!! the 13th! I kind of want to hug a black cat today. I stopped by the Valentine's Day aisle at Target this morning but couldn't find anything interesting, other than all the candy of course. I was thinking I should probably pick up candy for the boys but wasn't very inspired by what I saw so I bought nothing. Tonight we are going to visit my dad up at his new rehab place. He has a roommate and is settled in. My mother visited yesterday and says he was sitting up on the edge of the bed when she went in so he is doing really well. Hopefully he comes home sooner than they thought. 

Today I used another Holiday polish for my Valentine's Day mani. All those reds that come out for Christmas come in handy when Feb comes around. I had picked up one of the Sally Girl Snowmen polishes on sale after Christmas and thought it would be great for a sparkly February mani. 

The base was the Snowman Polish in Red Shimmer. This clearly is a holo glitter and not a shimmer so I am not sure what the deal with the name is. I guess we are lucky it had a name on there because the Red Cross pumpkins and snowmen don't have names or colors or anything on them. 

I used three coats of the Red Shimmer polish. I could have probably stopped at two but the polish is on the sheer side and wanted to see if it would build up to a deeper color. It didn't really differ too much between two and three coats.

I then stamped using another Dashica plate. I used plate XL SdP-54 for the heart pattern. I love the Dashica plates as they stamp really nicely. 

I used Konad white stamping polish for the white hearts and LA Colors Gel Like Stunner for the accent nail. Stunner stamped really well so I am happy to say that so far I have found the line to be great for stamping. 

That's all for now :)

Valentine's Day Hearts

Hey Everyone!! I have been running around a bit since my dad had surgery this week and things are a little hectic. Between visiting him at the hospital and taking care of the dogs I have had these Valentine's Day manis but hadn't had the chance to edit the pictures and get them ready for posting. I am behind but I have several manis to share and a few more since I still have three days until the evil "holiday". I will either post a couple a day or I will just let them run past Valentine's day, not sure yet. 

Looking at the pictures of the base I used for today's post I feel kind of like Goldilocks and the three bears. The first picture is a little too bright because my camera freaked out on this polish when I was outdoors. The third picture is a little too light and washed out. I wish I could say the middle picture was just right but it the polish is actually a little more vibrant in real life. The pictures of the final mani are most color accurate. I hate when I can't get good pictures of a color.

The base for this mani was LA Colors Gel Like in Stunner. 

This polish totally freaked my camera out because it is absolutely not this bright. Not even a little bit. I do love this color though and would like a polish that looks just like this. I probably have one actually.

This is the closest picture to the actual color. Stunner is a really pretty bright coral color. Love the color even if I can't get my camera to take an accurate picture.

This one is a little too washed out. The life of a blogger is always exciting. Sometimes no matter how hard you try you just can not get an accurate picture. 

I went to three Family Dollar stores to try and find these Gel Like polishes. I found one display which was 98% empty and in the other stores I found little buckets with the polishes they had left. I was able to grab a few but I wasn't able to get all of the ones I want. This particular one is a nice color but the brush was thick and difficult. I used two coats but it was nice and thick and had the brush been more cooperative I could have almost done one coat. It also didn't really self level which drove me nuts. The color is nice and I did think it might be nice for stamping.

I decided to stamp some hearts on this one. I used Dashica XL SdP-111 and China Glaze Tip Your Hat to stamp the hearts on the background.

I thought it would be a nice time to double stamp so I decided to add a couple of darker hearts on a couple nails. 

I used Vivid Lacquer plate VL001 and China Glaze Out Like a Light for the accent hearts. I love how the final mani looked. Even in the stamped pictures the base color was playing games.

That's all for now :)

Essie Sable Collar

Hey Everyone! I thought today was Thursday and then was highly disappointed when I realized it was only Wednesday. Bummer. I have started to move into the Valentine's Day manis, however, I don't have any ready to post yet. Those should be coming up soon. 

Today I have very unique polish from Essie. It is from the 2013 Winter Collection or the Shearling Darling Collection. I am still not sure if Essie actually names their collections or if they just pick one of the colors and put the name up on the display. 

This gorgeous color is Sable Collar. It is a brownish purple with are really pretty pink opal shimmer. I absolutely love this color.

I used two coats of Sable Collar for this mani. I did get a couple of tiny chips really quickly when wearing this polish but they weren't really noticeable and I went two days with this mani.

A lovely nail friend gifted me a mini bottle of this polish and I am so happy she did. I just about forgot about this one until I saw the bottle. Essie is not my usual go to brand but I do absolutely love some of their polishes and colors.

The coloring is a little off in these next two pictures due to the sunlight but I had to show the shimmer. It really popped in the light on my drive home. 

The polish looks so glowy in these two pictures. Sable Collar is definitely a winner!!

That's all for now :)