Tuesday 13 March 2012

Prophecy Fulfilled

Lately I have been using and getting really good results with Creative's Moxie monomer paired with their Perfect Colour sculpting polymer.  I have had minimal lifting and find that now I have become used to the how fast it sets I am doing my fills in much less time.  However, I recently had an index nail lift about 1/2 the way off, unfortunately while I was away from home and had no glue handy to tide me over to carrying out a proper repair.  Eventually it got the better of me and I peeled it off completely.  I kept thinking to myself "I really should fix this before my natural nail tears."  And then this happened:
Rummaging in the drawer minus an enhancement...


will lead to this...

After I cut it down.
It was that short that I had to create a free edge with acrylic so I could put a form under it to re-create the length to match the others!

It's not all doom and gloom though, after I repaired and completed my fills, I polished them up to submit an entry into a comp over at morenailpolish.blogspot.com.au, where I'm now in the draw to win some Lynderella polishes.

These are the photo's of the mani I submitted:
Cherries stamped in Natio Ruby with the stems highlighted by hand with Chi Chi  Show me the Money and the leaves hand highlighted with Rimmel Green Grass.



Sunday 11 March 2012

Black & Grey Stamping

Recently I was due to travel to a rather conservative conference for my "day job", for which I was planning on wearing something rather subdued and had already painted them a pretty mid silver by Essie, Fair Game.   But I had recently received my stamping kit (which was really reasonably priced from http://www.bornprettystore.com ) as well  as the matte polish I had also ordered, Suede Ink.  I'm not really sure what brand this polish is, but I think they refer to it as "New Magic" on the site.  Either way, it is quite a nice matte with silver flecks.
As I hadn't really had much of a play with the stamping gear I decided to put some designs in black over the silver.  I tried with a few blacks initially, but they just weren't opaque enough, but this matte was perfect, topped off with the silver flecks really showing up with a gloss top coat over the top ( I know how backwards that sounds to use a matte and then put a shiny top coat on, but it worked great!).


Not a great shot.  Essie Fair Game & New Magic Ink Suede

Now please keep in mind, I haven't had a huge amount of practising with these new tools and enthusiasm can only take one so far!  So, without further ado, here are the shots of the finished product, and yes, I also need to work on the capturing of the images to better showcase the nails!

Nice shot of the thumb

Crown & butterflies (one of the butterflies has lost a bit of her wing, because I didn't realise just how FAST you have to work when stamping

Nice overall shot