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.

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