Glitter Me Monday: Autumn Glitters

Hello lovelies!

I've been a very lazy blogger and not posted anything all week, oops! I did do my nails but just couldn't find the motivation to sort the pictures out and get them uploaded =(

BUT I am back and will hopefully be getting them all sorted and up here over the next week to make up for it so YAY.

For today's GMM I used lots of autumnal polishes/glitters-I LOVE autumn and so this mani made me very happy! I did some gradients using the Barry M autumnal gellies in Mustard, Paprika, Chilli and Cocoa. On my accents I used a coat of China Glaze-White Cap and then added some autumnal leaf nail vinyls which were from Make It Stick Designs. On my other fingers I used a variety of Autum glitters-Tara's Talons-Chocolate Orange, Nelly Polishes-Prototype and Absolut Lacquer-Falling Leaves.

What do you reckon? I kinda love these if I'm honest, they remind me of scrunching through leaves and large mugs of warming drinks. I love these sorts of colours together and they went together really well in the gradients.

What's your favourite season?

~Nail Art Novice~

My OH Paints My Nails

PIC HEAVY POST

The British Nail Bloggers are having another fun group post this week that I thought I'd join in with: My Other Half Paints My Nails. As the name suggests this is asking nail art newbies (not necessarily just partners) to paint your nails for you. I asked my Australian if he'd be up for doing that and he was surprisingly excited! He decided to do a skittle mani across all my nails, incorporating many techniques. He even opted to do a fishtail nail which I thought was pretty impressive! So these are all his nail art, he chose the colours and did them all and I think they look really fab. I'll hand over to him now:

So Ah... Hi!
Having spent so much time with Jenni over the last 7 or 8 months it is unsurprising really that I was asked to do her nails at some point. I have done several "He picks my polish" things, and Jenni has done several designs on my thumb nails, so I guess this was the next logical step. So without further ado here they are:

Left Hand

Right Hand

So I know this isn't how Jenni usually does her posts but I am going to do a nail by nail breakdown with the polishes I used for each nail and the technique used, also possibly some other bits and pieces. (See more after the break)

12 Days Of Xmas Nail Art 10-Santa

~Pic Heavy Post~

So we're down to the final three manis of this challenge and I still can't really believe that it's gone by so quickly-I mean in a WEEK Christmas will have been and gone, what's that about?! In the spirit of all things Christmassy, here's some Santa nails-hope you've all been good this year ;)
I saw some awesome ones by Pause For Polish yesterday and decided to recreate them as accents, along with some Santa hats. For my Santas I used Rimmel-Red Carpet/Serene plus W7-Black and Maybelline-Winner Takes It All. On my hats I added Barry M-Lady to add a touch of sparkle and to make the fluff look fluffier, oh and the background is Revlon-Silver Screen. My other fingers have a base of Tara's Talons-Carollers from my Advent Calendar which is a lovely forest green with gold glitters. On top of that is two coats of the appropriately named Absolut Lacquer-Mrs Claus' Night Out for that perfect mix of Festive colours!

First (pre clean up!) pic is to show Carollers in all its glory.

I also grabbed one without flash to show off Mrs Claus to her full potential-she's packed full of silver and red micro glitter and larger silver pieces:

I really like these! They're super festive and really rather cool I reckon. My Mum liked them so much that she asked me to do some on her too (and that's a big deal because she never ever wears nail polish!), which I think is pretty cool =D

Rara
Polishes used: Barry M-Retro Red, Essie-Cascade Cool, Nails Inc-Uptown Glamour, Barry M-Matt White and Andrea Fulerton black and silver.
I love my Santas!!!!!! I'm not sure if you can tell but they are tiny boots on my little finger! I like how happy and cutey my Santas' faces are!!!

It's "Christmas Day" today so I'm meeting Novice and we're going to swap gifts so it actually feels like Christmas now!!

~Rara~

Haha, yeah, we're going to take our Santa nails and eat some scrummy food whilst exchanging presents today, yay! I love Christmas!
Here, if you need them, are the challenge prompts one last time-only two left to go now.

And check out the other Santa manis too!

~Nail Art Novice~

12 Days Of Xmas Nail Art 2-Snow/Winter

Hey lovelies, it's day 2 of my Xmas challenge and I've got a lovely wintry mani for you. I was feeling a little indecisive when I was planning this one, so I did a skittle in the end. Sadly, my new snowflake decals haven't arrived yet so I wasn't able to include them-Boo!

On my thumbs/little fingers I have the gorgeous Barry M-Lady from their autumn textured line-it's the most perfect 'snow' polish I think, pearly and shiny and shimmery white-the way the light plays across it is quite lovely! The darker of my fingers is a couple of coats of Absolut Lacquer-Snow Daze over Rimmel-Royal Blue (a bit of an homage to my first ever blog post!), and the lighter is Pocket Money Polishes-Ice Ice Baby over Revlon-Blue Lagoon. On my middle fingers I have OPI-I Don't Give A Rotterdam! and a freehanded snowflake done in my Barry M nail art pen (thanks to this easy tutorial from Nailside).

These are minimal effort nails really-I've not really done anything taxing at all but I still really like them, they definitely feel wintry to me! I'm sure it won't be long before we have the weather to match either and then it's time for snowball fights and snowmen and then steaming hot cups of hot chocolate to warm up again-lush!

Rara's
So today is 'Snow' and I obviously had to draw a snowman...one of my favourite things about winter is making a snowman when it snows (no matter how small it ends up!) The polishes I used were Sinful Colors-Cinderella (which is a gorgeous baby blue with shimmery pinks in it), Barry M-Matt White, Andrea Fulerton dot and flick black/silver and green/orange nail art pens from Paperchase. On my thumb I did a house/cottagey thing with snow on the roof, then what was meant to be trees but they didn't turn out the best, a snowflake, a snowman and some snowflakes. I love my snowman. Can't wait to see the other manis for this theme!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! Don't forget to check out the other wintry manis in the inlinkz, and here's a reminder of the rest of the prompts:

~Nail Art Novice & Rara~

When Autumn Leaves Start To Fall

I know we're heading along into winter but as we're not there yet I thought I'd take this opportunity to use a polish I've had forever and not had the chance to. I bought this last year in a Black Friday sale but it didn't arrive til Decemberish so it was no longer seasonally appropriate. I've had to wait for Autumn to roll around again before I can rock it on my nails-and it's gorgeous! Falling Leaves by Absolut Lacquer is a glitter topper with orange and yellow glitter pieces along with browny/red bar glitter and microglitters-I think it's lovely! I've used it here over a gradient of Barry M-Gold Foil, Rimmel-Gold Save The Queen and Avon-Fabulous-a perfect autumnal trio!

I love Autumn-it's my favourite season and I really like this mani too! I think I need to go and find a big pile of crisp Autumn leaves and photograph it with them (before jumping in, of course!).

Happy weekend!

~Nail Art Novice~

A Gorgeous Goddess

As I've been doing lots of travelling and haven't wanted to take all my nail art tools with me I've been using a lot of glittery indies to keep my nails interesting without having to take too many polishes. Most of them haven't ended up being photographed but this one I had to share with you because it's stunning, although it comes with a sad (for me) story. While I think that the rise in indie makers (particularly in the UK) is fabulous because it means they are much more available for us polish lovers it also means that some of the older sellers are unable to compete with the influx any more. One of my absolute favourite indie polish makers, who has been so right from the beginning of my nail art obsession, is closing her doors for good and this makes me SO sad. To use up her supplies she's offering one of a kind 'mystery' polishes on her Etsy shop until they're all gone and I had to bag myself one before she disappeared into the ether. And boy am I a lucky girl-it's beautiful.

This is Absolut Lacquer-Goddess Jenni (she even named it after me-how awesome is that?) and she's a clear glitter topper filled with golden dots and iridescent hexes, squares and shimmers. She's utterly gorgeous and a little camera shy, but I've done my best. I layered her over Revlon-Plum Night to try and bring out some of that hidden sparkle. This is 1-2 coats-for the most part I got a pretty decent amount of coverage with just 1 but sometimes I went back and added a second for extra glitz and glam. (Apologies for the slight tip wear in these)

You can see how many different colours she shimmers and shines, and I couldn't stop moving my fingers about to admire the colour changes and the sparkle-I'm a bit in love. I'm also torn, I want to wear her all the time because she's so pretty but at the same time I know this is the only bottle that is ever going to exist and I want to keep her forever and ever! 

If you want to get your own Absolut Lacquer one of a kind polish then you have to be quick, they're going fast! Visit her Etsy shop here. I, for one, will miss her when she's gone! Thanks for all the awesome polishes Tisha, best of luck in your new adventures!

~Nail Art Novice~

ABC Challenge: P is for Purple Phishtail Plaits

So I may have taken a little liberty with the name there ;) Forgive me?

I was going to do penguins originally for this mani but thought they would be too similar to my owls in the end. Also I've been working at my friend's Dad's factory this week and am frankly too exhausted to do anything fancy-so I've done a simple fishtail. I love these manis, they're so effective! Also I apologise for not doing a Try Something Tuesday post this week-the simple fact is that I fell asleep for most of Tuesday night when I got in and therefore didn't do any nail art!

Polishes used were Rimmel-Marshmallow Heaven (pinky-lilacy colour), Rimmel-Purple Addict (shimmery purple loveliness) and Marks and Spencer-Blue (dusky purpley blue). Incidentally it bugs me when people call what are clearly purple polishes 'blue'.
After I'd finished the mani I felt like it was missing something, so I added a layer of Absolut Lacquer-Maybe I'm Crazy to my non-fishtail nails and I think it's really added something magical. It's basically a rainbow glitterbomb in a pot-every colour of glitter imaginable and it's so pretty. It's also the first indie polish I ever bought, so it has a special place in my heart!

It's a really simple mani but I reckon it's really quite pretty too! I just noticed the chip on my middle finger though, boo =(

~Nail Art Novice~

Check out what the other particpants have done this week:

Try Something Tuesday-Full Nail Water Decals: A Disasticure

~Before I begin I just want to wish Rara a very Happy Birthday, coz it's TODAY, Yay!~

PIC HEAVY POST

So the other night I went out to a comedy gig for Rara's birthday, and I wanted to co-ordinate my nails with what I was wearing-my beautiful black and white polkadot rockabilly style dress. I've done plain black and white spotted nails before and wanted something different so I chose some fun spotted full nail decals from YRNails which I thought would look pretty good. I watched their 'How To' video along with Lisa from Geordie Nails' tutorial video (which is really helpful if you've never applied full water decals before!) and got all my equipment ready to go. 

I started by painting my nails (badly) with two coats of Revlon-Black Star which is a lovely black with a silvery shimmer running through it to give a base colour if I needed one.

Then I set about applying my water decals and...here's where it all went wrong. Now I'm definitely not blaming the decals for this, I've seen lots of people use them well and get great results, I think it was my atrocious technique that was to blame for the mess they ended up in. 

Firstly, let me show you how they were supposed to look, with a little help from the lovely Wendy from Wendy's Delights:

Find her superior review of these decals here

I'm a bit ashamed of how badly mine do not look like the ones above really. Any how, here goes:

They don't look so bad from a distance do they?

Up close though you can see that I really did a terrible job!

And don't even get me started on my right hand!

I experienced SO many problems with these that I don't really know where to begin. I think my nails on my right hand were a little short (thanks to my Sheffield trip) because I struggled to get rid of the excess decal on my index and middle fingers simply due to how close to the ends of my fingers the nails are. Obviously I didn't cut them down as well as I could either, I didn't want to take too much of the widths so that I wouldn't end up with bald patches, but I should have been less cautious and they would have fitted my nails much better.

However even with the sizing difficulties I didn't manage to get these to stick to my nails at all. I followed all the directions to the letter, but they just sat on top of my nails and slid about no matter much I tried to get them to stay put by smoothing them into the corners. Even my right hand ring finger (which is probably the only one I cut to the correct size!) didn't stick down on its own, I ended up putting a layer of top coat underneath them all to hold them into place! I don't know what I was doing wrong. I also covered them in layers of topcoat, and they still lifted away from my nails.

As you can see only two of these are completely flush with
my nail! 

I ended up with lots of rough edges, lifting sections and creases and they just didn't look very nice. I went for a shower about an hour after putting these on and they all just lifted off so much that I just peeled them off in the end.

This happened just from picking up my towel! They all ended up
like this though =( =(

I'm really sad I wasn't able to make these work for me! I think they have the potential to look so amazing, and all the other blogs I've seen with people wearing them have been beautiful, I've never seen anyone else have this amount of problems. I am determined to try these again and get them to work, but maybe not for a while because I'm so disheartened by this first attempt =( I think next time I'll try them over naked nails to see if that helps, and obviously cut them down better.

In the end, because I was running out of time to get ready for the evening I ended up wearing something very simple (but lovely) over my Revlon base-two coats of Absolut Lacquer-Mrs Claus' Night Out. Although this is technically a Christmas polish, one of the reasons I bought it was because it had the potential to be used all year round, and I was right! These pictures were taken the day after so there's a bit of tip-wear but they're still in better condition than my decals were! I really like this combo =)

So there ends the sorry tale of my first attempt at full nail water decals. I hope you've at least enjoyed looking at my total failure, and if you have any hints or tips as to how I can make them work for me, please let me know in the comments!!

~Nail Art Novice~

My First Mani...Snowy Days

Today it has been snowing heavily in Britain, and I wanted to do a snow inspired manicure because of this. I have the perfect polish in my collection for this, so all I needed was some base colours, which were fairly easy to choose.

I started with my normal base coat- Sally Hansen Double Duty which I noticed was sadly getting a little sticky and gloopy-time to order some more I guess!
The colours I chose were Barry M-Denim and a London Girl polish which doesn't have a name but is a pearly white colour.

I have a large collection of Barry M polishes, and I think for what they cost they're very good quality and fit perfectly into my budget! Denim is a surprisingly dark blue colour-like the colour of dark jeans- with small silver shimmers in and it went on very easily. I only needed two coats for full coverage and I could have easily got away with one. It's quite matte when it dries though, which I'm not a fan of, but it looks beautiful with some shiny top coat on.
The London Girl polish is a bit of an odd one. I got an online offer for 24 bottles of nail varnish for £20 which I didn't really think I could pass up. Although the colours are fantastic, the quality of polish isn't great and they take a long time to dry completely. I do like this pearly white colour, it's very shiny and pretty, but takes about 4-5 coats to reach opacity. Unfortunately I didn't take a picture at this stage, sorry! I've got the blue one my left hand, with a white accent nail and vice versa on my right.

Finally, I topped them off with my snowy glitter polish- Snow Daze by Absolut Lacquer, which is my favourite favourite Indie polish maker on Etsy. She's got great prices and really awesome polishes, and is kind to her international fans and doesn't charge extortionate shipping rates-plus she's really lovely and goes out of her way to give great customer service. I cannot recommend her enough!
Snow Daze is a blue glitter topper with lots of white glitters in-small squares, large/small hexagons and bars which look like snow in a pot! (Hence the reason I chose it!). It goes on really nicely, although I moved some of the big glitters around to get them more evenly spread out. I used one coat on each nail, and then a top coat of my trusty Seche Vite Quick Dry.

Here's the finished result:

Apologies for the messy edges, I tidied up as best I could!

I think it's a really pretty manicure. I just hope the snow lasts as long as the nail varnish will!

What do you think? Have you got any snow inspired manis to share? Let me know =)

~Nail Art Novice~