Tara's Talons Treasure Trove!

Last month Tara's Talons turned 1 year old and to celebrate Tara ran a competition where you sent in photos of her polishes to help her celebrate. I was lucky enough to be picked as one of her winners and today I received my prize-a Tara's Talons Treasure Trove goodie box! It also contained some polishes that I'd ordered so it was a bit of a huge (and really exciting!) haul =D

This was what was waiting for me when I opened the box. This is a photo from my phone because I was far too excited to think about finding my camera at this point, haha! Four of those parcels are from my order but there's still loads from the Treasure Trove itself! I got two full size TT polishes, three minis, a black nail art pen/detailing brush and some cuticle oil PLUS some striping tape, some caviar beads and 3D nail art decorations, and the sweeties that Tara includes with every order cos she's awesome! Treasure Trove is definitely the right word for this box of magic =D

Here's what I got in a bit more detail:

My Treasure Trove polishes
L-R: Out Of This World, Kiki's Blue, Vy, Butterfly Dreams and Don't Be Jel
plus detail pen

The extras, plus the bow from the box it came in cos I thought
it was a nice touch!

As I said, also included in the box was my latest order from Tara containing some of her lovely spring polishes, and I grabbed a quick photo of these too!

My purchases
L-R: Party Bag, Clear Skies, 100% and The Mill Creek Killer

So basically this was a really awesome day! Although now I am faced with a complete dilemma about just which one I should wear first! They're all so lovely. Here's what they look like swatched (except Kiki's Blue and Vy cos I ran out of wheel!)

L-R: Clear Skies, The Mill Creek Killer, 100%, Party Bag
Don't Be Jel, Out Of This World, Butterfly Dreams

Which one would you choose?

You can get your hands on a Tara's Talons Treasure Trove over at The Tara Emporium-and there's lots of other monthly/yearly subscriptions too. I'm sure whichever one you choose would be amazing!

~Nail Art Novice~

31 Week Nail Art Challenge 6-Purple

I called this a 31 Week nail art challenge but I have to confess that I'm not really sticking to posting one every week very well, this should really have gone up by Sunday but oh well!

For my purple challenge I used a new polish and a new technique-the cloud mani. I've always thought these looked quite fun and I don't know why I've never tried it before! The base colour is the beautiful Cirque-Baptisia which is another polish I won in Emma's giveaway at the start of the month. It's a really deep purple packed with bluey shimmers, and it smells of lavender too, mmm! On top of that I added the "cloud" shapes in Loki's Lacquer-Buddy and Revlon-Purple Addict, both favourite purples of mine.

I'm totally in love with this, the colours together are just stunning! I have to say though, I'd not really thought about doing this one with my off hand-and it's really hard! Keeping the lines at the right height while at the same time trying to keep the lovely blobby shapes at the top was really difficult, and you can see some of the ones on my right hand are less than perfect. I still like it though!

Here's what I've got coming up next week, or at least at some point in the indeterminate future haha!

~Nail Art Novice~

March TPT The Third

Hello lovelies! I'm back again today with another blue, green and purple Tri-Polish Tuesday, but this one is a little bit special! At the start of the month I was lucky enough to win one of the prize sets in AJ from Nail Lacquer UK's giveaway and it was a set of four glittery duochrome polishes from her indie brand. This was kinda bittersweet for me as these are my first Nail Lacquer UK polishes (woo!) but sadly AJ closed her shop up earlier this year, so they are also my last. They're pretty gorgeous though, and as there was a purple, blue and green one I wanted to use them for this challenge!

They were all un-named apart from the purple which was called Galaxy so I decided to give them appropriately space-y names to go with it! L-R above is Universe, Planet, Galaxy, Solar System and I used two coats of all but the last one for this mani over black.

Aren't they pretty? Such sumptuous colours, they remind me of the iridescent scales on scarab beetles or something, and I mean that in an entirely complimentary way! They're lovely, and went on really easily too, I had no issues with the application. The glitters add another dimension of gorgeousness too!

I managed to get a picture of the colour shift too in the glorious sunshine we had the other day-albeit on my phone. The blue goes to an indigo/purple, the purple goes to green and the green goes red!

All kinds of beautiful, don't cha think?

~Nail Art Novice~

Things What I Did Won

A couple of weeks ago I won a giveaway over at It's All About The Polish and so I thought I'd share my goodies with you now they've arrived safely. I'm now the very proud owner of some pretty Australian Indies including my very first piCture pOlish (does ANYONE know why it's capitalised like that, I've wondered forever?) and my very first  Pretty Serious *swoon*

From L-R that's Pretty Serious-Party By The Pool, MaxFactor-Fantasy Fire, piCture pOlish-Mirage, Loki's Lacquer-Buddy, Gloss 'n Sparkle-Slowly Growing Deaf and Loony Lacquer-Love A Lot.

I've done a quick swatch of them on swatch sticks, and will try and get proper swatches of them up soon but in the meantime I'll try and find some links so you can see them in all their glory =)

Party By The Pool

3 coats

I have to confess this is my favourite of them all-but then again it would be, right? It's a teal jelly with blue and green glitter in it and I love it love it love it! Here's a swatch from Lucy's Stash.

Mirage

2 coats on its own/
2 coats over black

This is a terrible quality swatch for which I can only apologise. Mirage is a gorgeous greyish duochrome that shifts from green to blue with a hint of purple in it too. On its own I imagine it'd take a lot of coats to become opaque, but over darker colours it's gorgeous! Here's some swatches by the person who it was made for-Sarah Hassan's Blog

Buddy

3 coats

Buddy was a bit of a surprise for me-it's so pretty! It's a lilac shimmer with holo glitter in it that shifts to green in certain light which was released as part of Loki's Lacquer Easter range this year. Here's some swatches from Osiris and Loki.

Slowly Growing Deaf

2 coats

This one is really pretty-red and silver glitters in a baby blue base, I really like it. I think I may have to do some nail art using this baby soon. Nailed Obsession has got some good swatches.

Love A Lot

2 coats

I am surprised how much I like this polish-I originally thought I wasn't going to because I'm not much of a pink person at all! When I got it onto my swatch stick though, I was pleasantly surprised, it looks really fun! It's a mix of red and pink glitters in a white creme base-there are also hearts in the mix but I haven't managed to fish one out yet. Apparently this is really limited edition so I'm even more excited to own it. Marie's Manicure Madhouse has some swatches.

Hope you've enjoyed this post, keep an eye out for these polishes in future ones! =)

~Nail Art Novice~

Giveaway Goodies

I recently won a giveaway organised by The Sorting House and my goodies turned up on Monday so I threw together a quick mani to share them all with you.

Here's what I won:

-3D nail stickers-mostly bows with a few flowers scattered through

-Derma V10 hand & nail cream

-Nails Inc Elizabeth Street

-Barry M Cappuccino

-Two stamping plates (A16/A26, not sure what brand. They've got random flowery designs on.), stamper and scraper

As soon as I opened the packaging I tried out the polishes just to see what they would look like on (please excuse the sloppiness of these photos, I didn't bother cleaning up as I just threw everything on in about 5 minutes so they're pretty messy):

Three coats of each

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. I'm not normally a pink person-I don't normally wear it or choose it or anything, but I quite like these colours together. (even if they remind me of one of these guys!) I probably wouldn't wear the pink on its own but with the brown it looks quite sophisticated and grown up (well it would if I'd cleaned up!) and I am surprised just how much I like the combination.

I added a bow too, also something that's not very me but looks better than I expected:

They aren't too 3D that I would have problems wearing them-I couldn't wear manis that were gonna catch on things a lot because I'd just end up picking them off-they're actually pretty flat. I can't say I'm a huge bow convert but I might start using them more than I had originally thought because they add a nice detail without being too in your face.

I have to confess though, the bits of kit I'm most excited about is the stamping kit. I have already bought stamping plates from Ebay but the scraper they provided was metal and REALLY scratched up the plate when I first practised with it so I didn't want to use it again. I'm looking forward to using the plastic scraper from this kit and trying out stamping properly! (Coming up in a Try Something Tuesday post at some point I would imagine)
I did have a go stamping but I definitely need a lot more practice in this department as you can't really tell what it is! I love the looks it can create though so I'll definitely be doing it more often.

So that's all my giveaway goodies! Oh and I tried the handcream out just before I typed this out too. Can't tell you what it smelt like (still suffering the end stages of cold, boo!) but it felt really nice and creamy and wasn't greasy at all-by the time I started typing it wasn't even leaving smears on the keyboard which is great. My hands feel very soft too so it seems to be doing its job!

All in all, I'm a happy camper!

~Nail Art Novice~

Check out what some other awesome British bloggers have been up to this week: