It's a zigra!


Today's theme for the Crumpets Nail Tarts 31 day challenge is half and half.  I thought about this one for awhile without anything really coming to mind.  I considered doing half matte half glossy and I considered half black and half white.  Then I thought maybe I'd do a half moon mani with negative space as in...half painted half not! But then something else occurred to me. Something I see A LOT on nail art boards and forums is the above; zebra/tiger print.  Here, ladies and gentleman, is a zebra:


Zebra's have these nice, wide stripes all over them.  For the most part they're pretty evenly spaced and not really too windy. Now for the tiger:


Arguably, there are different types of tigers and each has a different type of stripe. As well different tigers have different stripes BUT I think we can agree here that tiger stripes most definitely are NOT the same as zebra stripes.  When doing nail art though, they seem to work so seamlessly as one, no?
I hope you enjoyed my "zigra" nails!




From now on, I'll connect the dots my own way...



Today's theme for the 31 day challenge is dotting tools.  I actually remember when I first started out doing nail art and discovered dotting tools.  My life was completely changed. The possibilities that dotting tools opened up for me were endless: flowers, hearts, rain drops....dots.  Lol...it made such a difference in the beginning. Now, while I still love my dotting tools, I find that I don't reach for them as often.  I'm working on that but it seems like things go in stages for me.  I start to rely on stamps and then I feel lazy so I go back to brushwork and so on and so forth.  Not that stamping isn't an art but I find that I get lazy with it and just plop a stamp over a color and call it a day.  At any rate I decided to just play around with some simple patterns of dots today.  I forgot how totally cute and intricate dotticures can be even though they're really fairly simply in execution for the most part! I hope you enjoy these! :)

I just like to smile, smiling's my favorite!



 It's already the fourth day of Crumpets Nail Tarts 31 Day Challenge! I can't believe how fast this month is going already. I suppose it helps I've been off work since before the new year!  I'm not really looking forward to going back tomorrow but...I'm sure once I get  back into the groove of things it will be fine.  Today the theme of the challenge is happiness.  This past year was a really rough one for me and it really dampened my spirits about life in general. I'll be honest and say I'm not really an optimist; I consider myself more of a realist though I'm definitely a fighter and a survivor.  I can make it through anything and everything without breaking down but it does take a toll.  So this year I'm trying to be a little more positive.  Mixed in with all the downs last year were a few little pieces of happiness and that is what I'm choosing to focus on moving forward.  There's always going to be bad times but it's the good ones that make it all worth it.  I took two trips to beaches last year; one with my best friend and another with my husband.  Trips taken with my best friend are ALWAYS an adventure! We have a lot of fun together but we also always end up in the oddest situations!  Then my husband and I checked one of the bucket list and visited Maui, Hawaii.  Both trips were so much fun and really the brightest bright spots in 2014, so I wanted to focus on a beach theme.  This isn't exactly where I started off going with this design but it turned out to be one of my favorite designs ever!  I hope you all enjoy it! :)






Poppies will put them to sleep...



Day three of the Crumpets Nail Tarts 31 Day Challenge is water spotting.  I think my brain took a vacation for this one because to me, water spotting is this:



The awesome technique where you dot thinned acrylic paint (or polish) onto your nail and then soak the middle of it out with a cotton bud.  I think they come out super cool looking and I thought I was being totally clever by using a similar technique but without soaking out the middle.  I was inspired by Will Paint Nails for Food and her amazing poppies technique. While mine came out decent, they don't hold a candle to her original ones.  But then this morning whilst looking for a picture to demonstrate my idea of water spotting I came across another problem; water spotting is meant to be the technique where you spray polish that's sitting on water with alcohol and then drag your nail into it to create a web.  As seen here:



I did think about starting over but...let's face it:

So not only am I avant garde today, I'm also completely off base!  Oh well. Enjoy the art anyway! :)


Tape it up!


The second day of the Crumpets Tarts 31 Day Challenge is a tape mani. Anyone who is a regular follower of this blog should already know how I feel about tape mani's!  Not that I don't think they can be absolutely stunning but I just do NOT have the time or patience to be laying down tape and then polishing over it.  I generally polish after work which means I have enough time mostly to do a base and design (if I'm not stamping).  Anything I want to do that has to be done over dry polish would have to be done the next night which means start to finish I'd not have a photograph to post for at least two days.  Not workable for me.  I've been working on that recently by laying a base down and allowing it to dry while I'm on my lunch break so that if I'm quick when I get home in the evening I can do a stamp or something and beat the sun for a picture. However, I've been training which means I have ample time at work to let them dry without fear of dings since I'm not actually doing anything. We'll see how that trend holds next week! In either event here is my take on the tape mani! I hope you enjoy it! :)


Day One: Follow A Tutorial



The first day of the Crumpets Nail Tarts challenge is to follow a tutorial.  Which honestly I thought would be easy until I realized that a lot of the designs I'm dying to recreate don't actually have tutorials! One of my favorite Instagram accounts is @Christabellnails and she does A LOT of tutorial videos.  They're short because it's Instagram but they're also easy to follow.  So I scoured her Instagram for one I really liked.  This one seemed really simple but pretty -- and it should have been but for the fact that I apparently do not own a sheer silver shimmer.  She uses affordable polishes for the most part (hers used Sinful Colors) so I could probably have gone to the store and picked it up for next to nothing BUT I opted to use a silver glitter instead. Still pretty but the effect is definitely not the same. I hope you like them anyway! It's never good to discover there's a hole in your 1500+ collection of polishes! lol...check out her tutorial video below and give her some love if you like at her Instagram or YouTube account!




Welcome to 2015...



Well 2014 is officially over and it's a new year! In the new year I usually chop my nails and start up a bunch of renew your nails posts.  This year however, I'm going for a different approach.  Last week for me-- or last month maybe-- was SO insane.  I FINALLY got a call back on my interview for my promotion at work and I GOT THE JOB!  I've had a few snags with my company and trying to get promoted due to some computer errors and other silliness so I'm incredibly excited to finally be moving up.  However, the promotion requires me to move to our corporate office which means I'm actually starting OVER.  All new job. All new people. All new everything. There are perks certainly: a 30% raise, extra days of paid time off, more room to advance...but it didn't really hit me until my last day, yesterday how much I'm really going to miss everyone I've gotten to know over the past year and a half.  The other source of craziness was trying to squeeze in as much work as I could AND covering two positions while training a new person for my old job IN two and a half days!  What I'm mostly getting at is that my blog has been sorely neglected.  I feel like some of that is how disorganized my life has been lately.  Since my original move to this city a year ago, things have just been INSANE.  Just before my move last year I had a stupid rough week.  While I was packing my phone was obliterated and when I went to go see about getting a new one I realized my windshield in my car had cracked. That same week my cousins grandma, who was like a second grandma to me growing up, passed away and the NEXT day I lost my kitty, Eoghan to an illness.  I was given the week off of work (reasons I love my company!) but it helped little since I was packing and cleaning for a move that, due to my husbands job, was now happening CHRISTMAS DAY.  From there it's been all downhill. This year he left his job and got a different one which was a process that was quite stressful.  My grandmother died on Thanksgiving Day.  I was diagnosed with CFS/ME and am now struggling with stomach issues that are yet to be fully diagnosed.  On top of little stressors and trying to adjust to a new city and new job it's just been a real trip.  I never really organized my polishes, I don't have them where I can really get to them easily and my motivation is just nothing.  So I thought this year, I would go HARD into 2015!  I feel very blessed going into this new year.  Despite all the bad last year I have a great job with wonderful people and an opportunity to do so much more with that in the new year with my new title.  I have two snuggly, loving kitties (who I woke up to this morning!) and a wonderful family who I was lucky to ring in the New Year with. I was incredibly lucky to check Hawaii off my bucket list this past September and to take a wicked awesome trip with my very best friend. PLUS this year I've got FOUR days off to start my year! So...in the spirit of go big or go home I'm trying out this 31 day challenge from Crumpets Nail Tarts.  No promises I'll get every day or even finish it! I'm not pressuring myself this year.  My resolutions are to smile more, stress less, save more, travel more and let things take their natural course. At the end of the day, things could be A LOT worse.  :)  I hope everyone has a wonderful new year and remember that while the new year is a great time to start over and become the things you want to be....you're  not helping yourself by stressing out over it.  Just take it a day at a time, start off slow and you'll get there!

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