31 Day Challenge: Orange

I've been looking forward to these nails: oranges! I stamped with Bundle Monster 308 over Kleancolor Boogie Nights.

31 Day Nail Challenge: red.

*gently blows dust off blog*

I've been gone awhile but it's nice to blog again. I got a bit bogged down in perfectionism and it stopped being fun, so now I'm going to take it easy and enjoy it more.

For today I had a lot of trouble with stamping - I was going to do roses but the image was too shallowly engraved. So instead I painted them holo red with a Enchanted July 2014 and added some round studs from Born Pretty. Simple and effective. The lighting isn't the best to show off the holo sadly.

eta: daylight photo! Sadly the sun clouded over before I could take a photo, but the colour balance is a lot better.

Melbourne Cup nail art

The Melbourne Cup was just on, so I painted my nails in honour of the Race That Stops The Nation.

On my left hand I did the silks for Admire Rakti, the favourite. I used Essie's Bikini So Teeny and Butler Please, and some nail vinyls from Celestial Cosmetics.

Admire Rakti's silks (from Races)

On my right hand I painted Who Shot Thebarman's silks. I used Kleancolor's Boogie Nights for the orange and Celestial Cosmetic's Snow Clouds for the white dots, which I did using a dotting tool. It was strangely awkward to try and pose my right hand!

Who Shot Thebarman's silks (from Races)

In the end Who Shot Thebarman came third, but Admire Rakti came last and later died of a rare heart condition in his stall just after the race, so that was quite sad.

Portal chamber info icons nail art and Celestial Cosmetics Snow Clouds swatch

As I mentioned earlier, I went to PAX Australia at the beginning of the month, where I cosplayed as Chell from the video game Portal.

I was talking to Caitlin from Nerd With Nails and she mentioned that she'd also gone to PAX, and she'd painted her nails in an Animal Crossing manicure! Check it out, they look amazing.

So here's my PAX mani. In the game, each level starts with a sign that tells you what hazards you'll come across in the level (here's a picture of one). So for my manicure I put the chamber information icons onto my nails! Someone noticed them while admiring my costume and asked to take a picture of my nails as well as my costume - so happy people noticed!

I started by painting my nails white with Celestial Cosmetic's Snow Clouds, a really nice crisp white that goes on very smoothly. I did - I think it was three coats? But you could probably use two careful coats if you wanted. I put a swatch of it at the end of this post.

I then used some nail decals which I'd printed myself, and just stuck them on. This time I let them completely dry before applying topcoat and they hardly smeared - much better. 

 

L-R The cake is a lie, Place weighted cube on button, Use the portal to fling yourself, Sentry turret.

L-R: High-speed portal exit, Use the portal to fling yourself, Aerial faith plate, Sentry turret.

And here's one with my companion cube in the background! :D


To wrap things up, here's Snow Clouds on its own:

Making my blog easier to follow and comment on

I've been working on ways to make my blog easier to follow, and to that end I've signed up to Bloglovin. Hopefully you find it useful!

As I've mentioned, I've also signed up for Instagram (here's a link).

I've also gone into the settings and enabled anonymous comments, so now anyone can comment with ease. :D

Lit-up jack o' lanterns

I'm a bit behind on my nail blogging because I've been busy making a cosplay costume for Pax, a video game convention. It was heaps of fun but it took a lot of time!

I did make a quick post to my Instagram with the Halloween nails. I painted my nails with Ulta3's midnight and then reverse stamped using Mundo de Uñas polishes, and finally a Chi Chi glow in the dark polish (unnamed yellow) for the eyes of the jack o' lanterns.

Halloween nail art using Born Pretty Store decals and Lilypad Lacquer's polish from the Holo-ween What's In-die Box

More nail art using polishes from the 2014 October What's In-die Box? holo-ween box. I also used some Halloween nail decals from Born Pretty Store, which were sent to me for review.

(I put them back in the package back-to-front and only realised when I looked at my photos later - oops!)

I love the decals - they're super cute while also having a little Halloween spookiness. You can't see very well in this picture, but the decals are actually multiple colours: black, orange, white, grey and yellow. They really pop on your nails. They're very easy to use (just soak in water until they come away from the backing paper, and then apply to your nails), and they're nice and durable.

You get 20 images, enough for two manicures, which is great! The only downside is that the designs are printed twice - one as a mirror of the other- and for this design, which has some text, you wind up with some mirror text. However if that bothers you, the decals on Born Pretty Store are cheap enough that only doing one manicure with them would be fine, and you could use the remaining decals for accent nails, or combine them with some stamping or other techniques. I just put the mirror image on my thumb and no-one noticed. :D

Reversed writing! Plus my beaten-up tweezers and clean-up brush make a guest appearance.

The only other downside with these decals is that I can't find them on the site at all - I think they may be sold out? So I'm afraid you can't actually buy them! On the other hand, the shipping times from Born Pretty Store mean that you probably wouldn't get them in time for Halloween anyway, unless you paid for express shipping. But there are many other decals which you can get from Born Pretty.

You can also use my coupon code if you place an order (although I believe coupons have been disabled at the moment, due to their big 4th Anniversary Sale) and get 10% off.

Okay, now for the manicure behind the cut!