Emily de Molly EDM08 - 31 Day Challenge - Day 8 - Metallic stamping

I was lucky enough to win a set of Emily de Molly's new stamping plates, and they arrived today! So it was easy to choose what to do for today's challenge - I was so excited to get stuck in to EDM08, with its beautiful ancient Egyptian themed images.

The images stamped very well, with nice crisp transfers. The only image I had a little trouble with was the heiroglyphics, because the lines are so thin, but as you can see with a little care they came up wonderfully as well. I'm impressed because thin lines like this often just come out as a hot mess, but I got a very clean stamp from the image.

I used an unnamed gold polish from Blush-amour, a polish which I was given as a young teenager. It's a bit gloopy but still trucking, and has a nice old gold look to go with the Egyptian theme.

A past manicure that I've done would also fit the challenge well - silver hexagon stud nail armour! Check it out, I really liked that look.

An InLinkz Link-up

31 Day Challenge - Day 7 - Black and White stamping

After a bit of debating, I decided to do some stamping for this day, because I think black and white patterns are always quite striking. I was looking through my stamping plates and saw the houndstooth pattern, and decided immediately that was the pattern for me. Houndstooth always reminds me of the David Jones shopping bags! This is plate BM-223.

An InLinkz Link-up

31 Day Challenge Day 6 - Violet - Violet flower nail art

Although flowers are an upcoming theme, I wanted to do some nail art of the violet flower.

I painted my nails with Ciate's Chincilla, then used Ulta3's Sour Grape for the petals and Rimmel's Sunny Days for the stamens.

An InLinkz Link-up

31 Day Challenge, Day 5 - Blue nails, stamping with Cheeky plate

I'm posting on day 6, but I did actually do this mani in time for day 5. I went to a market to try and sell some of my old clothes, and was there pretty much all day with the set-up/selling/break-down time.

I like to theme my nails to events that I'm doing or going to, so for the markets I used Cheeky plate CH-55, from their summer collection. It has some $$$ signs, and a some little sale signs, plus some other fashion-related images.

I used Revlon's Royal Blue again, and stamped using Stargazer Chrome Gold, because all my stamping polishes have gooped up and my Mundo de Unas order hasn't arrived yet (unsurprising, since I only ordered on Friday - international shipping is open again!). It's not very crisp, sadly, and I hope my new stamping polish will fix that.

Sadly I didn't even break even at the markets, so I possibly should have done the dollar signs in red, but I still like the way this looks. It's a kind of distressed luxe.

An InLinkz Link-up

31 Day Challenge - Day 4, Green Nails - Sugar Spun Nails

I've hit the winter blahs, and although I've been doing and even photographing my nails, I haven't posted here for a while.

Chalkboard Nails is doing a 31 day nail art challenge, and I thought I'd kick-start my posting by taking part. Here's the full challenge list:

Day 4 is green nails, so I decided to pull out some polishes from my yet-to-be-used stash and have a go at a technique I've never done before: sugar spun nails. I used this tutorial by The Nailasaurus.

(Speaking of yet-to-be-used stashes - I saw someone proclaim on their blog that they were quite into nail polish, and as proof they offered up the size of their collection: 30 bottles of polish! While I agree that they're definitely a polish fan, I had to laugh, because my yet-to-be-used stash alone is easily over 30 bottles of polish! I know that quite a number of bloggers have multiple helmers full of polish. It's a whole different scale in the nail blogging community, for sure.)

For this manicure, I used a base of Revlon's Emerald City, which has a matte suede finish, and I used Chi Chi's Relax! Don't Do It and Maybelline's Green Park for the sugar spun drizzles.

The good: the texture of these nails is lovely, and I do like the look.
The bad: it took a long time for the polish to become goopy enough to even vaguely form threads, and it still wasn't quite right when I used it, as you can see by the thick lines. It's not exactly sugar-spun, but more of a Jackson Pollock effect. I'm not sure what went wrong (too dry? too wet?), but as a result it took quite a while to dry, and I'm still concerned about sheet marks.

An InLinkz Link-up

A-England's Ascalon with hexagon nail studs armour

A while back, I bought a packet of silver hexagonal nail studs from Born Pretty Store with the intention of doing a full-nail armour look.

I painted my nails with A-England's Ascalon, a silver nail polish with a muted scattered holo effect and a distinct pink-green undertone which makes it quite warm toned. Formula was excellent, as I have found for all A-England polishes.

I then stuck the studs on the ring finger of each hand. I found that the best effect comes from starting at the side and working in a bit of a diagonal, making sure to always press each stud up hard against the edges of the other studs. Coverage was pretty good, with only a few awkward gaps - I did find that you can cut the studs to size for the gaps, but it's hard to get them to stay on the tips because it's such a high-impact area. It was fine on the side, though.

The studs are shiny, attention-grabbing, and the texture is lovely. I'd definitely recommend them!

Enchanted Polish's Presto Magic with gLORIous gold leaf

I've been having a lot of trouble with stamping recently, so I thought I'd rock some gold leaf nails for this manicure. Super blingy! I painted my nails with a base of Enchanted Polish's Presto Magic, which is a lovely dark blue holographic polish. You can't see the linear holo effect terribly well because the gold gets in the way, but it does add some extra sparkle to the look.