31 Day Challenge: black & white

I love black and white - it's very striking - but it's also so unforgiving! No matter which white I use, I always seem to wind up doing 3 coats, and it takes a while to dry. Maybe I've just psyched myself out about white? Which white do you use?

I painted my nails white with Celestial Cosmetic's Snow Clouds (nice and easy to work with) then stamped over it using Cici and Sisi plate 06. I find that it's really hard to clean up my black Mundo de Unis stamping polish, so I used some liquid latex to paint around my fingers and form a peel-off barrier. This makes clean-up for much faster and more effective, but the smell is quite off-putting and you can be allergic to the latex. Happily for me I have a cold at the moment and can't smell anything. (Well, as happy as you can be with having a cold?!) 

An InLinkz Link-up

31 Day Challenge - violet

I've been making an effort to use items from my stash, so today I used two untrieds.

I painted my nails with a gorgeous purple from Essie called The Lace Is On. I decided to stamp it with a lace pattern, as a bit of a nod to the name, so I broke out Born Pretty stamping plate BP-02. (I really love peeling the blue film off stamping plates! So full of anticipation.)

An InLinkz Link-up

31 Day Challenge - blue

I had planned to do all-blue nails but the weather was so nice I couldn't resist adding some colour to the mix.

I painted my nails with Kleancolor's Sensual Lagoon (what a name!), a nice matte blue, then stamped the orange seahorses on with Born Pretty's BPL-025. I finished with a matte topcoat from OPI. I really like this look! Unfortunately I smudged one finger getting my camera out. Too impatient. :(

An InLinkz Link-up

31DC: Green apple nail kit from Academy of Color

Today I used a nail art kit I got from Kmart awhile ago (probably over a year... I'm trying to stop hoarding my nail art stuff and just use it! Does anyone else have that problem?)

This is the Acamedy of Color Apple Gloss kit. It comes with a green apple-scented polish and some apple "nail chips" - pretty cute.

The polish is indeed apple scented. It's still lingering even once dry and is a little annoying, but I don't like scented things in general so YMMV. It does smell reasonably well like apples. It dried to a satin matte finish and I used two coats - easy enough. I then used a wax pencil (from Born Pretty Store) to pick up the apple chips, which was very easy. Here's the finished look!

 However, I have quite curved nails, and the chips just don't sit right on my nails! Perhaps I should have curled the chips ahead of time. As it is, I'm glad I'm changing this mani tomorrow because I doubt it will last and it's a bit annoying to have them stick out. I'm a bit meh about the finished look.

Overall this kit is cute but I would recommend it more if your nails are flatter than mine. That said, it may have been discontinued now. If you do find it, I think it was around $4. So not bad value.

Finally, I was amused by the warning sign on the little vial of apple chips: "This is not food." Glad we cleared that up eh!

Hopefully I've got the InLinkz sorted now too. Blogging on my iPad is a little difficult sometimes; I'm not used to it.

An InLinkz Link-up

31 Day Challenge: Yellow

Here are my belated yellow nails - I was sick and did them a day late. The 3rd of September is National Flag Day in Australia, so I did some patriotic nails.

I painted them with OPI's The "It" Color, and then stamped using MoYou's Traveller 19 plate. I was a bit impatient with waiting for my nails to dry so I stamped a bit too early, and didn't press hard enough to fully transfer the full image. Still, I like how it turned out.

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.