Nail Art: Black and White and Schmutzed All Over

I wanted to paint my nails white with black polka dots like the super-cute ones I saw as nail stickers somewhere (Target? Ulta? I don't remember, to be honest). I was worried about how steady my hands are (thanks to my migraine medications, they shake all the time) but figured I could come up with something entertaining no matter what. I started by painting my nails the opaque white I'd gotten from Ulta, but it was so opaque and so bright I just wanted to cover it up as much as humanly possible. I let it dry over night and the next day I had very little time to do anything to my nails, but needed the white covered, so quick slashes of Scotch tape diagonally crossing ten fingers later, I used Ulta's "Little Black Dress" for an extremely fast and dramatic manicure. The white was still too bright so I went digging through my glitter sparkle collection and settled on Pink Cookie's gold, thinking it would be the least unclassy. Still, the final result is not classy or pretty or anything I particularly love. And the worst part: even though I let it dry for a really long time, it smudged and moved and squished around hours later so that it ended up looking like total crap on a few fingers before I even got a photo of it! So here are my pictures, but just so you can see what I'm talking about and not because I'm proud of it the way I was proud of my ripples or my cashmere sparkle gradients.

Tap Gala Ripple Nails

This month I attended galas two weekends in a row. My life is awesome. But two different galas meant two different dresses meant two different nail creations. This past Saturday's gala was for the Chicago Tap Theatre and I wore a royal blue slinky dress from Akira. After all my nail art experimentation, I decided on a ripple in blue and silver. I did the ripple with Scotch tape cut by decorative edged scissors. I think it turned out pretty well:

The polishes are Wet n Wild dark blue (don't know the color name, it either fell off the bottle or never existed) and Nicole by OPI's "Look at Me, Look at Me." After I took the photos I added Essie's "No Chips Ahead" topcoat.

The polish looked like it was going to last a long time until I went digging through vats of vintage door knobs.  I've been searching for four identical vintage or antique knobs that are as similar as possible to the one already owned by a client of a client, which has been more difficult than I expected. I may have finally found solutions, but my hunt destroyed my manicure with chips all over.

The chippiness made me mad last night so I took it off and redid my nails in Ulta black and white with Pink Cookie's gold glitter on top. The white is very opaque, which I like, and unbelievably bright, which is good and bad. It's very striking, but it's in no way "pretty." Still, I think I'll have more fun with the black and white combos in the future.
Photos to come.

I really want more decorative edge scissors. There's so much more I could do.

Nailed It! (Sort Of)

I've been neglecting this blog again. Oops. Best thing to do is to jump right back in where I am now.

Latest "crafting" endeavor: nail art! Thanks to the wonders of Pinterest I'm a little obsessed with nails right now. My "Get Nailed" board on Pinterest has 26 pins and 105 followers as of this moment. I'm picky about what I pin, and I want to try or steal or just completely love every set of nails on my board. I've also started following too many nail blogs to count. My next post will probably be a "Great Nail Art Blogs" post, but I'm not there yet.

This post is a "Look At What I Did!" Post. Because I've started doing. First I just got a really fabulous polish from Target.  

It's called (appropriately) "Look at Me, Look at Me" and it's silver with minuscule sparkly glitter flecks of red and blue. I loved the way it looked, so I took a photo and posted it to my Flickr and Pinterest.

Then I was craving pastel blue nails, but neither OPI nor Essie seemed to make a pastel blue polish. Once I was compromising on brand, I figured "Go cheap or go home" and went straight for NYC (New York Color)'s glorious $2 Cashmere Creme. 

Before I had a chance to repaint my nails, I found myself in the Marshalls checkout line staring down some packages of 6-for-$6 nail polishes. After some indecisive hemming and hawing, I went with the glitter overcoats package. The brand is "Pink Cookie," which I'd never heard of, but for $6 I was willing to risk it.

I found on Pinterest all of these manicures with pretty gradients, and I figured I could manage a glitter gradient. Cashmere Creme plus the teal glitter Pink Cookie overcoat and way too much time trying to perfect it and I had myself a successful set of nails:

Unfortunately, the glitter washed off in two days despite my Essie topcoat (should have reapplied).

Last night instead of, say, actually doing real work on my Etsy shop like a productive human being, I watched Bones and Glee on Hulu while I attempted a gazillion versions of basic Scotch tape manicures in three colors on my nails. 

A bit messy, a bit insane, but successful in that I now know how to do a Scotch tape manicure and I know what I did wrong and right.

I'm going to a gala for Chicago Tap Theatre this Saturday night and I'm wearing a dark blue dress, so I think I'm going to go with just two-colored dark blue and silver glittery nails. I may play around more to choose which design to do since I'm not happy with any of the two-color designs I did, so there may be another photo very soon.

Yay nails!