Nubar Polka Dot Magenta Ladybug Nails Happy Goodtime Wow

After seeing it on Pinterest, I requested as a birthday gift (and got! thank you again, Mom and Dad!) Nubar's Black Polka Dot nail polish. It's a clear polish with tiny and large black dots in it, so when you put it over a color it looks like you are a polka dotting expert. It's not particularly even and can take a few too many coats when the big dots decide to hide, but the final look is fabulous. I chose to put it over OPI's "Houston We Have a Purple" (which is more magenta than purple). Add OPI base and top coats, and the first photo was actually taken today, four days after I polished them! (A good thing, too, since some of my original photos came out like crap). 

What you really care about: photos!

Life at 30, in Polka Dots and Blah

I'm 30.

I had a party with my closest friends, spent my actual birthday (which was also Mothers Day) with my family including my brand new babycousin, ate too much and completely quit exercising for a week and a half. My party went well despite the caterer and the cleaning people both leaving me hanging (caterer flaked and cleaning crew got into a car accident on the way to my house)! My friends are wonderful and so is my family.

In work news, I've been hunting for these vintage doorknobs, and then for these rosettes for the doorknobs, and now I'm trying to get versions of the things fabricated, and the whole thing has been significantly more difficult than I ever anticipated. I don't like assuming the worst, but assuming the best meant I was disappointed at every turn when no one had enough of the right thing in the right size and no one ever called me back in a timely manner. Whiiiiiine.

I've been neglecting my Etsy shop a bit, too. When the bare minimum effort still gets me views and favorites, it's hard to motivate myself to do the more I need to be truly successful. I haven't been advertising and getting my name out to other blogs at all. I haven't been listing new items. I'm in a blah funk and I need to get out of it fast.

My nails, on the other hand, are anything but blah. They seem to be my main creative outlet these days. They are short now, thanks to scrubbing the heck out of my house before my party when the cleaning crew had to cancel at the last minute, but they are exciting.

I got more quality nail polishes as well as some fabulous tools for my birthday. My cousin did these beauties for me:

It's OPI's "Teal the Cow's Come Home" with "Gargantuan Green Grape" (also OPI) on top using a dotting tool. OPI base and top coats helped this manicure last an extra long time.

Thank you, Cousin K for doing my nails, friend K for the fabulous nail tools (and polish not yet used), and parents for the polishes seen here and yet to be tried!

Minty Nail Fail

I saw my migraine doctor last week, who reminded me that I have been doing something with my life: getting better. And I've finally been succeeding at getting better. That counts. That's huge. It just isn't what I thought I'd be doing at age 30, but "Mentsch tracht, Gott lacht" (Yiddish proverb meaning "Man plans, God laughs"). I just need to laugh along.

On a lighter note, nails! I finally found a bottle of Essie's "Matte About You" at the North and Sheffield Commons Ulta. The next day I was at the crazy shmancy Walgreens on State Street and spotted a bottle of Wet n Wild "I Need a Refresh-Mint." The color is completely gorgeous so I decided to treat myself (at 99 cents, this was not a major self-spoiling) and began planning things I could do with it and the "Matte About You" together.

I decided to paint my whole nails with the mint and then use my wavy scissors and Scotch tape to split them vertically between matte and shiny.

It was a good idea in theory.

In practice, you could barely tell the difference between the matte and the shiny sides, but it created a weird slightly textured wavy line down the middle of my nails.

Fortunately, it only looked stupid from up close, but I think I have to experiment more with the "Matte About You" on darker colors, or put down a layer of shiny top coat first to make a bigger difference.

I still absolutely love the Wet n Wild color. People keep complimenting it. I just have to come up with a better creation next time.


Terrible photo to go with terrible manicure:

Hating My Starry Manicure, Hating My Life

I hate what I did to my nails yesterday.

It started with a seemingly good idea. I punched a whole bunch of stars out of vintage wallpaper.

But then something stupid inside me said "oh look, the paper is gold, white and black, I should paint my nails black." I used Ulta's "Little Black Dress" and tweezered the stars onto my still-wet nails. They looked like crap.

The stars were too big for my little nails and the black didn't sufficiently contrast with the black in the stars. I smudged up one of them and repainted it gold, thinking that might help. Why I thought repainting yet another non-contrasting color would help is beyond me. I wonder if the stars would look better on, say, red or some other color not in the wallpaper.
But instead of taking it all off, I sealed it in with a hearty layer of topcoat (Essie's "No Chips Ahead") and poked and prodded the stars down as they curled up then calmed down in the stickying drying polish.

I don't like myself very much right now, so of course I don't like my nails, and maybe I think I deserve it. The migraines have been better for over two months, and while I'm still in a side-effect stupor, I can do more on a daily basis than I could when I was in pain all the time. Between turning 30 in a few weeks and these new questions of if I'm capable of having a real life again, I realize just how much I don't have a life right now. I'm wasting my time away, and if I'm in pain constantly it's just something I have to learn to accept, but if I'm not in pain, what the hell am I doing? I'm going nowhere and doing nothing and I hate it, but I can't find the motivation to make something of my days. I fight myself enough just to exercise, do the laundry, wash the dishes (and I have a friggin' dishwasher). How do I find the inspiration and the desire to forge a new path, lunge forward, do something real?

Of course I hate my nails.

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!