Saturday, April 30, 2016

by Kitties26 on Saturday, April 30, 2016 2 comments

40 Great Nail Art Ideas: Three shades of Red/Orange - squares

Another week, another mani for the 40 Great nail Art Ideas challenge.  Although I have to say it's sad how many of the original participants have dropped out.  Last week's inlinkz only had 22 manis, a far cry from the 50+ manis in the first few weeks of the challenge. 

This week's theme is three shades of red/orange and my individual prompt was squares.  This was a hard one for me and my end mani is a bit meh!  And for a mani that I felt a bit meh about, let me tell you that this took bloody ages to do!

Because I wanted really neat little squares, I painted my polish out onto my Uber Matt and then cut up the squares of polish with scissors.  After i had stuck them to my nails I didn't like that the side edges weren't perfect, so I added the red lines, and then I didn't like them.






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Thursday, April 28, 2016

by Kitties26 on Thursday, April 28, 2016 2 comments

Picture Polish Gala with Swarovski crystals

I have heaps of manis to share, but only a few words. I think I have been staying up to late at night playing with polish, then catching up on facebook groups and browsing through instagram.  How's a girl to keep up!!

Today's mani is a super simple one. I originally swatched Picture Polish gala, but decided it was too pretty to take off and I needed to wear it as a full mani.  So I just added some silver Swarovski crystals and left it at that.





Picture Polish Gala is available from the Picture Polish website and through the various Picture Polish international stockists.

 Polish provided for consideration.
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Tuesday, April 26, 2016

by Kitties26 on Tuesday, April 26, 2016 6 comments

What's up nails - Hypnose vinyls, hot and cold gradient.

What's up nails recently sent me a little package with a selection of their nail vinyls to try out.  The first one that really caught my eye was this Hypnose design with a a crazy jaggered edge swirls.

I thought the design of the vinyl really lent itself to a couple of circular gradients - similar to a previous design I here with aqua shades, but this time I chose contrasting warm and cool colours to really make it pop!

The vinyls are a nice quality and worked wonderfully for this design. They stuck down securely and mostly gave really clean and sharp edges, especially considering that I first sponged on some white before doing the blue gradient. I only had one or two spots where the colour leaked underneath.





This is what the sheet of vinyls looks like. You get 16 stencils on a sheet, so enough to do a full mani, as well as a bunch of feature nails too.


These hypnose vinyls are available from Whats up nails and are $3.75USD a sheet.

Vinyls provided for consideration.
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Saturday, April 23, 2016

by Kitties26 on Saturday, April 23, 2016 3 comments

40 Great Nail Art Ideas - Animals

A couple of weeks ago at work, one of my colleagues was wearing a most funky aboriginal inspired frog tie.  The moment I saw it I new it would translate to so well to nail art, so much so I told him that.  So then he said, well just let me wear it to my next meeting and then I'll take it off and you can take it home to create your nail art.

So that is how I ended up with random aboriginal inspired multi coloured frogs on my nails.  I was going to post these earlier this week, but then I checked the prompt for 40 Great Nail Art Ideas and saw that the prompt was Animals.  Perfect, I wouldn't have to paint another animal mani cause I had this one sitting there ready to go.

Scroll down to see a shot of my nails with the frog tie.






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Thursday, April 21, 2016

by Kitties26 on Thursday, April 21, 2016 1 comment

Bow Polish - Dark Days with metallic stamping

Its Autumn school holidays here at the moment, and I've taken this last week off work to spend some time with the kiddos.  Today's was actually my Son's birthday, he wanted to play golf, so the four of us headed out and played nine holes.  He loved having a swing with the golf club (as did I), but I think he enjoyed getting a chance to drive the golf cart most of all.  We went out to Teppanyaki Japanese for dinner, which is always entertaining for the kids.

Earlier this week we visited Questacon, which is the National Science and Technology Centre that is a hands on science based museum for the kids.  My two loved it and I could see their inquiring minds thinking and exploring ideas. However it shocked me just how many children , and I'm not talking little kids, I'm talking 10-13 year olds, couldn't be bothered reading the explanations or listening to the staff about how and why things worked the way they did. Instead they would run up to an exhibit and grab whatever it was before some else could and then shake it, or bang it or spin it to see what is did and the would run off. I can't imagine that they learnt anything!  

Anyway, enough about my life, lets look at my nails instead.

It had been ages since I'd used some of my metallic Hit the bottle stamping polishes, so I pulled out three complementary colours and noticed that they looked fabulous next to a new Bow polish I had. The Bow polish is called Dark Days and it's a black jelly polish with multicoloured flakes in it as well as scattered holo shards.

Here is the finished mani using PUEEN46 plate and purple, blue and green stamping polishes from Hit the Bottle.





I remembered to snap some swatch photos of Dark Days on it's own before I stamped over it.  The formula was great and it was opaque at two coats, although I did three thin coats to get more depth to the multicoloured flakies.




Here are all the Dance Legend links for your shopping and social engagement.

Dance Legend Online Shop
Dance Legend Facebook 
Dance Legend Instagram

Polishes provided for consideration.
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Tuesday, April 19, 2016

by Kitties26 on Tuesday, April 19, 2016 2 comments

Price check on this black and white mani - bar code nail art

I did bar code nail art nearly four years ago, and back then it was a really popular design.  But when I look back at it now I just cringe. Argh, the messy cuticles, the wobbly lines, the numbers all over the place!! This was a nail art design that was screaming out for me to redo using a clear stamper.

Oh clear stamper how you have changed my world. Placing these stamped lines was so much easier and as for doing the numbers at the bottom! WOW, the ability to see where you are stamping is such a game changer.

For the bar code lines on this mani I used an image from DRK-A plate. I just taped off the tip of my nail and stamped over it.  For the numbers along the bottom, I just used the numbers from the Bundle Monster stamping plates, mixing them up a bit from 3-4 plates to get some different number combos.





Here is the image from DRK-A plate, which is available here.


I've got an instavideo tutorial of this on it's way, so just over to Instagram to see that tomorrow morning.

Plate provided for consideration about 4 years ago.
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Sunday, April 17, 2016

by Kitties26 on Sunday, April 17, 2016 1 comment

Dance Legend Mystery Collection Chrome flakies

I have been sitting on this collection of polishes for a month or two, and I'm finally glad to be able to share my swatches with you, as well as some nail art.

First lets look at the nail I wore.  I used some square swirl nail vinyls over white polish and applied each of the polishes in a circular motion.  Not only do many of these polish change colour on different angles because of their multichrome goodness, but when you apply them in this sort of patter it make it look like there are even more colours.





Now let's look at my swatches.  I have the six multichrome flakies from the Mystery Collection here, but there are also six more metallic shades that really remind me of the China Glaze Bohemian collection from a few years back.

These polishes come in the smaller Dance Legend bottles, but I was very happy to see that they are packed full of the multichrome flakies.  Unlike other brands of multichrome flakes that you have to sponge on to achieve full coverage, you can easily achieve coverage with three thin coats.  All the swatches show three coats with Seche Vite top coat.

Essence - this one has the greatest rainbow of coloured flakies, blue, green, purple, gold, copper and platinum, plus they all have a bit of shiftiness and show other colours too.  Mixed together though, the overall appearance is a metallic platinum



Firewalker -  a warm toned gold with platinum and gold flakies.  This one has the least amount of duochrome colour shifting.



 Hell Money - a strong green to purple multichrome flakie.



Invocation - this one is mostly made up of gold, green and blue flakies, some of those flakies have a stronger colour shift than others. The overall appearance is a mossy olive green.



Supernatural - another of the strong colour shifters.  This one goes from indigo blue to purple, but there are also a few other coloured flakies in there, with some green and gold too.  The overall appearance is a metallic purple.



Unrequited - This one has a mix of pink and gold flakies, as well as a few scattered blue ones.  The overall appearance is a rose tinted copper that also glows green.



Overall I think it's a great collection. I love that you can just apply them like regular polish and get full coverage at three coats.  This means of course you can also layer them over a base colour, that way you wont waste the precious polish in the little bottles.

Here are all the Dance Legend links for your shopping and social engagement.

Dance Legend Online Shop
Dance Legend Facebook
Dance Legend Instagram

 Polishes provided for consideration.
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Saturday, April 16, 2016

by Kitties26 on Saturday, April 16, 2016 2 comments

The Digital Dozen does gradients with 40 Great Nail Art Ideas

Today I thought I would be clever and combine my to challenge posts into one.  Digital Dozen is finishing with gradient week, and my prompt for the 40 Great Nail Art ideas challenge is sponging.  I can't believe my technique prompt is sponging the same week we are doing gradients on digital dozen, that's the planets aligning from the nail gods. The colour prompt for 40GNAI is pink and lilac.

So with all that said, here are my nails and I think they are a bit meh.  The colours look sheer and dirty to me and the stamping isn't as crisp and clean as I'd live.  All in all I'm just not loving it. Needless to say, these lasted only one day.





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About Me

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I live in Canberra, Australia with my husband, Mr Ten and Miss Eight. My blog is all about nail polish, and a few other bits in between. You can contact me at morenailpolish@iinet.net.au