Good News, Good Nails

GOOD NEWS! I found the phone with the good camera! We're back in business, baby!

GREAT NAILS! I was looking through my Pinterest nail art pins for some inspiration. I had decided that I was going to do some stamping (haven't done that in a while!) and came across this pin. It made me think of mermaids, so I went with it!

Unable to locate the BM-209 I needed, I used my Mash-39, which has a clearer print than that of my RA-111, and a smaller print than that of my GA14, (I have FOUR plates with fish scales. FOUR. Almost as many as zebra prints...) but honestly, I'm very pleased with the results!

I couldn't figure out what to do for the accent nail, so I decided to go for something that strikes of sea monster, and I think I did fairly well. I'm not completely satisfied with the result (am I, ever?) but I didn't hate it so much that I redid it several times, so there's a plus.

At about 3 hours, this was one of my longer manis, because I had to wait for the MANY layers to dry. SO WORTH IT!

I'm thinking Scary Monsters and Nice Nymphs for this!

Main nails:
Layer one: NYC's Water Street Blue and L.A. Colors' BCC 590, gradient.
Layer two: Pure Ice Strapless, Pure Ice Look My Way, and Petites Craze.
Layer three: Pure Ice Silver Mercedes, stamped with Mash-39.
Layer four: Pure Ice Oh Baby

Accent nail:
Layer one: Wet'N'Wild Fergie Glowstick 
Layer two: Wet'N'Wild Fastdry SaGreena the Teenage Witch, stamped with Mash-39.
Layer three: Wet'N'Wild Fastdry SaGreena the Teenage Witch, gradient from top.
Layer four: Sinful Colors Queen of Beauty
NYC's Matte Me Crazy for top coat.

I based with my usual Sally Hansen's, and topped my main nails with the Rue 22 topcoat.

I am in absolute LOVE with this mani!!!! What say you?

Loot

So this month I decided that I was going to throw caution (and money) into the wind. I bought a BUNCH of new stamping plates (96, to be exact), and I bought $27 worth of stuff at the Dollar Nail Art store (it hasn't shipped yet).

I got the first shipment of stamping plates on the 15th-two days before the first day of estimated arrival.
They were from RedAngel (link here). I was so excited I took The Book to work with me to put them in! (What's that? I haven't told you about The Book? We'll get to it, all in due time.)

Fast-forward to this morning.

I get woken up by my mailman, knocking at my door. He's holding TWO packages for me! One is from amazon, and the other is a little envelope. It has a few things inside (including a belated Christmas present for my mom), but the thing I was waiting for?

This little oddity

What is that, you ask? This makes my mani's like 90% easier on my carpets. NOT that I'm constantly spilling, but I am knocking over my bottles like 85% of the time...

Maybe I shouldn't have used such a transparent color...

This little doodad keeps my polish in place. It's fairly stable, pretty hard to knock down. And it's made of silicone, so it adjusts to the shape of my bottle. It's got a fairly good grip, too. I love it! I got it from SammyDress. The shipping speed isn't great (I bought it around the 11th of December), but it's worth the wait. Mom loved her Christmas present.

In the Amazon box, were three packs of stamps. Gals Fairy set, Gals Princess set, and Mash's 26-50 set. I put them in The Book asap.

Okay there's that thing again, I guess I'd better tell you (even though you might have figured it out already. You're pretty sharp, aren't you?)
I got a binder to organize my plates!

Giant glowy tome. Can you hear the angels singing?

I looked into getting this, but it's just a little out of my price range. This binder was $6 at Walmart. It's one of those old-school scrapbooking binders with the sticky pages to keep the pictures in place, and it does a decent job of its job!

Empty pages

Full pages. 

The biggest downside is that the seal doesn't always hold, and the ones at the bottom tend to fall out. But that's okay. It just means I need to keep a close eye on things.

So I'm really stoked about all these plates. Biggest downside is that now I have so many things I want to do and not enough nails to do them on!

Please take a moment to do the fast, 1-question survey off to the top right of this page!

***Disclaimer: NO companies discussed in this blog have been contacted or have contacted me for review.***