Nub Club - Tree in the Snow

I'm trying to pack the nub nail art in before Christmas, and this was something I was intending to do on my larger nails before my de-clawing.

Little Christmas tree!

Quickie Mani - Slate & Gold

Nothing like recycling a good swatch for a nice mani.

This was done on top of the Revlon Blue Slate & Sally Hansen Gray by Gray comparison mani, mainly to test out my new purchases from the Born Pretty Store.

Comparison: Revlon Blue Slate & Sally Hansen Gray by Gray

Apologies for the quietness here lately, but the sun has come out and as a Northerner I feel duty bound to spend as much time it in as humanly possible. We have to make the most of what sun we get - it could be next July before we see it again. Winter is coming, don't you know.

This, however, inevitably leads to me being a little pink in places and having to hide for a couple of days whilst I cool down and stop feeling a little ill. Thanks to yesterday's family barbecue, today is very much a hiding-and-cooling day.

So whilst Mr Painted Claws did manly DIY things in the back yard, I sat in the living room and played with my polish.

Contrary to what your eyes are telling you, this is actually two different polishes. Revlon Blue Slate and Sally Hansen's Gray by Gray.

Swatched: Revlon Moon Candy in Moon Dust

I bought this little polish wonder from Boots quite a while ago now and I'm so glad I did - I've never seen it back in stock for about two months!

This is Revlon's Nail Art Moon Candy in Moon Dust, a double ended bottle consisting of a lovely black and a shard/flakie topcoat.

Pokemon Challenge Week 14

I'm far too excited about this week to produce justification of my pokemon choice. There ain't enough Ghost pokemon to have much of a choice from in the first generation, but they're all awesome anyway so it doesn't matter.

GHASTLY!

Extra Relaxed 31 day challenge - Week 1

31 day challenge, as run by Rambles of a Polish Addict. Thankfully this is being run as a 31 week challenge, rather than a 31 day one, else my brain would explode - I have no energy after work during the week to come up with nice manis!

I'm so relaxed about this extra relaxed challenge that I missed the first week, so here's my catch up post and week 2 will happen before the end of the weekend.

The first 10 weeks are colour based, and week 1 is red. I love red. I have quite a few red polishes now but I picked up another one a couple of weeks ago and completely forgot about it until I was raking through my stash this morning..

Spring Pastels

Easter is coming, and spring is coming, and I've finally given in and busted out the pastels.

I'm gonna be completely honest - my thumb is hiding because I managed to take a chunk out of the blue by incautiously shoving my hand in to my pocket before the 6 million coats of blue had dried properly.

The polishes used in this delightfully cute mani were - Sally Hansens Complete Salon Manicure in Yellow Kitty, Revlon Blue Lagoon, with spots in BarryM Matt white.

The colours on these two polishes are absolutely adorable, especially when covered with my matt topcoat, however there is one major downside with both - they're streaky and take loads of coats to go opaque. And by loads, I mean like five or six regular coats for Blue Lagoon and four for Yellow Kitty.

Blue Lagoon, when not matted, does have its good points as it has a beautiful silvery blue shimmer in it. 

New polish

This week's haul is actually a lot larger than this post, thanks to a saturday morning spent shopping with my biggest enabler, Rachel from Racho's Nail Love, but I'm focusing on my favourite two new polishes - NYC In a New York Minute in Park Avenue and Revlon Sweet Nothings in Nude Nightie.

Park Avenue is a lush cool, neutral brown which goes on quite streaky and thin at first, but rapidly thickens up with another coat. The polish is super quick drying which is a complete must for me - I'm terribly impatient with my nails and have a nasty tendency to ruin mani's within about half an hour because I've gone to bed or sat on my hands or something equally silly.

The Revlon Sweet Nothings is only on my ring finger in these images - its a delightful, sheer and shimmery topper which looks a pale lemony yellow in the bottle. It isn't until you get it on top of a colour that it gets interesting; the pale yellowy colour pretty much disappears, leaving behind a polish base colour that is slightly lighter but covered with a cute pink shimmer.

The flash really shows up the shimmer on the topper, and the neutral tone of the Park Avenue below it.

Pokemon Challenge Week 4

Bug type week!

I'm not a great fan of bug type Pokemon - being that my starter Pokemon is usually fire-type they tend to be crushed underfoot quite easily when encountered in-game. And when they're not crushed easily, they irritate the life out of me with their status affects and such.

So the choice for this week was simply a case of - what isn't massively difficult and what do I have the colours for? Which turned out to be...

Venonat!

Pokemon Challenge! Week 1

I choose you...!

Yep, I'm a massive nerd. I've played pokemon since Crystal came out many moons ago, and so when Rachel (of Racho's Nail Love) showed me the super awesome Pokemon Challenge run by The Blahg and Adventures of the Nail Friends  I really couldn't resist doing it.

And so I ended up all snuggled up in my nice warm house, eyeballing the snow which has been falling pretty constantly for about six hours now, and freehand painting Pokemon on to my nails.

Week 1 of the challenge is a grass type pokemon.

As we're limited to the original 151 I went for...