Pick N Mix Week 1 - Teal / 2 Colour Gradient

My first post of the epic 52 week Pick N Mix challenge!

The prompts for the first week of the challenge are teal and 2 colour gradient. This being a pick and mix challenge, we get to mix up these prompts and use one or the other prompts - or both!

Hallowe'en 2013 - Trick or Treat

Mmmm candy.

Now to be perfectly honest, I was a bit stuck on what to do for all five nails. You see - I never went round knocking on doors and demanding tasty treats as a child. We just straight up asked for cash. We never really got that much, or at least not much per house - perhaps 20p or so - but as a small child that might as well be a fortune. In fact, I can only remember being given something edible once, and that was because the very nice man in the house had just cooked cupcakes but had no change left.

Pink Wednesdays

Time for another Pink Wednesday!

This week we've got a design inspired by The Nailasaurus' Waterfall Manicures for Pink Wednesday, and I had so much fun raiding my inexplicably large stash of pink polishes for this one!

The base for this is OPI Step Right Up, a beautiful pale pink which is unfortunately super sheer. This is four fairly thick coats to get it opaque.

The waterfall itself is done in OPI Kiss Me On My Tulips, Orly Sterling Silver Rose, Orly Lola and Essie Big Spender.

I love the look of this mani and I've been wanting to try it for ages, so what better opportunity than a pink wednesday!

An InLinkz Link-up

Green on Green Half Moons

I picked up Orly's Lucky Duck and OPI's Live and Let Die in a blog sale last week and I totally couldn't resist using them.

Lucky Duck (the half moons) is an amazing bold green creme, with great colour. I looooooove this colour. Three coats for full opacity but you could probably get away with two careful coats - I have to admit I'm not entirely the most delicate when doing my nails. Thank god for acetone and a clean up brush!

The rest of the nail is done in Live and Let Die, one of the OPI Bond collection. A dark, glittery, foresty green, this polish is a one coater and dries in fairly reasonable time too. The glittery shimmer in this just lights up when the light catches it, it takes the polish from normal but pretty to amazing.

The half moons were done with paper hole reinforcement stickers, bargain from WHSmith. I love halfmoon manis, they look so classy and awesome.

Whats your thoughts on the green on green?

An InLinkz Link-up

ER31DC Week 29 - Inspired by the Supernatural

I did try and do mermaids for this one, but only after I had painstakingly painted my nails with a super sheer polish did I realise that I did not actually own the fish scale stamping image that I thought I did. And then hand drawn scales came out badly.

So I went on to do the obvious... Vampires.

Not the crappy sparkly kind though. I grew up watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with proper vampires in it.

Birthday Polish Haul

I turned 27 last wednesday, and I got some amazing polish-based presents from  Mr Painted Claws and from my bestie and Chief Enabler Rachael (of Racho's Nail Love).

Just to warn everyone in advance, this is gonna be a fairly pic heavy post - and these are just the bottle shots! I haven't even gotten time to think about swatching the lot!

Pokemon Challenge Gen II, Round 5 - Flying

I was so impressed by Rachael's HootHoot nails for round 1 - he's a dual Normal/Flying type that I thought I'd try it myself for the flying round!

ER31DC Week 18 - Half Moons

Ah, a blissfully easy week in the 31 day week challenge - half moons. Not really much I can say about half moons, except they always come with the biggest problem... what colours??!? I have a terrible habit of wearing colours that are either too similar (green and green, turquoise and teal etc etc) or ones that would sear the eyes out of a normal human being (offensive pink and super orange orange, as work by me to work this week).

For once, I ended up with something vaguely classy.

Fun With Glitter

As I was playing nice and trying to figure out what base colour & glitter combo to use for my 31 day challenge nails on saturday, I stumbled upon two polishes that I've never really used.

OPI's Thanks A Windmillion is a new purchase from the joy that is Fragrance Direct (OPIs for £3.99? How could I resist!) and is a beautiful pale sage green, wonderfully classy looking and pretty.
Orly's Halo is a super sparkly and super packed gold and silver glitter in a clear base that can easily be used as a full coverage polish - see this post for swatches of it and the other two polishes I got in the trio a few months back.
With one of these polishes being new and the other being a glitter, neither had really been used for anything yet, so I decided to stick 'em together and see what happened - classy, muted green with super bling gold-and-silver.

Long and the short of it - I think its amazing.

ER31DC Week 12 - Stripes

I love stripes. I'm actually really surprised that I haven't done more stripey manis on here, but then again I only have one roll of striping tape. I'm preserving it haha.

The base colour for this mani was given to me by my Chief Enabler, Rachael of Racho's Nail Love and is Orly Lola. I have a bit of an odd love for all things "offensively pink" as I like to term it, which is quite amusing as I'm not big on the whole girly thing.

ER31DC Week 9 - Rainbow

Apologies for the lateness on this - I've not had the energy to peel myself off the sofa, never mind write out this post.

I really enjoyed this week's challenge, I even kept it on my nails for work this week.

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!

Swatched: Orly Viridian Vinyl

On one of my many rambles through eBay I stumbled across a couple of Orly polishes being sold off consistently cheaper than others. Whats wrong with these polishes I asked myself.

The Answer? Not a sausage. This is Viridian Vinyl, a gorgeous teal that claims to be matte but as you can see it comes out as a more rubberized finish than truly matte.

Pokemon Challenge Week 9

9 weeks in already!

This week is Poison type week, but I realised that I already did my favourite poison type pokemon for Bug week - Venonat. I clearly did not think ahead. So off I toddle to the Bulbapedia to peruse the poison type listing, and I spot the only pokemon I would I want to do on the list....

Arbok.

Then I also realised that I cut my nails short last week and I've not actually got much space to paint an full Arbok on my nails now. So I went abstract.

Orly Naughty & Nice Collection

I proclaimed myself on a new polish ban last week, then promptly went and broke it by going in to Tk Maxx and finding more bargains than I had money for - damn you, last week before payday.

I love red polish - I have quite yellow toned skin so I can get away with wearing most shades of red. So I rampaged ahead and swatched it - glitters and all!

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 3

Water pokemon!

I'm a bit later than usual with this one, as normally I get it done on a Friday night as that means I can get at least another two manis in saturday and sunday - my teen years playing instruments have drilled in to me necessity for regular practice for everything, even if I can barely remember how to play my saxophone.

And so, on to week 3 - water type pokemon!

Shellder!