My very first...

Hi everyone!


Brace yourselves... I can't stop grinning so you're going to see lots of exclamation marks and smileys in this post.

Guess what? I DID IT!!! I finally did it! I mastered the beast! I dove in head first and won the battle!
What is it I'm talking about (read: scream about like a maniac)? Water marble of course!!

I so couldn't stand that I just couldn't do a water marbled manicure like all the other nail bloggers that I decided to sit down behind my desk on Sunday morning and try and try and try again until I was happy or it was time to go to bed (whichever would come first). I tried out several cups, a zillion polishes, dropping polish with the brush almost touching the water or higher above it, dragging lines with a needle, a pin, a dotting tool, just about anything that was sort of pointy and... I did it!!! Wanna see?

Tadaaaa:

indoors, no flash

I only did one nail on each hand because, you know me, I don't want all my nails looking the same (and the fact that I was lucky enough to create two decent looking nails might have been a big factor as well ;)

The manicure itself was pretty easy up to the marble part:
- three coats of OPI Dark Side of the Mood + a coat of Seche Vite on my thumb, index and pinky
- two coats of OPI Let's Be Friends! on my middle finger
- three thin (subtly lavender smelling) coats of Cirque Framboise + a coat of Seche Vite on my ring finger

After that had dried I started making my bull's eye (see? I can talk water marble tech-talk as well ;) by dropping LBF, DSotM, LBF, Framboise, LBF, DSotM, LBF, Framboise in a cup filled with room temperature tap water from the tiniest distance from the surface as humanly possible. I drew the outsides in towards the center in eight places to make a flower pattern, said a small prayer and dunked my middle finger in it, positioned just so that the center of the flower would hopefully be at the side of my nail. I collected the leftover polish from the surface of the water, took a deep breath and pulled my finger out looking like what you can see in the pictures (minus some clean up of course).

indoors, with flash

Can you see the gorgeous sparkle in Framboise? It even shows up in the thin lines in the water marble! It's absolutely beautiful :)

Here's the bottle shot:

OPI Let's Be Friends!, Cirque Colors Framboise, OPI Dark Side of the Mood

And another rare thing happened as well. I actually checked to see if water marble was one of the SBB Challenges and it was, so I get to check off number 16... 22 challenges done, 32 to go!

I can't stop looking at my nails. I'm so happy I finally managed to do it and I even managed to do it during the day... it wasn't even dinner time when my manicure was ready! What do you think? Like it too? Oh, and I ended up using a small port glass (not the expensive crystal ones my mom gave to us but the cheapy ones my husband had when we first started dating and that we never use anymore since we got the posh crystal ones ;) and a sewing pin with a green head. I guess that green head was the most important detail :D

Cirque Colors Framboise was bought from Pretty Polish.