Catching up... big time!

Hi everyone!


As it's vacation time over here, the team that I'm part of (that usually consists of five people) has been reduced to three and one of those has been assigned to a project so that means we're down to two persons, yours truly included. That means I've been working 12+ hour days and I've basically been scrambling to at least fix dinner and do laundry and not much else but sleep. I've also found out conference calls while working from home actually provide time to paint nails, as long as you don't want to do very complicated designs ;) Typing up posts is an entirely different thing though, so I decided to do one post with my manicures of the last three weeks to be all caught up before posting the Triad manicure coming Friday.


First up: week 27 of the 52 Week Nail Challenge: Unused plate:

The almost neon coral is OPI Live.Love.Carnaval and I needed two coats for full opacity. I combined it with nude Catrice ICONails 12 Creaming of You (3 coats) and beautiful black holographic Colour Alike 07 Prince, which is actually a stamping polish so I used it to stamp the petal like thingies from my latest stamping plate Moyra 32 Nature. A coat of Seche Vite and voila, one manicure done!


Next came my anniversary nails. My husband and I were married for ten years earlier this month and he took me to the restaurant we went to on our very first date (yep, it still exists and they still have the same people working there).
I asked him if he had any wishes for my manicure and he immediately said "Purple!" so I picked one of the most glorious purples I own and this is the result:

The gorgeous purple holo is a-england Crown of Thistles. It's a scattered holo that has an almost golden glow from within next to all the sparkles. Even in low light it's stunning! And as most a-england polishes it has a great formula. You see two effortless coats, although you can use just one when you're in a hurry. I painted my middle and ring finger with two coats of lilac Cirque Colors Sartorial and doublestamped an image from Born Pretty BPL-024 using first Hit the Bottle Snowed In and after that Crown of Thistles. Again a coat of Seche Vite and I was ready to go to the restaurant :)


Last one for this post:

I was spoiled with not just that black holo stamping polish I used earlier, I received several colors and I was curious to see how they would do in a stamped gradient. As you can see they performed great!

I started by painting all my nails with OPI Don't Cry Over Spilled Milkshakes, a vanilla colored polish (that my husband immediately called dirty white) that covers in two coats. I stamped an image from MoYou Fashionista 08 using Colour Alike 83 Hawaiian Blue and Colour Alike 86 Kiwiiz that I painted on the plate side by side and scraped a few times to make them blend. Hawaiian Blue can best be seen close to the cuticle of my middle finger and Kiwiiz is the yellow green at the tip of the image. The darker green in the middle is where the colors blended and I love the way it looks, even though the holo in the stamp wasn't as visible as I had hoped. Of course this manicure was also finished with a coat of Seche Vite.


And that was it! Unfortunately I managed just one manicure per week and I'm afraid it'll be that way for some time to come as most people have planned their vacation in July and August. Oh well, I hope that means it's going to be a lot less crowded in September when we have planned our time off ;)