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Hi everyone,
I bet it's a surprise to see a sign of life on this blog.
2021 has been a rollercoaster of a year for my family and me. Besides all the consequences of the pandemic, with lockdowns, social distancing, information and mis-information, we were also faced with the consequences of a reckless driver who speeded through a red light and ran into my mother on her bike. She was unbelievably fortunate as she got out of it without any injuries to her brain and nerves, but both her legs were shattered, and she suffered multiple cracked ribs, bruises, cuts and scratches.
The entire year was filled with surgeries, hospital visits, physical therapy, rehabilitation, exercising, talks with lawyers, arranging help, and of course encouraging her all the way, and slowly but surely improvement to the point that my mom is now able to walk without crutches or a walker. I'm immensely proud of how far she has come and I'm convinced she will continue to get better still.
Taking care of my mother, combined with a full time job and my own household, has taken up so much time, polishing nails and writing about it had to take a huge step back (along with lots of other hobbies). Now that everything is settling into a semblance of normal, I want to try and starting blogging again. I'm not making promises but I hope to pop up in your feed again in the next year with some nice nail art.
So here's to a better, happier, healthier new year. I hope 2022 holds everything you hope for it ❤️
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Hi everyone!
It's time for Vinyls this week... and I'm not a particularly big fan of those. Or rather, for some reason I've never managed to use them properly so I prefer just about any other technique to using vinyls. But as time went by, some found their way into my stash and so I pulled out a really nice design to create this manicure:
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Hi everyone!
This week's theme is Brown. I love brown but I have to admit I find it a bit difficult to use it as the main color for a manicure. I think I succeeded though, as I'm still wearing this manicure and I don't want to take it off any time soon 😉 So what did I create? Let me show you:
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Hi everyone!
After I had done the green French tips from the previous post, I tried another approach. I love the colors, I love the image I stamped, I just don't love Frenchies 😉 But since I'm not just showing off the nails I like, here's the second take on French tips:
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Hi everyone!
It's time for the prompt I was looking forward to least of all... French Tip (it's actually a toss-up between Negative Space and French tips as neither is quite my style). But French tips it is, so I set out to do a 'proper' French manicure this time. Although I didn't feel like doing white tips and there was a gorgeous green polish on my desk so I decided to do a trial run on my bare (read: base coated) nails and see what it looked like. And this is what I looked at when I stopped fiddling:
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Hi everyone!
Another week, another prompt for the nail art challenge: Negative Space. If you've visited this blog before, you might know I don't like naked nails or VNL (visible nail line) so this definitely isn't my favorite theme. But as this challenge is all about getting out of my comfort zone, I didn't want to skip it either so I decided to think of a design I would normally do on a nude base and just skip the base. Let me show you how that turned out:
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Hi everyone!
This week's theme is Halloween. I know a lot of people are looking forward to this holiday, decorate their house weeks in advance, cook enough to feed a football team... but over here (the Netherlands) Halloween is something that is only seen online with influencers, in magazines that show insta-ready interiors and in stores that hope to get a boost in sales. So to say I'm not really feeling Halloween is putting it mildly. And waking up to no less than three broken nails (and I still don't know what I did to accomplish that) didn't help much either 😢 In the end I decided to just slap on a pretty color, combine it with black (THE color for the theme of course) and see where that would take me. This is the result:
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Hi everyone!
I looked at the week's prompt (Orange + Silver) and I was stumped... I didn't have a clue what to do with it! Usually with these prompts, I would pair two colors with white and go for a dotticure but I just wasn't in the mood for that. Then, all of a sudden, I realized there is another design that only asks for pretty colors: plaid! And that's what I did, an orange and silver plaid manicure:
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Hi everyone!
It's time for Lace and I was actually thinking about two color schemes: fall colors or, inspired by my wedding dress that had a lace bodice, white on white. I decided to go for the latter but after painting the base, I realized it would look beautiful with a darker color on top. So I dug up a gorgeous reddish brown polish... and it's turned out to be this mix of fall on white-ish:
