What's on my nails today?

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:

Hi everyone!

This weeks theme is White + Blue and as you may know, I love those two colors. I contemplated going for a porcelain design but I wanted to experiment with a new-ish purchase: Dance Legend Spot It 02 White. So I gathered some pretty blue polishes and a white, my silicone matte and set out to play. This is the result:

Hi everyone!

Another week, another theme for the 52 week nail art challenge. This week it's Stars, and I immediately knew I wanted to recreate this manicure by @alinasnailplace, but with stars (and slightly different colors and sparkles 😉). Here's my version:

Hi everyone!

Hi everyone!


It's time for the 24th installment already... can you believe 2020 is almost halfway through already?! *shakes head in disbelief* Anyway, the 24th prompt is Glitter. As you may know, I'm not that much into glitter on my nails (or anywhere else on me for that matter) so I wasn't looking forward to this prompt very much. I looked through my stash but most of the glitter polishes I own are only suitable for small accents as far as I'm concerned (I know, I'm boring 😉). And then I came across a small category of polishes I hadn't thought of... glitter-crellies! After that the manicure was easy: pick a pretty glitter-crelly, find a matching creme, pick a nice stamp, have fun! And fun I had, take a look:

Hi everyone!


This week it's time for Gold + Black. The moment I picked my gold polish, I knew it was going to be a very simple manicure as this gold is so stunning it doesn't need much. Let me show you what is on my nails right now:

Hi everyone!


If you know me personally, you know I'm married to a gamer. Yep, even in 2020 he still loves to play computer games with a group of friends. They don't drag computers over to each other anymore as they can play over the internet, but they're still gaming a lot! So when this week's prompt (Game) came along, I figured I would ask them what kind of game I should try to recreate. What a mistake-a to make-a! They kept coming up with games I'd never heard of, games that were impossible to do, or a combination of both! When I was about ready to go for Tic-Tac-Toe, they suggested Space Invaders... A thorough search of my plates resulted in a plate with the little alien monsters on it, so all I had to do was decide on what colors to use. Apparently the game has existed for ages and ages (Google tells me it's over 40 years old) so I picked a monochrome color palette: a near-black as base and a silver for the aliens, hopefully sort of resembling the old black-n-white game a bit. This is what I created:

Hi everyone!


April is coming to an end and so another installment of the Friday Triad series is here for your reading pleasure. I know, it isn't Friday but unfortunately work interfered for one of us so we're a bit later than usual.

This time Juanita picked a lovely manicure by Kathy from @kt_tk1, and here's what I did with that inspiration:

Hi everyone!


This time the theme is Mythical creature and my first thought was... dragon! I didn't want to do a full dragon though, I don't have the necessary freehand skills or a plate with a dragon that I like, so I opted for dragon scales, regal green to gold ones:

Hi everyone!


Of course the 52 week nail art challenge prompt for this week couldn't be anything but Easter. I'm pretty sure lots of bunnies, chicks and eggs will pop up in our feeds but I didn't really feel like doing that. When I think of Easter, I think of the midnight mass my parents used to take us kids to, the silence in the dark church where only a few lamps were turned on, the lighting of the candle, the feeling that something big was going to happen (and staying up late and walking outside in the middle of the night made it even more special). Another thing that I associate with Easter (and Spring in general) is pastel colors, so I combined this in my Easter manicure:

Hi everyone!


A day later than usual but I couldn't wait until another Friday to show this off... a new post about a new to me technique! I have seen many pictures of beautiful drip marbles so when my husband finished a tub of cottage cheese, I immediately snagged the plastic lid to finally try it myself. I have to say I'm pretty excited about the results :)

Hi everyone!


Another post in the My polish, your plate series. This week Michelle picked the polish and the plate was my choice. Michelle picked a glitter... I'll let that sink in for a while... a glitter! And of course the chosen polish has to be really present in the manicure we do with it so I had to step way out of my comfort zone and finally managed to create this:

Hi everyone,


the seventh prompt of the 52 week nail art challenge is Nude. Add to that the fact that I've been wanting to do a plaid for some time now, and this is what you get:

Hi everyone!


This week's prompt for the 52 week nail art challenge is Metallic. Usually, I stamp with metallics/chromes and mattify them, but this time I wanted to try something different and leave my nails glossy. This is the result:

Hi everyone!


Another month has passed so that means Triad time :) This month Juanita picked the inspiration and I don't think I've had an inspiration that was this far out of my comfort zone... heck, at times I didn't think I would be able to find my way home! This is what she chose: an Easter colored, freehanded manicure with decals by Yulia from @juli_addicted. Believe me when I say it was a struggle, but I think I managed to make it mine after all... a bit. You be the judge:

Hi everyone,


Surprised to see me? Me too!

To be honest, I didn't think I was going to make it this month. Last year we decided to get our kitchen redone. All was planned perfectly and we should have had only one week of mayhem, after which I would have a gorgeous new kitchen. Sounds simple, right? Wrong! You probably guessed it, for most of the last four weeks I've been surrounded with chaos, dust, plaster, paint and all other stuff that guys apparently thrive on and that forced me to put my entire stash in storage to keep my beauties safe.

So much for my plans to join the 52 Week Nail Art Challenge 2019 edition... (but I hope to catch up once all is back to normal). But nothing could keep me from the Triad manicure! So I picked the colors and the plate I wanted to use by googling swatches and reviews on my mobile, wrote down the names, made my husband dig up the bottles as he went to get some more things we needed and went over to my mom to paint my nails and take pictures with her camera as mine is... ehm... somewhere I can't find it at the moment.

But all obstacles aside, here's my version of Michelle's pick by Nails by Jema:

Hi everyone,

it's that time again... when I realize I still have manicures that are patiently waiting for their place in the spotlight while my roller coaster life takes up all free time. This time I have no less than four manicures for you!

Let start with the first one:

Hi everyone!


This week's challenge is splatter... a technique I haven't tried before so my brain was already thinking of what plates to use. But I had the entire afternoon basically to myself today as my husband was running a (lengthy) errand and I'm on standby duty for work so I have to remain close to phone, email and computer, so I figured I could try a real splatter manicure and I would be able to clean up the mess and stamp something if it turned out disastrous. In the end I had to clean up some mess but I'm quite proud of the outcome. Let me present my very first splatter manicure:

Hi everyone,

this week's prompt is Houndstooth, or (as we call it) Pied-de-Poule. I actually knew what it was because my mother used to have a suit, consisting of a jacket and a pencil skirt, in this pattern. The twist was that her jacket had a fuchsia pink lining, so this manicure is based on my memory of what she looked like: the black-n-white pattern, the pink lining and the silver watch she wore (and still wears btw ;)

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.