What's on my nails today?

Hi everyone, 

Hi everyone!

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:

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This week the challenge is Purple + Gray. I kept my manicure very simple as inspiration is in very short supply lately. Since you can hardly ever go wrong with a dotticure, that's what I did:

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The tenth installment of the 52 week nail art challenge 2020 is Beach. I grew up close to the North Sea and when I was a kid, we visited the beach quite often (it was only a 10-minute bike ride). The water wasn't turquoise but a murky greenish, grayish blue, and the sand wasn't pearly white but... well, sandy. That's the picture that pops into my mind when I think of the beach so that's what I tried to create on my nails, a wintery North Sea beach:

Hi everyone!


The ninth prompt for the 52 week nail art challenge... the tenth week of the year... what happened to the first nine? 2020 has only just started and now it's almost 20% over already!

Oh well, this week we had to create something with neon. As you can tell by the overwhelming amount of neon manicures on the blog, I don't really like neon on my nails. I can appreciate it on others and when it's sweltering hot I may venture into the sunglasses-needed-territory but that hardly ever happens. And as it's cold and gray and rainy outside at the moment, I don't feel like anything bright at all... but the challenge says neon so I did neon, with a bit of a wintery twist:

Hi everyone!


2020 steadily moves on, so this is the fifth installment of the Nail Art Challenge already: Blue + Gold. This one was a bit of a struggle but after seeing a gorgeous blue that I couldn't put out of my mind, here's is what happened when I started playing with it:

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The second installment of Michelle and me challenging each other with a polish one of us chose and an image from a plate the other picked. This time I picked the polish (Colors by Llarowe Berries in the Snow) and Michelle picked the plate (Pueen 103, bottom left). Michelle doesn't own Berries so after some deliberating we settled on ILNP Black Orchid for her as that is supposed to be a dupe for Berries. And after the selection process was done, we were ready to start painting!

This is what I created:

Hi everyone!



It's the last Friday of the month again, so that means Triad time! The inspiration of this month was picked by me and I had a really hard time deciding. In the end I went for a manicure that actually I saw popping up in my feed and immediately saved, this pretty dry marble/smoosh by Anastasiya of @nail_muse.

I especially loved the horizontal lines so I knew I wanted to try and get those too and boy, did I set myself up for trouble... but I think I did sort of okay. I'll let you be the judge:

Hi everyone,


this is a manicure that was on my nails last week, so here's a quick post to show it off anyway as I think it's too pretty to remain hidden ;)

Hi everyone!


I wanted to do a happy, colorful manicure so I started out... by picking gray and white ;)
Of course I picked those non-colors for a reason, I wanted them to look nice with the yellow I had in mind. Yellow didn't happen though because I spotted the beautifullest (yep, I've decided that's a word) lime green bottle when I was searching for... what was that color again? So green it was... and that's how this happened:

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!


As I already expected, I didn't have the chance to write one last blog in 2018 with the December nails that were patiently waiting on my camera but as I have some unexpected free time (I guess that's the only advantage of back problems) I decided to write this post and give them their spot in the, slightly belated, spotlight.

Let's start with the manicure I did for my mother-in-law's birthday, early December:

Hi everyone!


This month has felt like a runaway train with no brakes and me running behind it, trying to catch up... But this evening I FINALLY sat down with a mug of tea and declared I would turn in early. My husband grumbled something in agreement so when we were about to get ready for bed something suddenly dawned... this wasn't a Monday, it's a Thursday and not just any Thursday, it's Triad-day!! So my oasis of tranquility immediately turned into a frantic search for polishes, plates and, most important, inspiration to create something worthy of the beautiful, colorful, summer manicure by Claire of clairestelle8 that Juanita picked. Fortunately the polishers patron goddess (there has to be a deity devoted to nail art... I've been calling on her this entire evening) took pity on me and here I am, it's not even midnight yet and my nails look like this:

Hi everyone!

Can you believe it's the last day of November 2018 already? I still feel like someone secretly stole a week or two as this month has zipped by with lightning speed! But my calendar shows it is the last Friday of the month so it's time for the Triad manicure again. And boy, this one was TOUGH!

Michelle picked a pretty summer manicure by Paulina from Paulina's Passions... that was completely freehanded! Of course you all know I can't freehand a stick figure, let alone an entire manicure! So I already knew I would be stamping stuff on my nails. But I really didn't feel any summer vibes so I decided I was going for contrast, opposites, turn this thing into a wintery scene! And that's where the trouble started. I picked a gorgeous white that resembled fresh snow, I had the perfect pine green and... I pulled a blank... a huge blank... the biggest blank in history! I literally spent two weeks trying to figure out what to do and nothing came to me. I even started on a manicure and it resulted to nothing (well, a lot of frustrations ;)

On Thursday evening (yep, yesterday) I desperately went to once again look at the video that Paulina had recorded to see if maybe freehanding something would be possible after all. When I read the title, something clicked inside my brain at last. Her nails were inspired by a Hawaiian shirt! (don't ask me why I didn't see that before... I guess a frustrated brain doesn't work that well) And while I don't like the pattern for clothing, I do like the combination of big leaves and flowers so I put all previously selected polishes and plates aside and went on a hunt for materials I could use in a Hawaiian shirt manicure that would still fit my non-summer mood... and I think I succeeded, see:

Hi everyone!


Today's post is coming to you from... my bedroom :(
Yup, the dreaded flu has struck again so I'm reduced to a sniffling, feverish, whining mess that would be convinced the world was coming to an end if I were a guy ;) Although, that's unfair to my guy who patiently dug up an ancient laptop, connected it to the internet, installed all security updates from the last ten years or so, and even got my photo editor on there (I know, he's the best... but in this case I think it may also have something to do with me reaching the limits of his patience with all the complaints about how I still had pictures waiting and week 45 was over already and I was way behind and I couldn't do a thing with this small mobile to edit pictures or write a post, yada yada yada... I really am the worst patient ever!).

Anyway, I got my connection to the outside world and I can finally show you what I did for the Orange + Yellow prompt that I was actually ready to skip until I first saw Michelle's and Juanita's manicures and then came across this gorgeous design by Chloé from Klo's to me... and I just knew I wanted to recreate it, with a little twist to make it mine of course ;)

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!


It's the last Friday of the month (and for once actually the last day of the month as well) so that means it's time for the Friday Triad manicure: Michelle, Juanita and me sharing our manicure that was inspired by a manicure that was on one (or more) of our to-do lists. Michelle picked this month: beautiful mustard and navy nails by Debbie, the lady from Lady and the Stamp.

Michelle was actually very early in sending the link so I had plenty of time to search my plates for a suitable image... and search them again as I didn't find anything I liked ("Honey, I need more plates... I have absolutely NOTHING to use on my nails!!"). Finally I decided on an image that "would do" and I started looking for colors. I settled on purple and mauve and pink and was just about ready to start painting when my husband asked me what I was working on. I showed him Debbie's manicure and he asked me why I didn't go for the same colors, mustard and navy. Well... because I don't like mustard on my nails? Apparently that wasn't good enough for him so he did the unthinkable... he asked my mom (who had come over for something or other) what colors she liked best and she did the utter unthinkable... she agreed with my husband I should go for mustard and navy!! As you can imagine I couldn't stand up against the two of them so I put the purple and the mauve and the pink back in their spot and looked for the required colors. This is the end result: