What's on my nails today?

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,


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!


Long time no see, right? You probably guessed it... life interfered again :(
But that means I have a lot of catching up to do, so brace yourselves for several manicures in the coming days (if life doesn't act up of course... so I better start typing fast!)

First in the line of past manicures is this White + Pink design for the 52 Week Nail Art Challenge. October is breast cancer awareness month and this year it hit a little too close to home for comfort (in case you are wondering if those regular checkups are worth it, I now know they definitely are!!!). The ribbon color for breast cancer is pink but I didn't feel like doing ribbons, so I chose to do a very feminine manicure with one of the prettiest pink polishes I own. This is the result:

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:

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 ;)

Yesterday was a sad day for my family and me as we had to say a final farewell to my cousin.
His motto was: live your best life.
This one's for him.

Hi everyone!


As you can see, I've spend an hour or so filing down my nails... again... :(
After breaking the nail on my left middle finger, I decided to take pictures of my Cinderella hand for a while, only to crash into a door when it was opened unexpectedly so that took another two nails from my right hand. I managed to avoid getting hit in the face though! So it's back to shorties (and pampering them as much as I can to encourage them to grow faster). I was lucky though, no breaks went into the pink part so it doesn't hurt.

Anyway, the 32nd prompt calls for Black and White and for me that means a minimal design, which in turn means the emphasis is on the paint and stamp job... I hope I did a decent job:

Hi everyone!

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.

Hi everyone!


Usually I try to avoid looking at other manicures until I've done my manicure for the 52 Week Nail Art Challenge. This time however I saw both Michelle's and Juanita's version pop up in my feed and I loved both of them so I set out to do a combination of the two. As you can see, that totally worked out... NOT!

I couldn't find the right sheer polish as base, I didn't like the floral images on the plates I selected, basically I wasn't happy with anything. So finally I decided to go with another idea that had been in the back of my mind the entire time but that I thought too simple to be called nail art... and I loved the way my nails looked! Here they are:

Hi everyone!


Week 23 brought on the winter prompt. Winter... yep, this is definitely a challenge that was thought up by someone on the southern hemisphere as it's still gorgeous summer weather over here :) So I decided to see if I could create a manicure that does go with the challenge for the week but wouldn't look too weird during summertime. I think I did a decent job:

Hi everyone!


It's been a while, I know, but I have a great excuse, even greater than binge watching tv series ;) I have been studying for an exam I had to take yesterday and since I had very little time to prepare the fun stuff had to take a back seat for a while. It was worth it though, as I passed with flying colors!

So what does this have to do with the manicure I want to show you? Thursday evening I was home alone as my husband had to work late. I had studied all I could and I was feeling very nervous so I decided to give myself some polish therapy. Not just because I REALLY needed to get rid of the tipwear but painting my nails usually calms me down and forces me to focus on something else. This is the result of my therapeutic manicure:

Hi everyone!


There is no special reason for these nails, except that I liked the colors together. Come to think of it, what better reason is there to polish your nails, right? So here are my just-because-I-like-them nails :)

Hi everyone!


Yup, real life struck again so I had absolutely no time to write a post any time earlier... but I'm keeping my fingers crossed I can finish typing this post and publish while it's still Sunday ;)

This weeks prompt is Childhood and when thinking about it, I thought back to the time when my mom taught me how to make crowns out of daisies. The way I usually see people do it is by making a tiny slit in the stem of a daisy with their thumbnail and pushing another daisy through the hole, forming a very thin, delicate chain. But my mom used a different method, she braided the stems which resulted in a sturdier chain but I had to pick way more flowers to make it. Fortunately daisies grew just about anywhere (as they are considered weeds) so there were plenty for me to pick and when I made a long enough braid, my mom connected the ends and I could wear my flower crown, making me a flower princess :)

With that in mind I set out to pick colors and a plate and here's the result:

Hi everyone!


The sun is still out and since I have a little more time for not-work-related things at the moment, I've been painting my nails... again ;) This time I was inspired by a friend who showed me her pedicure. I loved the color she'd used, so I quickly went through my stash to grab the same polish. A quick paint-and-stamp job later, my nails looked like this:

Hi everyone!


This week's theme is 'Most expensive polish' and as just about any polish lover I own some polishes that were bought for prices I don't want to start thinking about, and a few that are just very very special for several reasons. My choice for this week is a polish that falls in both categories: it cost a lot in both money and time-to-acquire-it. The beauty I'm talking about is OPI We'll Always Have Paris Suede:

Hi everyone!


When I saw this manicure by Michelle I instantly knew I wanted to do something similar and since my very demure french tips manicure had just been removed, I had a clean canvas to work with. So I went through my stash, picked some polishes and gave Michelle's design a bit of a twist:

Hi everyone!


When you're reading this it's the last Friday of April so that means it's time for another Triad manicure. This time I got to pick the inspiration and I chose this stunning manicure by Sassy Shelly.

I had absolutely no idea what I would do for my version, except that I wanted to use a beautiful base with "plain" stamping, just like the original. While searching for a polish for my Zodiac manicure I came across a polish I thought could be used as a base for the Triad manicure so I pulled it from my stash and did a quick swatch to see what it would look like... and about half an hour later I was doing a happy dance while my nails looked like this:

Hi everyone!


This week's theme is French Tip. If you've been here before (or if you quickly check the tags on the right) you can see how much I love this type of manicure... not at all! So this week was another challenge for me. Early on I decided I wouldn't do a classic french manicure or a faded french, but I did want to stay close to those so nude and white would be my colors and the white would have to go at the tip of my nails only. This is what I came up with: