What's on my nails today?

Hi everyone,


now that the ABC Challenge is finished (my very first fully completed challenge... yay!) I figured it would be nice to have an overview of all manicures I did so be prepared for a lot of nails (26 x 5 = 130 to be exact).

Hi everyone!


It's time for the last manicure in the ABC-Challenge, the Z. I wanted to end with a stupendous, awe inspiring manicure but of course I had to also think of a theme with a Z... All I could come up with was Zig-Zag and Zebra, which didn't inspire me to do something awesome and I started to get a little agitated... and then I realized another theme for the letter Z is what polishing my nails means to me. It relaxes me: I can focus on a small thing that is totally under my control and take my mind off matters that keep nagging when I can't do a thing about them. And while I'm not very good at things like painting or other "normal" creative hobbies, I love that I can create something beautiful with nail polish (and it's an extra bonus that other people like what I make ;) So basically polishing my nails is sort of my way to Zen (or at least a more relaxed, peaceful state).

Of course Zen is a very abstract concept so I decided to see what images were connected with the word Zen. When I searched Pinterest I came across something called zentangle: drawings made up of easy, repeating lines that make up patterns. While I don't think I would enjoy drawing with actual pen and paper, I immediately started thinking about translating those patterns to a manicure and that's what my final ABC manicure turned out to be: zentangled nails.

indoors, no flash

Hi everyone!


I know, lousy title, but I'm totally lacking any kind of inspiration (or energy for that matter) so it'll have to do. The manicure it describes is better, I promise! Want to see? Just move your eyes a little further down the page...

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you probably know I'm not too fond of polishes that have larger thingies in them like flakies or big glitters. So when the Cirque Colors Facets collection came along I decided I didn't need them in my life. But for some reason I kept looking at pictures of swatches when I came across them and when I saw a gorgeous swatch by Maria of the blue one I seriously started doubting my decision but with all the beautiful holiday collections that started to show up I didn't want to spend money on polishes that I wasn't 100% sure I would like.

Enter my husband who keeps pushing me out of my comfort zone by asking me to put on colors I wouldn't choose, do designs that are totally not me and telling me to buy polishes I would never pick myself. This time he didn't say a word. Instead he simply ordered the entire collection and gave them to me as a present for putting up with him for eleven years, two months and seventeen days (HIS words). It doesn't happen very often but I was speechless (and he couldn't stop laughing while I was trying to come up with an answer...) Anyway, when I was putting away the new bottles, Morganite ended up next to Carpe Diem and Hudson (I store my polishes by brand) and I really liked the colors together. This is what happened next:

indoors, no flash

Hi everyone,


I'd been thinking about a theme for the letter Y for days but the only thing I could come up with was Yellow and I was so not in the mood for yellow. So I kept on thinking and the end of the week kept coming closer and closer... and I still wasn't in the mood for yellow! When I was just about to give up on the Y my priceless husband decided to just read a list of english scrabble words that start with a y and while I knew most of them, I never heard of the word 'yesteryear'. It turns out it means 'last year' or 'not too long ago'. The cogs in my head started turning and I decided to go with 'years ago' and an art deco theme. Of course art deco is from the 1920s so it's definitely not of yesteryear, but it IS from years ago (about 90 to be exact ;)

I've always loved the straight, geometric look of art deco and, living in a house that was built between 1920 and 1930, we have some gorgeous art deco stained glass in the separating doors between our living room and our study (which is actually one of the things I love most about this place). So I searched through my plates for an image to stamp. I'd already decided I wanted to stamp with gold on a very dark color (Great Gatsby movie poster anyone?). Everything combined looks like this:

indoors, no flash

Hi everyone!


Juanita and Michelle invited me to join their twinsies posts (so does that make this a triple-sies post? ;) We're going to recreate let ourselves be inspired by a manicure from our to-do list and post it on the last Friday of the month, but we're only really starting in January so this is just a trial run. I got to pick a manicure from one of them to recreate for November and I had already chosen their twinsies Halloween manicure (here and here) since I would be at home on Friday so I could actually do the black nail thing without getting weird looks and I would do a manicure from both of them... double win! Unfortunately something popped up that requires me to look more or less presentable tomorrow and I doubt that graveyards fall in that category so I had to search for something else at the last minute... and I'm NOT good at 'at the last minute'! So what is a girl to do in crises like that? She makes her husband pick out a design! He chose Michelle's Pink treasure nail art (see what I did with the title? ;) and after that all I had to do was select my polishes.

Hmmm... The one kind of polish that isn't very well represented in my collection is glitter polish. I hardly have any and the ones I do have usually have a clear base so those don't work either. I quickly decided to go for one of the rare holos-with-thingies-in-them that I own (and I can just hear Maria chuckle now ;) and combine it with a chrome, like Michelle did, and I think I didn't do too bad, even if it was 'at the last minute':

indoors, no flash

Hi everyone,


after searching through my husbands english dictionary (yep, the old fashioned paper kind, a huge Webber dictionary that could easily be used to step on to reach the highest shelves as it's at least 6 inches thick!), I still couldn't find anything that I could use as starting point for my entry for the letter X of the ABC Challenge. I finally decided to see if I happened to have a polish with a name that started with an X. Lo and behold, I actually had one: a lovely lilac colored holographic beauty named Xochitl. After I googled the word xochitl (as it wasn't in Webber's) it finally clicked. Xochitl is a name that is used in central and southern Mexico and it means 'flower' (thank you Wikipedia ;) So I decided to go with a simple manicure that featured lilac colored flowers, and this is it:

indoors, no flash

Hi everyone!


If you haven't guessed from the title, this is my entry for the W :)
Another word I could have added was 'wedding' as I can totally see a winter bride wearing this manicure but
1) I'm already hitched and
2) our wedding day was in the midst of summer (and it rained... ;)

When I tried to think of a theme for the W, all I could come up with was 'watermarble' and I really didn't want to do that with bleary eyes and a pounding head. Only when I asked my husband for some english words that started with a W and he came up with 'weather', something inside that brain of mine clicked and a light bulb labeled 'winter' popped on, immediately followed by white (snow) and the early beginnings of a design were born :)

So what exactly is this W-manicure I'm talking about? This:

indoors, no flash

Hi everyone!


Quick post for the V as I can't wait to crawl back into bed... yep, another flu victim here :( For some reason just the smell of acetone makes me nauseous so please forgive the lousy clean up job.

My original idea was a leadlighting manicure with viola flowers but as that is a bit too ambitious at the moment I decided to go the easy way and chose Violet as my theme. When I googled the definition of the color violet, Wikipedia told me violet is the bluer side of purple: the color of amethyst and lavender. That made it even easier so I searched my stash for polishes with amethyst in their name and I found two, OPI I Am What I Amethyst and Teeez Amazing Amethyst. Fortunately the Teeez one stamped pretty nice and this is the end result:

indoors, no flash

Hi everyone!


I was totally stumped for the letter U. I thought of unicorns and uniform and understated but nothing inspired me to even start looking for colors, let alone do a complete manicure. All I could think of were fall colors, especially deep reds... Fortunately I have this wonderful person in my life who usually comes up with the weirdest ideas but has his moments of genius and this weekend one of those moments happened. He asked me why I didn't do a manicure with all untried polishes... Why didn't I think of that?! I had already seen a gorgeous fall manicure that was on my want-to-recreate list so I decided to brave Mount Untried and find colors for my version of it... and this is what my nails look like at the moment:

indoors, no flash