Purple Rhinestone nails

Thad is a huge Vikings fan, huge. The movie Fever Pitch really resonated with me, except that Thad is not exceptionally annoying like Jimmy Fallon. This last weekend the Vikings had a fan appreciation day at the Metrodome, obviously we went. I like football, but mostly I watch it because Thad loves it so much. His excitement at fan day was infectious. We got to take a tour of the Metrodome and when we went into the locker room I thought Thad was going to lose it. He has wanted to be in the Vikings locker room since he was about 5 so it didn’t really matter that the locker room was kinda crappy or that this is going to be the last season that they are even in that building. I love that he can be so passionate about something.

Of course my nails had to dress appropriately for Vikings day, for this manicure I used Sally Hansen CSM Anenome of Mine (I would like to point out that is how the polish name is printed on the bottle, I didn’t just spell it wrong for fun) and a crap ton of gold rhinestones. These nails took for freakin forever and I hated these nails, they were not at all what I intended.

Purple rhinestone nails

At first my plan was to do matte finish tips with the gold rhinestones, the Vikings just unveiled their new uniforms which include matte finish helmets, so I thought it would be a cool touch. I have never had any issues with essie Matte About You before, but it really didn’t work right on the purple. It left a bunch of white spots and just got the purple kinda chunky. To make matters worse, I use topcoat to adhere my rhinestones and it made little glossy streaks in the matte finish, so that is why you are not looking at badass purple matte tips.

I don’t even know what to say about my pointer finger

The topcoat went on like a bitch and just made the whole thing look weird and horrible. What I hated most about these nails was also the weirdest thing about them. You know how some sounds or the feeling of something can make your teeth hurt? Well, these nails made my teeth hurt. Every time the rhinestones rubbed against something it made my teeth hurt and was beyond annoying. It doesn’t make any sense though because my rhinestone holly manicure didn’t do that. Needless to say, I couldn’t wait to get these nails off and I avoided showing them to anyone. I’m going to have to redeem myself with my next Vikings nails.

Purple Ombre nails

Spring is finally here! After snowing for the last three weeks I think we are finally done with the snow and spring is here. I missed green so much, and being warm. I wore a dress yesterday, I love wearing dresses when it’s warm since I hate wearing shorts. I think it was just about the perfect Minnesota weekend. We cleared off the leaves from the patio and I spent a fair amount of time outside today, soaking up vitamin D and remembering that Minnesota does in fact have other seasons besides winter. I hope everyone else had as wonderful of a weekend as I did, it was worth the wait J

For this manicure I felt the urge to do something different so I tried my hand at ombre again. I have done a manicure like this once before and I wouldn’t say it was a success, this time turned out much better. For these nails I used OPI You’re Such a Budapest, China Glaze Gothic Lolita, and Sally Hansen CSM Anenome of Mine.

Purple Ombre

These nails are also sometimes called gradients but I like the word ombre more, even though my Microsoft Word isn’t putting the fun accent mark on the e and I don’t know how to put it on myself. To create the faded look I put the colors on a makeup sponge in three lines and then dabbed it on my nail, then I put on top coat pretty quickly so it smeared it a bit. The smearing didn’t work out so well on my pinkie but the other nails turned out pretty good.

The sponging method didn’t provide for good tip wear

I don’t know what happened to my middle finger, perhaps I was drinking too much, I’m going to guess that the sponge had it out for my middle finger and just decided to deposit a ton of dark purple right at the end. These nails were annoying because I immediately chipped one of them on my right hand and I had no way to really touch it up since the color was mixed and not just out of the bottle. They also annoyed me because they looked so much better from far away than up close but no one looks at your nails from far away (not my nails anyway).

Picture from further away, disregard the filthy windowsill

These nails were far from perfect, but they were lots of fun to do. Next time I want to try to transition from two different colors (like yellow to orange) instead of doing shades of the same color. I imagine it will be tricky to not make it vomit colored in the middle but I think it would be worth a shot.

OPI - DS Radiance

My parents are pretty awesome, I know I’ve mentioned that before, but it bears repeating. We dog sat for them while my newest niece was making her grand appearance and to thank us they decided to grill us steak (in this sentence read ‘they’ to mean ‘dad’). My dad is an amazing cook, especially when fire and meat are involved. His grill is epic; it was specially made just for him and it weighs like 800 pounds. The steaks he made were ridiculous; they weighed a pound and a half each (don’t worry fitness center ladies, I didn’t finish mine). To go with these monster porterhouses, he made huge baked potatoes and amazing stuffed mushrooms - all that food just for watching their sweet little beagle for a few days, totally worth it. Now that I made everyone jealous and hungry, I’ll move on to totally unrelated nails J

I love when people at work come up to me to show me their nails, it makes me feel like I’m the resident nail expert, maybe I can get that into my job description. One such work encounter resulted in the idea for these nails, for this manicure I used OPI DS Radiance and Orly Liquid Vinyl. Every time I use that OPI I’m reminded of how awesome it is, the color is just amazing. When it’s wet it looks like metal that has been liquefied, it goes on so easy, and it looks amazing with one coat, what more can I say?

DS Radiance

This is another one of those manicures where I have no answer to the ‘what are those dots?’ question. Despite the fact that I have no idea what the dots are supposed to be, I love this manicure, it is one of my favorites that I’ve done. They are classy, but still whimsical, and the silver is super shiny and distracting, for me they are like nail heaven.

Maybe they look like ants?

I messed up the dots on my pointer finger but otherwise they came out pretty clean. I get over excited when I do this many dots and I forget to clean off my dotter and it results in sticky dots sometimes. I also had a huge problem with dog hair on this manicure, my girls must be shedding and I had to pull out several hairs from my nails, thanks girls. This is the first time I’ve done tips since the big break and I love the proportion, perhaps I do need to keep them this length.

I love them so much you get three pictures

I’ve been painting my own nails for over a year now, I just renewed my Sally’s card. For everyone who looks at nail art and thinks they can do it I have to say that you can, it really does just take practice. My nails are so much better than when I started, I can’t say I’ve saved money or time, but I’ve had a lot of fun painting my nails, and for me that’s more important J

Ladybug nails

I love myself a good lazy Saturday. Today we didn’t really mange to get much done but I did make time to watch two movie classics from the 90s. I watched My Cousin Vinny this afternoon and followed it up with Pretty Woman. My phone and IMDB application have ruined me to just watching a movie, I have to look it up on IMDB and read all the trivia, then annoy Thad with useless things like “did you know they offered the role of Vivian to Sarah Jessica Parker?” I find some irony in the fact that most men (at least the men I know) don’t find Sarah Jessica Parker or Julia Roberts very pretty, and they were both looked at for the role. I won’t lie, I love Pretty Woman, it is one of my favorite movies and I always watch it when it’s on even though I own it, surprisingly the only other two movies I do that with are Rudy and Shawshank Redemption, they would make an interesting boxed set.

For this manicure I wanted to do something fun but tame it down a little bit. I used Orly Liquid Vinyl, Sally Hansen CSM All Fired Up, and China Glaze Sea Spray. I got the China Glaze on clearance at Sally’s and I love it. It’s this super cool blue-gray, it needed three coats to look right, but I think it was totally worth it.

Ladybug nails

I sometimes try to be modest about my nails, but the grass is awesome on these, I’m beyond happy with how it turned out. It makes me want to come up with more ideas just so I can reuse the grass (dragonfly nails?). I wish I would have made my ladybugs a little bigger so they stood out more, but I like the overall subtle ladybug effect.

Don’t mind me, I’m just a ladybug

I was asked what the dots on my other fingers are for, I really don’t have a good answer to it, I just like dots and since ladybugs have spots I figured I could use them. I do want to take time and say that these nails are ladybugs and not those horrible Japanese lady beetles, I hate those things, they are evil imposter ladybugs. Hope you enjoyed my nail foray into bugs J

essie - Braziliant

I can’t call my nails short anymore. I had to buy new files so I could shorten them, they still aren’t as long as they were before the incident, but I think I might like them more now, they are a good length. Just because they grew out doesn’t mean I’m going to stop doing ridiculous tacky manicures on them. I keep wanting to do nice simple nails, and then as soon as I sit down to paint I just go crazy. If I’m not distracted by my nails I feel like I didn’t really do my job.

A few months ago one of my friends gave me a color that screamed summer, I’ve been waiting to use it until it got warmer, but after how this spring has been going I decided to just cave and use it despite the cold weather. For this manicure I used essie Braziliant, Orly Prelude to a Kiss, OPI Brisbane Bronze, Sally Hansen CSM Parrot, and Ulta Oh!.

essie Braziliant

I love the base color in this manicure; Braziliant was exactly what I wanted it to be. I sometimes forget how good the formula on essie can be since I don’t own very much of it. The lighter colors seem to be runnier, but this color had the perfect formula, and looked amazing after two coats. I’m not sure what the green blob things were supposed to be, when I started painting my nails I wanted to do a pattern that wasn’t flowers but then they ended up looking like blob flowers.

Are they flowers or amoebas?

On my ring finger I used lose glitter and it looked pretty cool, in a 3D kind of way. The glitter didn’t wear well at all though and most of that glitter is now in my bed and hair. My favorite part of this manicure is the little Orly colored dots. They make the whole manicure look kind of retro, like a kitchen from the 70s.

My ring finger looks fuzzy

You can tell by looking at these nails that I didn’t really have a plan when I started. I love the color combination but the overall design isn’t one of my favorites. Pretty sure these aren’t going to last long, but that’s ok, I like painting my nails J

Shooting Star nails

I have a new niece! After so many nephews (and one niece) the last three babies born have been girls, so many nieces! I have not met my new niece but my mom checked out her nail beds and assured me that they were nice and long. I’m hoping to buy my nieces’ love when they get older by painting their nails but as I struck out with the eight year old on Easter, I’m not sure how much they would actually like crazy aunt Rosie coming after them with nail polish. Perhaps instead of going for ‘beloved aunt’ I should aim for ‘what the hell is wrong with her aunt’. I’m not really ‘beloved aunt’ material, but I can do up crazy in high style.

For this manicure I wanted to have classy nails, that was my thought when I started anyway, so of course they ended up having rhinestones, because for some reason for me classy equals rhinestones (I’m like the Gypsies in that show on TLC). To create this *classy* look, I used China Glaze Gothic Lolita and Color Club Status Update. This is my go to Vikings purple, but I haven’t really used it on its own like this before.

Shooting Star nails

I actually got the idea for these nails from a tattoo I saw, I guess that also means that for me classy equals tattoos, I really have this classy thing down. This manicure really sealed that I freakin love dots on my nails. I especially love tiny dots like I did here; I foresee many little dots in my future. I’m sorry these pictures didn’t turn out very well; I was too lazy to get off the couch and get closer to the light source (the window).

Laziness is my Kryptonite

Thad and I love watching TV, it is our main entertainment (TV and talking about our dogs). We have been watching a lot of Big Bang Theory lately and it is making me want to do superhero nails, I can’t decide on what five to do since I need for them to have pretty simple designs (like Green Lantern). So if you have any suggestions, let me know J.

Saran Wrap nails

It’s been way too long, I wish I had some awesome excuse to explain why I have been neglecting my blog, but I don’t have one other than I am lazy. Don’t worry; I’ve still been painting my nails so this week will be full of blogs, blogfull if you will. Minnesota and Mother Nature got together and decided to play a mean trick on us here in the northland. We got snow a few days ago, and not just a little dusting of snow, but like 8 inches of this horrible, wet, heavy snow. I miss being warm and seeing the sun. Please get warm again Minnesota, we really earned it.

I wanted to try something different for this manicure so I did what I read on the interwebs is called a Saran Wrap manicure. At first I tried to use Cling Wrap brand saran wrap and I’ll let you in on a secret, it didn’t work as well as the Saran Wrap brand saran wrap. For this manicure I used China Glaze Rich & Famous and Fast Track, every time I use Fast Track I’m reminded how much I love that color. I should have bought it in bulk so I would have it forever.

Saran Wrap nails

To do this manicure I first painted my nails with the gold color, and then I had to wait for it to dry all the way (something I struggle with). After it was totally dry (well, mostly totally dry) I put a layer of the pink on and then dabbed it away with a balled up piece of Saran Wrap. If you are thinking right now ‘I bet that made a huge mess’ you would be very right. I had pink all over my fingers, but nothing a shower couldn’t take care of.

I pushed a little too hard in a few places and made little divots

Just for fun, I decided to put essie Matte About You on my ring finger. In person I liked the matte finish nail more than the shiny ones but in the picture I like the shiny ones more. I like the overall look of the nails, I thought they kind of look like marble. This manicure was super easy and I’m already thinking of other color combinations I can do with it, perhaps next time I’ll use two colors that are more similar, like light and dark purple. Hope you didn’t miss me too much, I’ll try to be less lazy J