Owl nails

I used to think that when people complained about migraines they were exaggerating, I mean they are just headaches and everyone gets headaches, right? This holier than though take on migraines quickly changed after I started getting them. I’m not sure on the cause of mine, but I do imagine that winning the lottery would fix them right up. Not surprisingly, given the start to my blog, I have been dealing with a brain melting migraine for three days now. I usually like to refer to my migraines as ‘fight club’ and say super witty things like ‘don’t talk about fight club’ as I find talking about them makes the demon taking up residency in my brain frolic with sadistic bloodlust. For the first time in a long time I had to force myself to paint my nails today, the thought of using very smelly paint and focusing on my nails under police interview style lighting, didn’t really appeal to me. What did appeal to me, and ultimately convinced me I had to do something with my nails, was my super awesome set of dotters I had yet to use (and a big chip out of my left pinkie nail, thanks left pinkie nail).

As I’m not feeling 100% I decided to be a bit lazy and just touch my tip wear up and keep the base color the same, it is so pretty after all. To complete my owls I used Zoya Song (I told you I was in love with it) and Ulta Sun-Sational, Ulta clearly doesn’t have the same color naming people working for them that OPI does. I’m pretty happy with one of my owls, the other owl looks like it got hit up side the face with a baseball bat, I’ll let you decide which owl is which.

Owls outside, I have one of the dotters in my hand

Owls inside after topcoat, notice their beaks are rhinestones

Today my brother texted me an excellent owl joke. What do you call an owl that wears armor? Wait for it . . .  A knight owl!!!!! Good stuff Rick.

OPI Deutsch You Want Me Baby?

I’ve said before that I’m not artistic at all, this is still very true. My lack of artistic ability rears its head in many situations; the most recent is my complete lack of a photographic eye. Since starting my blog I’ve heard the phrase “your nails look so much better in person” more than I care to keep track of. The thing is, everyone that said that is totally right. I was taking pictures on my iPhone and then emailing them to myself, which works great in theory but really does limit the quality of the photograph. I’m sure a real photographer could take a picture with my iPhone and make it look glorious; I’m not a real photographer. Because of this, I have decided to now take pictures with our digital camera and upload said pictures to hopefully improve my photo quality. This seems like a lot of background info to get to the sentence: I took like 50 pictures of my nails in the last two days. My poor husband tried to help me take better pictures but I think it was like trying to teach Coco the gorilla how to take pictures, except that I’m sure Coco has more artistic talent (with a name like Coco how can’t you be artsy?).

For my manicure, yes I did actually paint my nails I didn’t just take pictures, I used one of my new colors I got from the OPI Germany Collection Deutsch You Want Me Baby?. It’s a really pretty dark orange with red and gold micro-glitter. I love the color, it went on really easily (disregard all the paint on my fingers) and it looks so pretty in the sunlight. I don’t know if I’ve ever loved an orange so much.

This is an attempt at taking a picture inside before I cleaned up my messy fingers

Picture taken outside, I was hoping the glitter would show up

 

Even though I really like the solid color, I just got my dotters in the mail today so I’m pretty sure that I’m going to try to put something over this orange. Are the pictures any better?

Leopard Nails

I went to Ulta today and spent the birthday gift card Gayle gave me and I must say I have never had so much fun spending a gift card. If I was pushed to make a guess, I would say that I probably spent about an hour in Ulta.

I found the beak color I was looking for and a Hufflepuff yellow!

As if wandering around Ulta spending free money wasn’t fun enough, when I went to check out the cashier asked me where I got my nails done. I told her I did them myself and at that point she literally grabbed my hand and pulled it to her face to get a better look. She then questioned what brand nail stickers they were and I had the sheer pleasure of informing her that they are not stickers and I had hand painted them. I loved this moment, thank you Ulta cashier. To create these cashier approved nails I used China Glaze For Audrey and Gothic Lolita along with black striper polish. After my last free hand catastrophe I really took my time with these so they took way too long, but I’m still pleased.

My nails say grrrrrrrrr

After today’s shopping spree I have acquired a total of 10 new polish colors in the last week, hopefully I will be good for a while. :)

Nautical nails

Every now and then while doing my nails, I’m reminded that I am not artistic at all. This especially happens when I decide to try to free hand something. Since I have that lovely set of new brushes, I thought I would give nautical nails a try. Maybe I can blame the fact that I am in no way nautical as the reason that these nails turned out like a let a child paint them. I’m not quite sure what traits I would need to possess for me to consider myself nautical, maybe if I didn’t get seasick and if I liked being in the sun. Alas, my pale, tender-tummy self will have to keep both feet on the ground. One bright spot in this nail fiasco was the absolutely amazing blue that I used.

It’s so freakin pretty, the picture is from the Zoya website that's linked below

I got Zoya Song as a birthday present from my sister-in-law (I won’t pretend my brother had any part in selecting nail polish for me). The color is simply gorgeous; it’s a super deep, rich blue that has silver micro-glitter throughout it. After the first coat I knew that I would love this polish forever. The color is a thing of beauty; the formula however, is not. This is my first Zoya so I don’t know if this is normal for the formula, but I found Song to be very runny and difficult to apply. I got paint all over my fingers because the polish would pool up on the sides and spill over. The color was quite opaque after one coat so I think next time I’m going to try to put it on in very thin layers and see if that helps with the pooling. This is going to be a perfect Ravenclaw color for when I try my hand at Harry Potter nails.

I think I’ve stalled long enough on showing my sad nautical nails. Aside from Song the other polish I used was all stripers.

It is supposed to be an anchor on my pinkie

I still need a good Hufflepuff yellow if anyone has any suggestions.

Needle Marbling

My birthday is over and I had to go back to work today. On my last day off yesterday I managed to find time to paint my nails and to get Jules’ nails done. Yes, I paint my own nails but I pay to have my dog’s nails painted (and cut, I’m not a weirdo). Petco painted her nails a really pretty pink called Rose Foil, and I could tell right away that she felt like a princess. She also felt like a princess when the lady at the Wells Fargo drive through included a dog treat with my receipt, very classy Wells Fargo. After getting Jules home I tried to get a picture of her pretty feet like I did for Millie, but she looked so sad in every picture. It appears that she managed to already get dirt all over her toes, it’s like she is a dog or something.

 

I couldn’t put a picture of her on my blog looking sad so I just didn’t include her face.

Thad continued my awesome nail art birthday theme by getting me an insane number of rhinestones, they are a little overwhelming. I’m pretty sure that I will have rhinestones on my nails from here on out.

 

Holy rhinestones Batman!

Jules was very generous and she got me a fantastic nail color for my birthday (featured in this manicure). She gave me my very first polish from OPI’s designer series; needless to say I was excited. For this manicure I used OPI Indulgence, and Sally Hansen CSM in Shiny Penny and Gilty Pleasure. I had seen swatches of Indulgence online before but they didn’t do the color justice. Not only does it have a great formula, the color looks like fire in a bottle. It is the perfect Christmas red but could also easily go vampy if need be, in short, I love it. For the accent nails I did a technique called needle marbling, while the paint was wet I pulled a needle through it to create the cool striped effect.

I think the black rhinestones look like caviar.

Even though I just painted my nails yesterday, I’m so excited to paint them again. I got four new colors from my sister-in-law that I’m itching to make into owls.

Cupcake nails

My birthday is tomorrow! I’m so excited and today I got birthday gifts from Thad and my friend Gayle. It seems that Thad’s birthday theme this year is ‘nail art’ and I’m totally cool with that. He got me this sweet nail brush set that comes in its own case. It snaps closed and then you roll out the brushes, I look like a total professional! I am going to have to Google YouTube videos to find out how some of the brushes work, but I still feel pretty slick.

Nail brushes!

Gayle got me a gift card to Ulta (among other things, you gave me too much Gayle) and I plan to use every penny on colors from the OPI Germany collection, pictures of nails to follow :). I have known that I wanted to try cupcake nails for my birthday for a while, so armed with my new bushes I set to make my nails look delicious. I used so many colors I decided to just take a picture instead of listing them all out.

I used all these, two base polishes, and nine different stripers

I decided to use off brand white because I wanted the frosting to look lumpy like frosting, wait, is my frosting not supposed to be lumpy? Anyway, I had a lot of fun with these nails and I’m already looking forward to doing them again. I think I’m going to use more glitter next time, glitter always seems like a good idea when you aren’t taking it off.

Happy Birthday cupcake nails!

I hope everyone enjoys their Labor Day!

Penguins!

My birthday is so soon! It is so soon in fact that last night I got my first birthday gift from my husband. Thad bought (and assembled) a nail tech table for me for my birthday. It is technically a crafting table, but I’m going to call it my nail tech table because that makes me feel fancy. He told me that it was sad watching me try to paint my nails on a TV trayJ.

Me at my new nail tech table, as you can see beer is a necessary tool.

Since I got a new toy I had to paint my nails last night. I decided to try something fun since I know they will only last until tomorrow (I have big birthday nail plans). When I was little I was borderline obsessed with penguins, I had penguin everything in my bedroom and would randomly tell people penguin related facts that they didn’t request. My best friend growing up (and my best friend now for that matter) loved killer whales; we didn’t really discuss the irony that her favorite animal ate my favorite animal, although she has admitted later that my love of penguins was a stumbling block in the formation of our friendship. My love of penguins has subsided quite a bit, I’m now much more interested in owls or hippos, I bet they would make cute nails too! For these penguins I used Orly LiquidVinyl (of course), China Glaze SplishSplash, OPI Alpine Snow, and Sally Hansen CSM All Fired Up. The orange is just a striper polish; I still haven’t found the orange-yellow beak color of my dreams.

I didn’t clean them up at all before the picture, I’m ok with that

The horrible red blob thing was supposed to be a bowtie; I really need a dotting tool. My penguins are a bit lumpy and I wish I would have given them arms/fins/wings, but all in all they are kinda cute. An old lady selling peppers at the famers market seemed to like them, she might have just been hoping for improved pepper sales, but I’ll take it. I’m pretty jazzed about my table, it makes me seem legit, thank you honeyJ.

Aerial view of my new table, notice there is a new beer. . . perhaps that why my penguins were lumpy