MOTW x 2

I have for you today my last 'ruby' mani of July. It's 2 coats of an un-named pink polish frmo the Goldie brand. I got mine in a back of 6 or 8 that I bought at TJ Maxx several monthes ago. The color is a nice silky pink creme. To bump it up a bit I added 2 coats of Nubar 2010 (which is by far my favorite top coat heck I ordered 2 more bottles so I wouldn't run out and so I could play with it a bit! ;-D) I really liked it shiny, but had seen other nail artists use a matte top coat over it. Mattifying it does something amazing. Since I recently found Hard Candy's Matte-ly in Love I knew that's what I wanted to do. Personally I love the subdued iridescence! BTW the pic with the spoon is to show what my mani looked like before I matted it. =D
I had iniatally planned to do 'peridot' (green) manis for the month of august, but I actually don't have that many green polishes and most of them I have already worn and posted. I really want to try and get through all of my polishes so I have decided to start at the begining! ;-) After a disappointing pedi using a color I had purchased (2 coats looked NOTHING like the bottle) I decided I needed a way to know what colors I had and how many coats each should take. So I picked up a pack of art wheels from Sally Beauty Supply (btw I have since found the same ones cheaper on ebay! There are 10 wheels to a pack and each wheel holds 18 samples. So I sort of sorted my polishes by color, grabbed my laptop and set to sampling every polish I own. Last week I filled up my last wheel with one of my holo frankens so I have more coming. Filled up all the wheels...omg that's 180 polishes! Well actually it's more like 162 as one wheel is pale polishes over black to see how they'd look! But still! lol


So anyways I am going to start at A1 and work my way through until I am all done! A1 is Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Purple Potion This is one of the first polishes I bought when I got back into doing my nails. Hubby says his favorite color to see me wear is purple so there aer several. This one has a really great blue duochrome effect. and yes the 2 pics are of the same polish, I just wanted to show off the cool color 'changes' this polish can go through. (there will be another pic of this mani tomorrow too as I am playing around with some nail art!)

A late MOTW

Eeeek I painted this mani back on Tuesday! I just got around to photographing it today! It's pretty but I'm ready for something new. I asked my friends on Facebook to pick my color for this one, and the first one suggested was orange. Since I was drooling over the Butterfly Wing mani from a few days back on Dee'z Nail blog... I felt orange was perfect! I started with my normal clear coat, then did 2 coats of Revlon's Siren. I must admit I was NOT happy with the way it covered. Maybe I didn't wait long enough between coats, but it smudged really badly. With most polishes by the time I finish all 10 fingers I can easily put on the second coat. Not so with Siren. Oh well. To try and even it out as well as add some shimmer I added one coat of OPI's Conga-line Coral. (if I decide to try the butterflies in orange again I think I'll just use 2 coats of this instead!) To add even more shine I added 1 coat of Nubar's 2010 which is a holographic flakie polish. On my ring finger of each hand I used Sally Hansen's Black Out and a fine brush. I now know why many nail salons use acrylic paints for artwork...this paint dried so quickly it was hard to get a clean smooth line. Next time I will definitely try using acrylics instead! The white dots were added using Petites French White, I dropped just a bit on some plastic and used a ball stylus in 3 different sizes and just dotted the polka dots. Dots are FUN, I will definitely be doing more of them!!! =D

On the doll front, my husband and I picked up the wood today for the 3 story Barbie doll house we are making. We decided to go with pine rather than plywood, partly because they had the exact size boards we needed, but also because the wood looked so much better. We decided that it was to pretty to paint, so with the 'customer's' ok, we chose a nice rich stain that will match the twins' bedroom furniture. I'm going to get down to business tonight on the furniture, and we will start construction next week!