MOTW

Well I had planned to share this one with you yesterday but Blogger didn't want to co-operate. Soo here is yesterday's mani. I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with this one. The end result turned out gorgeous, but getting there was a royal pain. Color 13 on my wheel is by Piggy Polish, it's called Teal me About it. In the bottle its a luscious glowly teal. Sadly this color is DEFINITELY a layering polish. It took me 5 coats on my sample wheel to get it to look halfway close to the bottle. :-( (and once you throw the pink of the nailbed, well you're screwed! So I chose another of my e.l.f. polish from the other day. This one is called Blue Mist. Like it's Lilac sister, Blue Mist went on very sheer and rather streaky. It took me 3 coats to get a nice covereage, although had I not been putting TMAI over top of it, I would have gone with a 4th coat. I added 3 coats of TMAI and then did a thin strip of Petites Figi. Figi is a much darker and more opaque verion of TMAI. In the end I did love the final results as with Blue Mist underneath the TMAI really glowed, and there really appeared to be a ton of depth to my mani. Sadly the downside to lots of layers of polish is they do then to peel rather quickly. So this glowy mani only lasted 2 days. :-(

MOTW and a New Pet

Ok so today's mani is the next 3 colors in wheel A. I first laid down a base coat of Mystical by Petites, then I free-handed a diagonal triangle of Purple Pizazz Frost by NYC, and lastly I added another triangle going the opposite direction using my paler version of Lavender Marquise. I added a small lilac acrylic gem into the wet clear coat, and toppped it off with 2 more coats of clear. It's a fun mani because PPF and LM both change color slightly depending on the light. I initally thought afterwards that I should have placed the gems in the little overlapping triangle at the tips, but I think that would have driven me nuts. Feeling the bump of the rhinestone is odd, but not too terribly bad. I really wasn't expecting the rhinestones to stay on, but they are hanging on nicely.


Every now and again I peruse ebay looking for Barbie 'stuff'. The other day I was searching out animals and found a listing for a dog I had as a little girl. AND they were offering free shipping! Sweet. So needless to say I bid and won Beauty the Afghan Hound! Sadly she is in kind of rough shape, but her body (under all the fur) seems to be in good condition) So I think I will skin her and try to replicate her plastic pieces so I can maybe possible make as sell these. I am currently researching color variations for this breed as well as fake fur sources.

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!