Spring Flowers!

I'm back after almost a full month.  After a month in the dumps, doing my nails was the last thing I wanted to do. But today is my first day of spring break, and one of the first days of sunshine in forever (seriously- it snowed yesterday- and the day before) so I forced myself to spend some time here.  And I'm quite pleased with the results!

Products Used:

China Glaze Kinetic Candy

China Glaze Sweet Hook

China Glaze Dance baby

China Glaze Wicked Style

China Glaze Gaga for Green

China Glaze Sunshine Pop

Revlon Top Speed in Royal

As you can see, I used this as an opportunity to break out and check out my new China Glazes from the electropop collection... which I got back in January!  Yeesh.

I Have Been MIA... and Very Bad :(

I haven't posted in ages, and here's my excuse... I bit off ALL MY NAILS!  I am so ashamed.  I've still been painting them, but quickly and without much love, and I've been so stressed and busy that I haven't had time for photos.  But I'm back in the swing of things (my summer semester started up and it took me a few days to readjust) so hopefully I can get myself back on track and grow these babies out.

I have a mani on my nails right now that I want to show yall, but I haven't cleaned it up yet or put on a topcoat.  So I will do that and hopefully have some photos by tonight or tomorrow to get things going.  But until then, I have some non-nail-art related photos to tide you over.

My boyfriend and I went to Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm for their tulip festival a few weekends ago.  So here's some colorful, happy, springtimey flower photos!

And I leave you with a few questions/I'm asking for advice:

1. I once again attempted to use my Zoya matte polishes and, once again, they chipped off within the first day.  Then I tried again with Essie Matte About You topcoat and that STILL didn't help.  Does anyone else have these problems?  It's not with any of my other matte polishes, only Zoya.  Do you have any suggestions to make that work?

2. I am looking for a baby, baby, pale pastel blue.  Actually, any baby baby pastel color recommendations would be so awesome.  But particularly a blue, as I haven't been able to find one.  So: powder/pastel/baby blues that you've tried/heard are awesome.  

Thanks so much!  I'm trying desperately to catch up on everyone's blogs, so sorry if I spam you with comments all at once!

ELF Summer Ready Collection: Lilac

I really really wanted to wear a pale purple matte manicure, and thought "Hey, why don't I continue swatching the polishes from my ELF collection?"  Because I said I was going to do that and never did.  Unfortunately, I decided to do it late at night when the sun wasn't out, so my photos of it aren't so great straight out of the bottle.

Here you can kind of see the color.  It's pretty sheer, this is I think 3 coats.  I probably would have gone for another one if I hadn't been wanting to go to bed.  I used OPI's ridge filler as a basecoat, but you can still see them ridges.  Overall I think it's a very pretty, springy color.  Oh and forgive the part where there's polish all over my skin and stuff, I have a very slapdash method of applying nail polish, and I definitely didn't clean up before taking pictures.

So after that, I slathered it with a coat of Essie's Matte About You.  These photos really don't do it justice!  Also it looks pretty streaky or bare in some places in the photos, but definitely not IRL.  I really liked this one, and my boyfriend liked it a lot too.  I think it would look super great with the green that also came in the ELF collection, so maybe I will try some combination of the two for Easter!

Ugh, Abby's hair gets everywhere!

Products Used:

ELF Summer Ready Collection: Lilac

OPI Ridge Filler

Essie Matte About You

Polka Dots Feather Mani in Yellow

Living in Oregon is tough sometimes.  It's so dreary and rainy 9 months out of the year, and I'm pretty sure March broke a record for being particularly cold and rainy.  And April isn't off to a good start.. it was hailing today!  So I thought I needed some bright spring/summer color in my life to get me through this.  I tried my hand at a feather manicure.  It was way more difficult than I had planned, but the good news is that I learned very quickly (the second hand I did was exponentially better than the first).  So here's a few photos to share!

Left

Right

Left again

So I did my left hand first and here's what I learned: definitely trim up the feather as closely as you can to the shape of your nail before sticking it on the nail.  Putting on a layer of SV and then smushing the feather on did NOT work for me.  I ended up using Elmer's glue to glue it down and SV to really stick it.  On my left hand, I used two feathers because my first feather ended up kind of misshapen and wonky and didn't cover the whole nail (due to me struggling to get it to stick) so be sure that your feather is big enough!  My right hand surprisingly (because I was using my bad hand) came out better.  The feather looked nicer and covered most of the nail.  My only problem is that I had a difficult time trimming it up and it had some sharp edges hanging off- I used a nail file to get at those bits after applying my topcoat.

Other than that, I think it came out pretty well!  The feathers that I bought came in a multitude of colors, so I definitely will try this again sometime.

Products used:

Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Lightening

SV topcoat

Elmer's glue

Creatology Feather Plumes from Michael's

Springtime in Matte Green and Pink

Well I tried to use both my new products, but the pink Essie did not show up well over the green, so I reverted back to my old faithful- Sally Hansen!

OPI's Gargantuan Green Grape Matte was, like most mattes in my experience, very streaky at first but dried almost instantly.  Shown in photos is about 3 layers.  I don't like the way my ridges shown through so visibly, so next time I would definitely use my ridge filler as a basecoat.  There is no topcoat used here.

Products Used:

OPI Gargantuan Green Grape Matte

Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Flashy Fuchsia

Bundle Monster plate number BM16

Spring Monarch Butterfly Mani

Finally completed that butterfly manicure I attempted a few days ago!  I think it came out pretty nicely!  My right hand- not so much.  But I'm pretty proud of how this turned out!

Before I attempted to clean some of the skuzz from my cuticles

Not too shabby, right?

Products used:

ELF Summer Ready collection- Mango Madness

Sally Hansen Nail Art pen- Black

L.A. Colors Art Deco- white

Top Coat: SV

Vintage Inspired Spring Rose Manicure

I knew that daisy french wasn't going to last very long!  Like less than 24 hours.  I decided that since I only spent 5 minutes on my nails last night, I'd spend some time attempting something I've wanted to try for a long, long time but didn't have the time or patience.

I've seen these vintage looking rose designs for a while now, but I never knew how they were done.  So I kind of just made it up as I went along, and I am so excited and proud of my results!  It's one of those things where it's been done before (and better) but I am just so happy that I was able to do it myself and have it come out mostly decent!  I am definitely going to try to take care of these for a while.

This is me not yet mastering the self-timer on my camera 

but still trying to cram all 10 fingers into one frame

Products used:
Base coat: OPI ridge filler
Base color: Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Whirldwind White
Base color (ring finger): China Glaze- For Audrey
Roses: Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Rapid Red and Flashy Fuschia
Leaves: Revlon Matte Suede- Emerald City
Top coat: SV

Daisy French Manicure

Well the good news is that my "interview" nails from Thursday night lasted all the way until Sunday!  That's basically a record for me.  Since they were too short to wrap the lip, they started looking a little bit worn about the ends so I preemptively removed them instead of waiting to peel them off later in the day.  I attempted a monarch butterfly wing manicure and FAILED miserably.  I didn't even attempt my right hand, and removed the whole shebang almost immediately after I completed it.

But I needed to do SOMETHING... bare nails for me are just asking to be gnawed down to nubbins.  So I went with something super quick and simple (it was like 1am, I had just gotten home from a night out at the pub with some friends from class- we were all drowning our sorrows and talking about how terribly our interviews had gone) and springy to welcome not only the first day of Spring, but my first day of Spring break.

My thumb looks WAY worse in the photo than in person.  

Don't know what's up with that!

I don't expect these to last a remarkably long time because I have tons of ideas up my sleeve and an entire week to experiment.  But I thought they were kind of cute for a five minute mani.

Abby tush

Products used:
Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Whirlwind White
L.A. Colors Art Deco in Dark Blue
L.A. Colors Art Deco in Yellow
SV topcoat