Minty Stamping with Cheeky Viva Mexico

This manicure is the one I did when I was making the stamping tutorial.

It's a little meh...I removed it after only 1 day.

I think I am disheartened as I cut my nails too short =(

I thought it would be a good idea to cut my nails while I was wearing nail polish so I could concentrate better on the shape, and I went overboard. 

Hopefully they will grow back fast!

The green polish on my thumb, pinky, middle and index fingers is OPI 'Gargantuan Green Grape'

The White/grey on my ring finger is OPI 'My Boyfriend Scales Walls'

The ring finger is stamped with China Glaze Aquadelic

The thumb is stamped with Konad white stamping polish

The glitter is one that I made myself. It has a mixture of  matte white glitters, and then these whitish glitters that change colours (the whole rainbow!) in the light. 

The stamp is from Cheeky's 2013 jumbo collection: The Viva Mexico plate.

Thanks for reading :)

Chanfie

xx

Bridal Nails Special!

A Couple of Different Wedding Day Options

I recently started a wedding Pinterest board and I couldn't find many pictures of wedding nail art designs that I liked. So I decided to start trying a few different designs out myself. Gotta be prepared !

Ok first up, the most simple. This is just a milky white jelly polish (Cutex nail whitener) with a coat of seche vite top coat. This cutex polish suffered from awful shrinkage- I had to file the tips of the nails where it had shrunken back from. Better versions of this white jelly include OPI funny bunny, OPI Don't touch my tutu or Essie Marshmallow.
In 2012 OPI did a lovely collection of soft jelly shades that would be perfect for a bride. They are now available as a part of OPI's soft shades range. There are great swatches of the OPI NYC Ballet collection here by Scrangie. I recently purchased Don't Touch My Tutu, My Pointe Exactly and You Callin Me a Lyre. I also own the glitter in the collection Pirouette My Whistle which I used in a mani below if you scroll down :)

Next up I tried adding some small pearls to the base of the nails. Pearl Rhinestones for nail art can be purchased here for very cheap here on ebay

I was thinking it might even look nice to do these in the same colour as your flowers/bridemaids dresses (or do this as a feature nail only on the ring finger to be more subtle)

I cheated and copy pasted a second rhinestone on the ring finger to see how that might look.... I like it!

Next up I did some nail stamping. I kept it subtle and just did a feature nail, but I think it's delicate enough that it would be nice to have on all the nails. 

This stamp design is from the XL-C plate available on ebay here. (I have purchased XL stamp plates from this ebay seller "worldwide_buy" before and received everything fine).

I used konad special white stamping polish (available on the konad website here or on ebay here.)

If you are unsure what nail stamping is I did a big tutorial/guide/review here.  

 

Next I did a simple glitter look using OPI Pirouette my Whistle over the milky white base. Its a fine silver glitter with larger iridescent white glitters. As I said this polish is from the OPI NYC ballet collection..... they say ballet but I think they were targeting the wedding market!
 I covered the whole ring finger, and for the rest of the nails I just dabbed some around the base. 

This last one I did a few months later once I ordered a few bottles of polish from the OPI NYC ballet collection. This one is 'Don't touch my tutu', a white jelly. I also bought OPI funny bunny which is also a white jelly, but it is less sheer than the one bellow. Here is a link to a swatch of OPI funny bunny so you can see the difference (scroll down as I put a picture of it alone).

The silver stamping is done with Sally Hansen Xtreme wear in 'Celeb City' and the design is from the Mo You London Pro 06 plate. Again, if you are unsure how to nail stamp please see my tutorial and guide here. 

The camera (or me) had trouble capturing the shimmer so this photo is a little blurry unfortunately. The silver stamped with a simple and sparse floral design over the white jelly polish looked so clean and pretty. It was also quite subtle. For me, I think this may be a winner for my wedding day. I will have to try different stamps though :)

Well I hope these ideas can help someone out for their wedding day :)
I plan to keep adding to this page if I think of anything else. Please leave a comment if you have any ideas you would like me to try out or if you know of any other good bridal nail polishes  :)

Stamping With Cheeky 2013 Jumbo Collection Happy plate :)

Today's manicure was a quicky, but I'm really happy with how it looks. The colours go nicely together, and I really love the flowers I used. They are stamped from a new acquisition of mine, a jumbo stamping plate which is part of the new Cheeky 2013 jumbo plate collection, specifically, the plate named "happy". 

I've read a couple of bad reviews about this collection- apparently some of the designs aren't etched deep enough. I haven't run into this problem yet, and neither has a friend of mine who also ordered 2 plates from the collection. Although collectively we have probably only used about 10 different designs. 

Personally, my only gripe with the collection is the size of the images. It's the opposite problem to many stamping plate collections..... they are too big! Sure, they always fit on your nails.. but I wish they had scaled the actual patterns down (keeping the large size overall) as many of  the designs are a bit too big and chunky, with half the design going on your cuticles. There is plenty of patterns and pretty designs to keep me happy though, like these big, beautifully detailed flowers :)

The polishes I used were:

Blue : OPI Dating a Royal

Peach: Essie A Crewed Interest

Blue stamp: Konad stamping dark blue.

Thanks for reading :)

Great Gatsby Inspired Baroque Nails

I went to see The Great Gatsby a few nights ago and absolutely adored the fashion, colours and style of the movie. Anyway I was inspired to do my nails in a black and gold baroque-ish style :)

..Well I think the stamps I used are a baroque pattern. I may be wrong though!

I ended up doing the feature nails twice. The first time I stamped directly onto the nails, but I didnt get it very centred so covered them in black rhinestones. It was ok..... but the off-centred-ness was annoying me too much.

I then used the 'make your own nail decal" technique  to make black baroque decals and then put them on over gold polish. This way I could centre the design  :)

Polishes used were :

Sally Hansen Xtreme wear in Black out

Sally Hansen Xtreme wear in Golden-i

Essie: Good as gold (stamped)

and Konad Special Polish: back 

The rhinestones are from ebay.

The stamps were BM12 (the smaller ones on my thumb and non feature nails)

and the feature was from Big SDP-I 

Here are the original rhinestone encrusted feature nails: 

 And the re-done more centred feature nails :)

Which do you prefer?

Gals fairy plates

 So I recently purchased the Gals Fairy stamping plates and so far I have used them 5 times. The images are etched well and are easy to pick up on both the Konad stamp and also XL stamp (This stamp is squishy and sometimes doesn't pick images up well ). My Only gripe is that if you have long nails they are too small - hence the feature/accent nail look below.
I have been in love with stamping a small abstract design/flower etc in the lower corner of my nails lately (I was originally inspired by chitchatnails). I think its especially great when doing a black and white manicure... for some reason using a whole nail design stamp on white is too busy for me- but I have seen plenty of pictures of other peoples nails that look great!

Essie a Crewed Interest stamped with Essie no place like chrome.The design is from gals stamping plate GA36.

OPI- You're such a Budapest Stamped with Essie- No place like chrome (Design from Gals Fairy plate GA35)

Opi - Casino Royale stamped with Essie Penny Talk with a design from a Gals fairy nail stamping plate GA35

Scotch tape mani for an Under the Sea party. OPI: Fly background stamped with China Glaze for Audrey and Konad special polish in dark blue. Image from Gals GA30. Glitter polish is home made

Gals fairy nail stamping plates GA34. Opi Alpine snow, konad special polish black