Honeymoon Nails: Honu

Hello all :)  I hope you've all had a lovely Christmas and have some exciting plans for tomorrow night!  I just thought I'd squeeze in a quick post before the new year.

As I've mentioned before (once or twice..), in August this year, my husband and I went to Hawaii on our honeymoon.  I've previously shown you some dragonfly nails inspired by Hawaii, which you can see here, and today I have some more Hawaii-inspired nails to show you.

Our hotel had a tidal lagoon that was FULL of turtles!  It was totally amazing.  We went out snorkeling everyday (me with my life jacket on, since I float like a brick) and there were so many lovely turtles around.  They'd also come up on to the beach every afternoon to soak up some sun before sunset.  Turtles have well and truly established themselves in my top 5 animals, which of course is where every animal aspires to be...

So, first a real turtle:

And now my attempt:

I sponged on some turtley colours - this is super simple and I love the effect, but if you're not sure how to do it you can take a look at my tutorial here - and then added my little gold honu.  Looks just like the real thing, no..?

What do you think?  Do you think I managed to capture enough turtliness with the sponged background, or would you have gone for something different?

PS. Happy new year!

Sponged Nails Tutorial

Sponged nails are one of my favourite things to do when you're in a bit of a hurry or can't be bothered fussing about with brushes and tape and all that jazz, but still want something that looks a bit more interesting than just plain nails.

You can use any colour combination you like for these, and as many or as few polishes as you like.  You can see some examples of my sponged manicures here and here.

You will need: -

•  A metallic polish
• Black or white polish
• Two shades of your chosen colour
• Sponge

I use a make up sponge, but you can use any kind of sponge.  If you can't get your hands on any sponge at all, you could even used scrunched up bits of cling film or tissue.

Here's the step-by-step photo tutorial:

1. Prepare your nail as usual, and paint with your lightest polish (white or the lightest shade of your colour).

2. Tear off a little bit of sponge, and put a few drops of one of your other polishes on to some paper.  Dip your sponge in the polish and dab off the excess, then randomly sponge one or two areas of your nail.  The order you decide to sponge your colours in is totally up to you, and depends what sort of look you want over all - whichever colour you sponge last will be the most dominant.

3. Repeat with your next colour.  Use a fresh piece of sponge for each colour (you literally only need like a 5mm piece).

4. Add your final colour.

5. If you're not totally happy with the colour balance you've got on your nails, now's the time to go back in with a few little dabs of extra polish.  Sometimes I end up with one hand being a lot lighter than the other, so I add a bit more dark polish to one hand to even them up.

6. Clean up and add your favourite topcoat.  Sorted.

In keeping with well-established sponge-manicure tradition, here's a photo of my lovely doggy.

Flip Flop #18: Galaxy Nails

I'm being naughty and posting out of order. Clearly just such a rebel...

My day 17 nails are on the process of being completed, but I did my day 18 nails yesterday, so you're seeing those first!

I've done galaxy nails before, which you can see here.  I absolutely adored them, although I didn't think they came across as lovely in the photo as they were.  I wanted to do something slightly different this time, that is after all the fun of doing challenges!  So I tried to do one big galaxy that spans across all my nails, instead of all the little galaxies that I did last time :)

I love them again...

I used Barry M Black, and then went sponge-crazy with Barry M Matt White, OPI On Stranger Tides, Barry M Bright Pink, Jessica Ruffled Bottoms and China Glaze Man Hunt.  I didn't have any silver glitter on me, so I added a few dots with the white polish.

Flip Flop #13: Sponging

I fully intended to spend today getting caught up with this challenge, but instead I spent the day looking at hotels in Paris and didn't paint my nails even once.  Whoops!  I have, however, booked somewhere for my boyfriend and I for next month.  I just need to book the trains tomorrow :)  Yay!  Now of course I need to plan my Paris manicure...

But on to Flip Flop related business.  The choices for day 13 were Watercolour or Sponging.  I really felt I should attempt watercolour...but I didn't want to.  I do love myself a good sponging manicure (in fact, I prepared a tutorial for you aaages ago that I haven't got round to posting!).  I thought I should attempt to do something a little different though, so I had the idea of cutting out shapes of sponge and using these to sort of stamp on my nails.  Much like potato printing!

So I thought some bold colours over nude would look good.  Originally I was going to randomly stamp my circles and triangles over the nail, but in the end I decided to make sort of tips instead.  Which I regret!  Not too happy with how this turned out, but I do like the idea of using shaped sponge.

I used OPI Don't Pretzel My Buttons for my base colour, and then Jessica Ruffled Bottoms for the circles and China Glaze Man Hunt for the triangles.

On to day 14!  It's a bit late for Valentine's Day, so I suppose I'll have have to go with French Tips!

Here's a reminder of what's coming up in the challenge:

Pink Fridays #2

Happy Friday!  Woo!

October is breast cancer awareness month, and so I've decided to make my Friday's pink!  You can find out more about breast cancer and Pink Fridays at Breast Cancer Care.

This week for my pink manicure I decided to have a go at a pink sponged manicure, like the one I did inspired by my doggy for the My Favourite Things challenge (which you can see here).  But in pink, obviously.

I used a base of Barry M Matt White and then sponged with Max Factor Disco Pink, Barry M Bright Pink and a Special FX polish (they don't have names, poor things).

In keeping with sponged manicure tradition, here's a picture of Bailey playing with her bear and looking very pleased with herself :)

I'd love to see how you're making your Fridays pink!  Post your pictures on my Facebook page! You should actually be able to now as well, I didn't realise it was set so that people couldn't before, sorry!

Do you have any exciting plans for this weekend?  My boyfriend's parents are currently on the M25 somewhere en route to coming to visit us for the weekend. I haven't seen them since August, so it should be good! (The wine's in the fridge...).