Carrots!

This is an idea I had for a while, but yet another one that I just hadn't got round to doing!

Carrots!  I was a little bit lazy and didn't add detail on to my carrots, but it was late and I was tired, and I thought I'd just make a mess if I tried to do something that precise lol.

I used Barry M Matt White and Spring Green, with Max Factor Bright Orange for the carrots.

Now, on to other matters.  I appear to have lost my mind and signed up to a 28 day challenge in February.  Very sensible...  I shall do my best, and we'll see how it goes!

Here's the schedule, just click the picture to be taken to Jill's blog :)

Star Studded Nails

Hello lovelies :)

I hope you've all had a good day!  Mine started with me sleeping through my alarm and the water turning brown while I was getting a shower.  Perfect!  And then I saw a dead kitten on my way to work.  Morning's are rubbish.

But anyway, it's no longer morning, it's now evening, and even better it's tea time, so now I'm happy and full of positive thoughts!  Well...

Anyhoo, rather excitingly I've got a product from another store to review for you :)  Next stop, world domination!  But yes, KKCenterHK sells all sorts of nail and beauty products.  They recently got in some new studs, which they asked me to review.

There's all sorts of shapes, sizes and colours - great if you don't have any studs yet and are looking for some basic gold round ones, or if you want to try something a little more unusual.  I decided to try these silver star studs, because they're adorable :)

There's about 50 studs in the pack, and they measure 3mm across.

For my first look, I thought they'd be really cute over some little star stickers.

Here I used Barry M Indigo, then I just stuck on the stickers, added a layer of topcoat and stuck the stars on while it was still wet.  I didn't put any topcoat over the stars.

I have quite curvy nails, but these are small enough that I didn't have any issues with them sticking up off my nail, apart from on my little nail a teeny bit, which did like to catch in my hair.  I have noticed since I started blogging though that my little finger nails do seem to be bizarrely small compared to other people's...  Anyway, I tried to photograph this for you so you can get an idea of how flat they lie.

A few days later I decided I'd like to try using the studs on accent nails instead, so I came up with this look.

I used Star Gazer 232, then on my accent nails I applied some Barry M Black with cling film.  Love this effect!  This time I did put top coat over the studs (on my middle finger at least...it looks like I might have missed my index finger??), and as you can see, that doesn't ruin the look of them at all.

It's also worth mentioning that these are the same studs I used in the first manicure (+1 obviously), so you can totally reuse them.  More starry manicures - yay!

These studs retail for $4.23 (about £2.10).  If stars aren't your thing, take a look and see if there's another shape you fancy :)  They also do matte studs, and bigger ones!

New Technique: Sugar Spun Manicure

Ok, so this wasn't a total disaster!  Yay :)  I really did think it was going to be...especially when 10 minutes in my polish just wasn't doing the strandy thing.

But anyway, here's the finished manicure!  Quite a cute manicure for Valentine's Day maybe?

I used Barry M Matt White, did my strandy business with OPI Flick Chick Cherry, and then added the heart with Barry M Bright Pink.

I did my ring finger first (I figured if it was horribly difficult I could just leave it at a ring finger accent), and you can see I hadn't quite waited long enough.  When I started it was just about making strands long enough to cover half the width of my nail, if I was super quick.  When I moved on to the next nail I was getting really long, fine strands.  Like thinner than hair.  This is what you want!  I just whizzed it back and fore across my nails :)  It honestly took about 20 minutes to get to that consistency though.  I don't know if that would've been affected by the fact that it's an old polish and full of all those nasty chemicals they don't use any more.

My thumb does not feature in this photo because...er...it didn't quite work out.  This is what happens if you leave the polish too long.

It looks like I had a horrible accident whilst chopping the vegetables for tea.

Anyhoo, you can now head over to my Facebook page to vote for which new technique you'd like me to have a go at next week!

If you have any suggestions for techniques, please leave me a comment and I'll add it to my list :)

Have you had a go at the sugar spun technique?  Or are you like me and shy away from trying new (and messy) things?

A Holly Jolly Christmas Challenge

This is a round up of all my manicures for the Holly Jolly Christmas Challenge 2012.  To see the original blog posts, larger pictures, or the manicures submitted by the other participants, just click on a picture!

Sam Attempts Stamping

You may remember from my New Year's blogging resolutions post that I said I was going to make better use of my stamping supplies by posting at least one stamped manicure a month.  I regretted this almost instantly.  I've put it off as long as possible, but now the end of the month is fast approaching, and it'd be a shame not to even make my resolutions last through January...

She here it is, my first attempt at stamping in 2013.

Not wanting to throw myself in at the deep end, I just went for stamped accent nails.  Baby steps, you know.

I used Barry M Gold Foil and Teal, and Konad plate M83.  I think my issue with stamping is that I can't get it perfect.  When I do freehand, it's obviously not going to be perfect, because it's freehand.  But with stamping, there's no reason it shouldn't be perfect lol.  I do love that you can get such fine detail that I'd never be able to paint freehand though, and that you can get consistent results on every nail.

A few problems I encountered.

I'm rolling the stamp sideways across my nail, but then it misses off the top and bottom, since my nails and the stamper are quite curved in all directions.  I tried just pressing the stamper into my nail so that it was in contact with nail across the whole length, as I rolled it sideways.  On my index finger this ended up in all my polish getting smooshed up (you might just be able to make this out, although I hid it pretty well with the angle of the photo lol).  Is this what other people do?  Do I just need to let it dry a bit longer, or do I need to go for a roll across, roll up and down type manoeuvre?  Any tips are greatly appreciated!

Here's a close up of the non-smooshed nail.

A few little gaps but, all in all, I don't think it's bad!  Hopefully I can just keep improving from here :)

How about you - do you get on better with stamping or freehand?