Nails & Needles

Of knitting and nail polish

Archive for the category “Nail Art”

26 Nov 2012

Blue Monday: Color Club Take Me to Your Chateau

 Another Monday, another blue polish for Mrs Data.

Last week, I had a few nail accidents and not even my tea bags could save them, so I ended up filing them all down. Major sadface at that, for real.

I probably shouldn’t show my nails here until they’ve grown out a bit more, but, well, I have too many polishes to resist anyway. Okay, so my nails are ubershort. I can still paint them, and I still will. If it’s not your cuppa tea, that’s cool, I understand. We can’t all like the same things!

All that aside, this week I decided to go for another nail art-y manicure. I bought a new nail marker recently and I wanted to see if it was worth it. It worked super well for the first, oh, three minutes, but then it started being a pain in the arse. Poop. I didn’t give up, though, so my nails are sporting quite a lot of polka dots today. As much as I love polka dots, my favourite thing about this mani is actually the angry little reptilian dude on my left thumb nail. How cute is he?

As for the blue this Blue Monday, it’s called Take Me to Your Chateau (long unwieldy name, hello!) and a Color Club polish. Baby blue creme that covers in two coats (on most nails. Some needed three). For such a pastelly colour, the coverage is actually pretty fantastic. Usually, this kind of blue is so not My Thing, but for this one I’m willing to make an exception. I love it! And I actually don’t think it looks half bad on my little stubbies.

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19 Nov 2012

Blue Monday: Color Club Blue-topia

It’s Monday and you all know what that means: Blue Monday!

Today I’m sporting a ridiculously rushed half-moon nail art thing. Seriously. I was in a hurry to go to work and my nails were completely bare, but I was going to do something, or else. And then I remembered it was Monday, so I couldn’t reach for the closest polish (which was a kind of snot green colour. Sounds yucky, but I love it! You’ll see that too soon enough), which meant even less time to finish it. Oh dear.

Anyway. I applied three coats of Color Club’s Blue-topia (a lovely deep blue jelly) to about two-thirds of my nails, then one layer Seche Vite, then Broadway Nails’ white nail art polish for the accents (and the wibbly wobbly heart!), then another coat Seche Vite. Done! I’ll probably recreate it some other time when I’m not so stressed, but meh. For today, it’ll do.

Blue-topia is lovely! It does end up a little uneven even after three coats, but so much that I’m really bothered by it, and the colour is gorgeous. The formula is quite thin and the polish likes to pool in the brush handle, so I ended up with stained hands, but the colour makes it worth it. Time and time again!

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27 Aug 2012

Stamping success? Well, kind of!

I recently bought some stamping plates and have been practising stamping a bit “in the dark”. By that I quite obviously don’t mean in actual darkness, but rather behind the scenes, to use a different expression. In other words, I didn’t want to post anything here until I was at least semi-successful at it.

This was my first, well, I’m not going to say perfect (look at that ring finger nail!), but at least decent, attempt.

I started off with two coats of (and this is embarrassing: I can’t actually remember which one it was!) either Butter London Slapper or Isadora Go Green. Seriously, I should start writing these things down when doing them, and not a week or two later. Usually I can recall which polishes I used for a particular mani, but not so this time. Urgh! (As soon as I get home to my stash, I’m going to do comparison swatches of both likely culprits to try to figure out which one’s the one used here. Promise!) Yeah, so, ::cough::, it’s Illamasqua’s Elope. Look at my memory being brilliant! =P (More on my recent Illamasqua acquisitions soon.

After that was sufficently dry, I used Isadora’s Tip White to stamp on a design from BM 322, a plate from Bundle Monster’s 2012 collection. Finally, I topped it off with a coat of Poshé to help dry and protect it.

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25 Aug 2012

House colours

I am a huuuuuge fan of the Harry Potter books (and fond enough of the films, especially the later ones), so a while back I decided to do a Harry Potter inspired mani.

I started off with a coat of OPI Nail Envy as a base coat and let that dry thoroughly before taping off a half-moon on each of my nails, except on my ring fingers. Next, I applied two coats of Butter London’s Slapper (what did I say? Still a favourite!) and then removed the tape while the polish was still wet. I then used my Broadway Nails Nail Art Paint (which, by the looks of things, is exactly the same as Kiss Nails’ ditto, only under a different name) in silver to outline the half-moons and draw patterns on the nails. On each of my ring fingers, I drew an S, for Slytherin, which is my favourite house.

This was my first mani to include blank spaces, but I very much doubt it’ll be my last as I really liked the outcome!

 

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07 Aug 2012
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First time for needles!

Though this is supposed to be a combined nail polish and knitting blog, the knitting bit has been rather absent so far. I promise this will change with time — I just haven’t had a lot of time for the knitting bit lately (for example, as a comparison, my latest FO was a pair of socks I started in early May and didn’t finish until late July. Back in February I knit an entire top in just a little over a week).

For now, this is the first post that truly does combine the blog’s both subject matters, and that’s always a start, right?

The socks I mentioned above were knit with this absolutely gorgeous sock yarn I bought from the North Atlantic Yarn Co. (easily my favourite yarn dyer ever. She gets her inspiration from sailing and old naval themes and the yarns are super soft and lovely. If you don’t fall in love with her stuff, I will think you are slightly insane! Anyway…). It’s Stevedore Sock in the colourway Tropic of Capricorn, which I’d already used to knit a pair of socks, but had some leftovers from. I combined it with some white Drops Fabel (not nearly as nice a yarn, but what I had at hand) to make a pair of lovely, fresh and happy striped socks.

While I was nearing the finish line on the second sock in the pair, I thought it might be fun to match my nails to my knitting, so I did!

I started with a couple of coats of OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls and some Seche Vite to let that dry, then went absolutely crazy with striping tape and a gradient in the two colours from the yarn (Mavala Blue Curaçao and Mavala Pistachio). This being my first real attempt at using striping tape, you can see where I fuddled it a bit, but I was still very, very pleased with the results. It was like I had the sock on my nails, not just on my needles!

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