Water marble Easter manicure (late, I know!)

Hi friends, I hope you've had a nice Easter (if you celebrate it).

This is what I wore over Easter - yes, I water marbled for real this time! I also included a step-by-step for those who aren't familiar with the technique.

Before I go on, I am NO expert on this technique. Quite frankly, I can't water marble without a bit of foul language thrown in.  You may notice the air bubbles...can you imagine the vocabulary those invoked?!

I used: Barry M's 'Matte White' (it's not matte by the way), Beauty UK's blue, scotch tape, a beaker of filtered water at room temperature, a cotton bud and a cocktail stick.

Start with white nails. Your base doesn't have to be perfect.

Put some scotch tape on the skin around your nail - this will reduce the amount of cleaning up you'll have to do. I wouldn't skip this step if I were you...

One drop of white....

One drop of blue - yes, that's blue polish. The pigment spread so well.

Another drop of white. Continue until you have a nice 'bullseye'. I reckon that 15 drops of polish may be enough, but you can put in more if you wish.

Ta daaa!

Take your cocktail stick and draw it through your bulls eye. You can go for random patterns or try to make neat, precise patterns.

Draw the stick through the opposite side of the bulls eye.

Make some vertical lines in the polish.

Position your nails over the part of the pattern you like the most, then place them nail surface down, onto the pattern. The excess polish on the surface of the water can be removed with the cotton bud. This step is not pictured because I don't have three hands!

Give those fingers a wiggle to reduce the likelihood of air bubbles. You'll note that it didn't work for me though!

The next step is to remove the tape gently, add some glitter (or not) and that's it!

I hope you like the design.

Have you mastered the art of marbling yet? Do you even want to? Perhaps your polish collection is too precious to waste on such a technique. Let me know either way and thank you, as always, for reading.

xx

The Tiger and the stump (nail rescue and nail art!)

Hi Friends and welcome to my new readers :-)

I'd hoped to have a little something for you tonight (or rather, this morning because it's 01:15), but right now, I still have to jump in the shower, iron my travelling outfit and get a couple of hours of sleep. I'm setting out again at 6am...my flight isn't until 12:00!!! If I hadn't spent so long gluing rhinestones, smudging polish and having to re-glue all over again, I might have been able to put up some pics! 

I have seen all the nice comments that you have left on the entries to my giveaway and on my recent posts. I shall try to do some more tutorials and easy to follow nail art. If I get a chance, I'll upload them when I'm lounging on a beach, drinking cocktails and baking myself....LOL!!

Okay, so I felt guilty. I couldn't come in here and not post what I've done tonight! No editing or watermarking on these so please excuse the colours of the pics, backgrounds etc.

I've been walking around like a maniac since Thursday. I tore off my nail trying to get out of the car park at work I have really dry hands. They look terrible.

 I couldn't walk around like that so I had to stick on a tip.

 Use some fibre-glass...

 From a strip like this^^

 Put it, sticky side down, on the nail,

 Use resin and activator to bond the fibreglass to the nail (I didn't picture them because I'm not trained to use fibreglass for extensions. I do it at my own peril and don't want you to follow me!)

 This is after the resin has dried. Repeat the strip and resin step again.

 Buff to finish.

Now for the nail art!!!

 Sponge on some white (whilst ignoring the heavy staining on the nails. Ehem)

 Paint on some orange strips (two coats)

Paint on strips with a striping brush

Use gold polish for the outlines

Glue on rhinestones and you're done!

I'm sorry for rushing, but I didn't want to leave without posting.

Talk to you soon

xx

Nails Inc and water decals

 Hi again friends.

As I said in this post, I'm going to make the most of the Nails Inc colours I have.  Who knows, I may just develop a love affair with them. Or not.

Here's a very simple manicure here, done with Heather Grey.  .

The Diet Coke sticker is there because the polish was free (if you bought two bottles of Diet Coke), during a recent promotion that was running at Boots.  My poor old hubby was prepared to by the entire cooler section in the store in order to get these for me, but when he went looking, they weren't put on the shop floor. A friend of mine ended up coming round with four bottles of Coke and two polishes for me instead :-)

For this manicure I used all Nails Inc products (base, colour and top coat). I have to say that I like the consistency and the brushes too. My only gripe is that it has already started to chip on my right hand after one day...I'm wondering if that's because on that hand I only used one layer of top coat instead of two. I don't know, but as a result, I'm going to have to re-do my nails. Boo.

The colour shown is true to life and I actually like it.  So much for me moaning about the company not having any colours that interested me.

The water decals were bought from Wicked Nails and they remind me of water colour paintings. I couldn't be without stickers or decals, because you can make your nails look good in a few minutes and with minimal effort. Just paint your nails, put some stickers on and you're good to go!

xx