31DC2013: Day 31 Recreate Your Favourite

Press Sample Purchased by Me

Afternoon loves!

WOW! We did it! We finished another year of the 31 Day Challenge. It's been a rough month, but we got through it and I am reaaaalllly proud of some of the manicures I came up with. You can check them all out tomorrow in my challenge round up post. It has also been really fun checking out the rest of the bloggers participating this month in the challenge. I especially enjoyed reading through my blog list this month!

Today I had to choose which one of Emily's manicures I was going to recreate. It was a tough job as so many of her manicures rocked this month. Emily also has an awesomely distinct nail art style and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do her manicures justice! I eventually settled on her Day 26 Inspired by a Pattern because her wood grain idea was genius!

I did not have the same base colour as Emily, so I decided to use one of the only cool browns that I have piCture pOlish Demeter as my base. Then I used my It's So Easy Stripe Rite Black to draw on the wood grain pattern.

These were super cute and fun to do and although mine is a tad darker than Emily's original creation I still think the overall look is similar! It is a genius idea !!

WOOOOW now I am officially done the challenge! I'm still shaking my head that it has gone by this quickly. You can check out Emily's original post here and make sure you head over to see what manicure of mine she recreated! I LOVE IT!

If you haven't yet this is your LAST CHANCE to enter our giveaway for the chance to win one of 2 $30 gift cards to Born Pretty Store.

Gold Goddess Demeter

Press Sample Purchased by Me

Morning!

Today I have some random sponging that I did late one night that I actually ended up loving! I had been wearing piCture pOlish Demeter for a day or so and one night when I was all done studying I decided to add a little to the polish on a whim.

I took a torn off piece of sponge and started with Essie Penny Talk. Using a pair of tweezers I randomly blotched on the copper foil until I liked the look. There was still something missing, so I grabbed NYC West Village, which looks like a violet purple in the bottle, and a new piece of sponge and went to work.

Even though the violet turned out to be blue once I sponged it on I still was digging the abstract look. Although it still needed one more little thing. My gold studs from Born Pretty Store were sitting out on my dresser so I placed one at the bottom of each of my nail! Originally I had thought I would need more than one, but I liked the simple look of the single stud.

What are your thoughts on my sponged late night creation?! Is this a look that you would wear? Or should I have left Demeter alone? Hope you are all having a wonderful day loves!

Pretty Damask Print

Morning loves!

Today I've got some pretty nails that I actually wore for Christmas day. I fell in love with these damask print nails that Whitney over at Dressed Up Nails did and ended up pretty much copying the pattern. I had a different idea when I sat down, but after trying a few things that didn't work I went back to damask and ended up with these!

I started off with piCture pOlish Goldfinger then added a coat of Nails Inc Bedford Square. Bedford Square is a gorgeous mircofine gold glitter with larger copper pieces and holographic sparkle. It's a stunner.

I used my small cut down brush to do all the detail work and black creme. I basically just followed along with what Whitney had done, because her pattern was beautiful and it was late and not thinking was easier. lol

These were really fun to do and they matched the dress I wore on Christmas day perfectly. What do you think of these? My pictures truly aren't the best here. I used my new camera and didn't have any of it down yet. So please forgive me!

Hope you are all having a great day!

piCture pOlish Demeter

Happy Saturday loves! Today I have a wickedly gorgeous polish to share with you. At the Ontario Blogger meetup the fabulous Katie of Harlow & Co. generously gave every girl there a bottle of piCture pOlish Demeter the polish that she helped them design!

Demeter is a scattered brown holo that leans a little on the berry side. I'm not that big a fan of brown polishes, but this one really is beautiful. I think that it leans berry takes it up a notch from all other brown polishes out there.

When I went to add some nail art to it I knew I wasn't going to be covering up much of Demeter. It is beautiful and I think one of the first brown polishes that I have truly enjoyed wearing and not just kept around for nail art purposes! I took out Wet n Wild Chrome None of Your Bismuth and painted some over placed striping tape to get those clean lines.

The above picture with the buttons is for Katie! She makes these ah-mazing button bracelets and gifted each of us with one at the meet up (I am holding the one she made me). Since I decided to pair this polish with a blue chrome I thought that it worked out lovely to hold the blue button bracelet.

I quite liked the combination of finishes here. The scattered holo in Demeter is beautiful and I like that None of Your Bismuth still had some sparkle from the chrome finish.

Of course I have Demeter on it's own to show you as well!

Katie says, "When piCture pOlish asked me what my perfect shade would be – I knew immediately what I wanted – a chocolate brown holographic polish! So they created this earthy subtle scattered holo and it’s exactly what I was dreaming of – I couldn’t be happier with this shade! Demeter was the goddess of earth’s harvest so we thought it was fitting that Demeter be a celebration for all the down to earth goddesses out there!"

This really is a down to Earth polish! It is perfectly suitable for a day at the office, and is the perfect accent to a pair of worn jeans and a white t-shirt. For some reason I think of this polish to be very calming.

I am truly in love with this shade. There is something extra special about it. I think absolutely anyone would be able to pull it off no matter what occasion you were looking to wear it for!

What do you think of Demeter? Do you love it as much as I do? Even though 9 times out of 10 I am not going to be a fan of brown polish.

If you want to purchase your own bottle of Demeter you can do so here for $14.50!

Thank you all for stopping by today!

31 Day Challenge Day 28: Inspired by a Flag

Inspired by a flag! This prompt left a lot to be desired for me. A flag seemed kind of unoriginal to me, but then I remembered that in one of my favourite shows, The Big Bang Theory the apartment has a flag!

Basically Sheldon, one of the main characters, is insanely smart but has no social skills. He makes his room mate sign a 'roommate agreement' and in the agreement states that apartment flag, which is a golden lion on a field of azure!

I used Girly Bits Denim Diva and piCture pOlish Goldfinger for the bases and the details. I wasn't thrilled with the lion, but I did this last night at 10:30pm so this was going to have to do! lol!
Here is the flag Sheldon created that I was inspired by!

I do absolutely love Goldfinger! It's the first time I got to use it on a full nail, and the colour is fabulous in my opinion. :)

I am soooooo excited for my idea for tomorrow's Inspired by the Supernatural nails! I really hope my idea pans out!

Make sure you head over to The Lacquerologist to see what Emily has done!

We're soooooo close to being done this challenge! I'm really excited for it to be over so I can wear whatever I want for awhile! LOL!

Thanks for stopping by! :D

31 Day Challenge Day 15: Delicate

Afternoon ladies! I'm sorry this post wasn't at the usual 6:30AM time. It was my boyfriends birthday yesterday and we went out and I had thought I had already scheduled this, but I remembered at about midnight that I hadn't! So here it is a little later in the day :D

Delicate Day. Honestly I have been dreading this day in the challenge. It seems so vague to me. Especially since it comes right after flowers, which can also be delicate. I eventually settled on starting with a delicate looking polish and seeing where my mind went from there. The one I settled on? Pretty and Polished Forever Rose.

This polish has been sitting in my drawers untried for far too long! It’s a beautifully delicate matte pink (see what I did there ;)) and the gold shimmer is really stunning, especially if you have any gold rings, this would be a perfect polish to pair with them. The above two photos are without top coat to show it matte, and the rest are with NYC In a Minute Top Coat. Continuing with my delicate theme I decided that I would add some floating feathers. I used It’s So Easy Stripe Rite White to create the feathers. The trick to getting them to look feathery is to have almost no polish on the brush when you are doing your swipes. This lets the brush do most of the work for you! Once I finished my feathers I wanted to tie them back into Forever Rose so I took a medium length striping brush and using piCture pOlish Goldfinger added a gold center to each feather and a few wisps of gold throughout them.

Well I think this looks pretty delicate to me! I’m not exactly sure what the prompt was really looking for, but I’ve stretched the limits on some of the other days prompts so if I’ve stretched it again, I’m ok with that.

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of delicate?

I’m dying to see what Emily of The Lacquerologist has come up with! So head over and find out! Emily has had some trouble with her blog recently, so check out her Facebook page and Tumblr page as well!

15 down!!! Only 16 more to go! We’re pretty much halfway through! Wooo!

See you tomorrow for some tribal nails

31 Day Challenge Day 13: Animal Print

Animal Print nails! To me animal print seems one of the best go to ways to do nail art. The classic leopard print can be done in ANY colour scheme and is super easy to stamp or freehand on. Zebra is another awesome animal print that instantly dresses up your nails.

Since I already did leopard print for blue nails here I was trying to think outside the box. Snakeskin? Did that here. Giraffe? Koala bear?! Hedgehogs? Ok so the last two don’t really have prints, but they're still animals. So then I got to thinking that maybe the animal doesn’t have to be real, imaginary creatures are still animals! That is how my dragon scale nails were born.

I’m going to say right off the bat that I love these. They are so cool in real life, but sadly my camera did not want to co-operate so they don’t look quite as cool here as they really are. So please forgive me : )

When I was thinking about what colour my dragon would be I immediately thought of one of the last great dragons of Middle-Earth, Smaug, from The Hobbit. This dragon is red and has an orange glow to him.

image source: http://www.donatoart.com/middleearth/smaug.html

I started off with one coat of China Glaze Adventure Red-y and then working one nail at a time while it was still wet I took a dotting tool and drew my scales into the polish. You have to work pretty quickly to get all the scales on your nail before the polish dries. Then I grabbed a sponge and piCture pOlish Demeter which I got from the lovely Katie of Harlow &Co., and sponged on randomly to give it a little burnt sparkle. Then I added China Glaze Riveting with a small nail art brush to the tips and in various scales.

Sorry about some of the weird angles, it was hard to get the scales to really show up! Not sure why this design was being so unfriendly with my camera. Ah well! I hope you get an idea of how awesome these were!

Do you think that I captured dragons scales in my animal print nails?! What is your favourite kind of animal print to do?

Head over to The Lacquerologist to see what animal print Emily has done today!

13 down, 18 to go. See you back here for flowers tomorrow : )