All This Polish: Spring ASBMF Challenge #4: April Showers

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Spring ASBMF Challenge #4: April Showers

Back on Sunday, when I posted pictures of my glitter sandwich mattified, one of the things I mentioned was that I finally got around to doing the April Showers part of the April Showers Bring May Flowers Challenge. Well, it's now 4 days later and I finally got a chance to edit the pictures and put this post together. I wish I could say that I've been really busy with all sorts of important stuff, but the truth is that I just play way too many games on Facebook! One of the reasons that I had such a hard time with this part of the challenge was that I had just recently done an April Showers themed manicure back in March. I originally posted it about it here. So I was kinda stumped trying to think of something that wasn't too similar to what I had already done. When I was trying to come up with a design, I started to think about how my absolute favorite thing about rain showers is laying in bed late at night, with the window cracked open just a bit, listening to the rain hit off the blacktop on the street outside.

China Glaze Stone Cold is one of my recent buys that I had yet to try and I thought it would be perfect for representing a paved street. The gritty matte finish would be perfect to act as blacktop and once top coat was added, I thought it might give the impression of a wet, rain-soaked road.

I also wanted to do something different for the raindrops than what I had previously done. That was when I remembered I had bought a set of rhinestone wheels from Bundle Monster back in January and had yet to use any of them. Looking through the wheels, I came across these blue raindrop/teardrop shaped rhinestones that looked perfect for what I had in mind. I had a feeling that having these rhinestones on all of my nails would probably drive me nuts pretty quickly, so I settled on just using them for accent nails. And I decided to reuse the clouds idea from my previous April Showers manicure, but with a bit of a twist. Rather than having bright white clouds, I had an image in my head of darker, grey storm clouds staggered with white clouds overlapping them. My only problem was that I didn't have a very good grey polish for stamping. I couldn't get any greys to show up well over the black polish. So I decided to reverse my original idea and stamp white clouds first, then overlay grey clouds, so that part of the white clouds would remain intact and other parts would look darker and more stormy.

The clouds design is from Konad plate m79. For the white clouds, I used Konad Special Polish in white and I used China Glaze Recycle for the grey clouds. I used one coat of Seche Vite on all the nails with the clouds and two coats on the nails with the rhinestones. I ended up only wearing this for a few days. I put it together Sunday night, took pictures Monday and by Tuesday night I was taking it off. That's not to say that I didn't like it. But it was the first time I had ever worn rhinestones of any type on my nails and I was not used to my nails feeling bumpy like that. I kept having the urge to pick at those little buggers and knock them off my nails! I will just have to be try to get used to having bumpy nails once in a while, especially since I have so many more types of rhinestones in the Bundle Monster set that I want to try some day. I will say that I was surprised how well they stayed on. I just used top coat to put them in place and then, as I mentioned, used two coats of Seche Vite over them. That seemed to be enough top coat to get rid of any edges on the rhinestones that might have gotten caught on something and gotten them ripped off my nails.