Guest Post at Polished Prisms!

Hey everyone!  Today, I have a guest post up at Polished Prisms for Hannah's Glitterific series!  It's my first guest post and I was so excited to contribute to this series.  Check out the guest post here.  It's all about some awesome glitters from The Hungry Asian!  And if you don't already read Hannah's blog on a regular basis, make sure to subscribe.  She's got some great posts, I know you'll all enjoy her blog!

Spring ASBMF Challenge #12: May Flowers!

Um, ya...wow, remember this challenge?  You know the one that started in April...that I still didn't finish.

...awkward silence...

Trust me, I had no intention of putting the next challenge post off for this long.  I believe my last challenge post was in June, which wasn't so bad for only having three parts left to do.  But considering that it is now mid-August...well, smooth move exlax!  I think it was just one of those things where, each time I went to paint my nails, I thought of the challenge but wasn't really sure what I wanted to do and just decided, "oh what's one more week?" instead.  Well Sarah, do a little math here...what is "what's one more week?" times 6 weeks?  Answer: way too friggin' long to be procrastinating on finishing this challenge!!!  You may be asking, why even bother?  Well...I don't know.  Even though I feel like a bit of a jackass for putting these last three parts off for so long, there is another part of me that doesn't want to just quit so close to the end and then pretend like it never happened.  So instead, here I am in mid-August with a post on...May flowers...lol.

This is two coats of Styled Out, from the Maybelline Color Show line, stamped with Konad plate m64 using Konad Special Polish in pastel blue.  Styled Out is part of the Denims set of polishes from Maybelline's Color Show line.  This is really the only Color Show polish I was interested in getting when I saw the swatches.  I might even grab a back up bottle since the bottles are only 7ml and this color is stinkin' gorgeous!  My favorite color may be green, but when it comes to polish, I can't resist a sparkly dark blue.  I used two coats but it was near perfection with just one coat.  I'm just crazy and felt like I needed to have a second coat because of some spots that seemed patchy to me, which in reality were probably fine.

The pattern is not your typical flower pattern, but I really like it and have used it a few times before this.  It has sort of a country/farm house feel to it.  Sort of reminds me of a pattern you might find on an old bandana, other than the typical paisley designs you normally see.  I also love the blue on blue look.  I don't stamp enough using something in the same color family as my base color and I really need to do it more often.  I'm getting in the habit lately of over analyzing what to paint on my nails instead of remembering that sometimes the simplest designs can yield the most amazing results.  "Keep it simple, Stupid!"  I have to remind myself of that every so often.

If you hadn't noticed, I decided to set up a custom domain so my blog address is now officially Allthispolish.com, and I'm also experimenting a bit with an updated watermark to match.  I actually bought the domain a couple weeks ago, but thanks to a bit of over zealousness on my part, I managed to screw it up.  It wasn't working and I didn't realize at first that I had done something to directly cause that, so I ended up waiting about a week and a half before trying to investigate what the issue was.  Then, with a little help from a friend at work, I got it fixed.  Here's a hint to anyone who is thinking of buying your custom domain through Blogger...when you get your Google domain registration confirmation email, DON'T activate Google Sites when you click the link to create your administrative account.  In fact, don't even click the links in the email at all, unless you're thinking of using Google Apps to set up a custom email address.  The domain will redirect to the blog on its own within a day or two.  But activating Sites will cause Blogger to think some other blog is already using that domain and it won't redirect automatically.  All you would need to do then is deactivate Sites and add the domain manually to your Blogger settings, but Blogger and Google Apps don't always want to cooperate so it may not get corrected on the first attempt.  Ok, end of rant, hee hee.  It's all good now so who cares!  Now to see if I can get the last two parts of this challenge posted before, oh let's say Christmas, lol.

Spun Sugar Sparkle

Today I have my second run at the spun sugar manicure.  This one actually looked much nicer in person than in the pictures.  I didn't really like it as much as the first one I did.  I'm not sure why but I think it's because I liked the final look more when I used creams than with the sparkle/glass fleck polishes I used here.  I still liked it a lot, but it didn't have quite the same spun sugar look to it as my first.

I had recently received the mother load of a swap from Jen from The Polished Zombie.  Seriously, it rocked my socks off.  Which was convenient since she also sent me a pair of socks...monkey socks!

Cell phone pic...I was too excited to get my camera out and set up for a nicer shot.

I was anxious to try out the polishes from the Color Club Take Wing collection she sent me, I've been wanting them for a while now.  I started with two coats of Color Club Fly With Me.  I wanted to use more than two colors for the spun sugar part so besides the other two Color Club polishes, Daisy Does It (yellow-hard to see, but it's there, trust me) and Sparkle and Soar (orange), I also used two Zoya's...Charla (blue/green) and Kym (red).

The sparkle/glass fleck polishes gave me a bit of a hard time trying to get consistent polish strings.  You can see where a string of Charla sort of broke half way across my middle finger when I was applying it.  It took a while for the polish to thicken up, and then when they finally did get thick enough to create strings, it suddenly would become too thick super fast.  I can't say for sure if that means that creams work best for this technique, or if there were other factors involved like humidity that could have affected it, but it seemed like I had a much easier time when I used cream polishes for this.

In the end, I was feeling about 50/50 on this manicure.  The Color Club polishes are gorgeous though!  I think next time I'll use one of them as a base for a stamping instead.