July 4th Weekend

Last weekend, I posted a quick pic on Instagram showing my last minute July 4th manicure.  The day was so dreary, it was raining all morning and showing no signs of stopping.  I knew any original July 4th plans were going to have to wait until the next day.  It was going to turn into a "stay home and watch fireworks specials on TV" kind of night for sure.  I had painted my nails white in the morning, in anticipation of doing some type of July 4th themed look with white as the base color.  But the gloomy day didn't really put me in the mood to paint my nails.  About halfway through the day though, I decided to do just a really quick, dry brush American flag (sorta) design.

I tested it out on my thumb first and was loving the effect, which was the shot I had posted on Instagram.  I was a little indifferent to the finished look though once I had completed the rest of my nails.  It did definitely grow on me over the next few days, and a few of my friends really liked it.  I think the overall effect was much cooler looking in person than it looks in photographs.  And I'm definitely inexperienced when it comes to the dry brush technique, so that's something I think I'm going to need to practice a bit more in the future.

My base was two coats of KBShimmer Eyes White Open.  The blue and red stripes are both polishes from Priti NYC.  The blue is Canterbury Bells, and the red is called Cherry Ripe.  If you aren't familiar with the dry brush approach, you basically try to scrape as much polish off the brush as you can back into the bottle, and then swipe the brush across your nail.  There were some times where I thought I globbed on a little too much color, so to fix it I just went over a few spots with more white polish.  I finished it off with a coat of Seche Vite.

I hope everyone had a fun and safe July 4th holiday last week.  I definitely enjoyed July 5th a whole lot more than July 4th.  The weather was perfect on Sunday, and there was a great fireworks display put on in my town.  I even snagged a few good shots of the show.