Snakeskin Manicure!

Real (shed) snakeskin, courtesy of an old friend from NC... no snakes were harmed in the making of this manicure, I promise :-P

It took a few different tries to get it right, but finally I settled on a base of Rimmel Bare Naked. While the second coat was still tacky, I laid down the snakeskin bits. Everything is sealed in with top coat.

The plastic centipede I'm holding here came with the snakeskin. I was told it's name is Cumbersnatch... hahahahaha!

So far so good, but I think the texture of my nails is going to drive me nuts before long... What do y'all think?

Needle marbling!

My first successful attempt! Not as good as the original though... I took my inspiration from the magnificent Tartofraises:

She is friggin' amazing, no?!

The polishes I used were Sally Hansen Ion, Cover Girl Forever Festive, L'Oreal Jet Set to Paris, Sinful Colors Firefly, & Sinful Colors Smoking Hot.

It was so much fun, & although some nails came out radically different from others, & NONE of them came out as even as hers did, I really like the effect and I'm totally going to do this again soon! What do you think?

Franken Friday, #8!

I present to you, Unicorn Girl!

Pretty simple, a purple jelly with gold glitter. The story behind it however, is long & complex... When my mother died, she left me all of her knitting needles. Now, I was NOT a knitter at the time... I was a stubborn crocheter, & insisted that you could crochet anything that could be knit. (This is NOT true; each craft has their strengths & weaknesses. Truth be told, I was afraid to learn how to knit beyond garter stitch. Now? I'm addicted!) Finally, one day I decided to bite the bullet. So, while visiting my sister upstate (who had the majority of my mom's stuff in her attic), the night before we went to get matching tattoos of our mom's symbol, we cracked open some beers & decided to sort the needles. There were a gaBILLION. Naturally, we wound up getting a little tipsy, & I decided to sing a song about the first thing that popped into my head. I saw a pair of purple needles, & a pair of gold needles... and kablammo! "Purple & gold, that's the color of the unicorns... & some people like it tooooooo!" My sister nearly drowned on her beer laughing.

So of course, I had to make us singing it my voicemail... and then when my friend Ash Gray heard it and the story, he loved it so much that he wrote a pretty amazing song, using it as the inspiration. (You can buy it on iTunes, I think.) I'm credited on his album as "the unicorn girl", hahaha. So when I had a desire to make a purple & gold polish... well, what else could I call it? ;-)

Sinful Colors Rainstorm

I did promise you, so here it is :-) I couldn't find this polish anywhere, in any of the thousand drugstores in Manhattan. I looked in Brooklyn & Queens too. Nada. But then, a beautiful soul on Ravelry sent it to me as a random act of kindness! I'm super pleased with the gloves I'm wearing too... I spun the yarn & knit the gloves myself.

This could easily have been a one coat creme, but I chose to do two. It's seriously the loveliest grayed out blue I think I've ever had the pleasure to paint with. The formula was wonderful as well. No issues with drying time or streaking or anything. I highly recommend this!

Do you own this color? If you're a SC junkie like me, raise your hands! :-)

Polish Days MAN-icure :-D

Well, because I love my fella very, very much... I decided to honor him today. I let him choose the color for my nails, & he said gunmetal. (He's genuinely interested in my nail endeavors... I don't know how I got so lucky!) I sponged a gradient of Wet n' Wild Venomous Vixen & Metallica over Sinful Colors Rainstorm (separate post on that coming soon) and mattified it with NYC Matte Me Crazy. Because I'm a cheese ball, I went a step... ok, like, 5 steps... further... and, well... take a look :-)

Hearts were made with NYC Broadway Burgundy Frost & KISS silver glitter. Our initials were done with KISS white eventually, after trying several different looks. (You can still see the purple underneath, but I think it looks pretty cool!)

Words can't express how much I love my fella. He's handsome (looks like a tattooed depiction of Zeus), he's strong, he's intelligent, he could easily be The Most Interesting Man in the World from those Dos Equis ads, he's kind almost to a fault, he's sensitive (yet totally not in a whiny weenie baby way!), he's a damn good cook (& LOVES feeding me ;-), he loves all my odd hobbies & interests that all other men in my history have found irritating or strange (growing plants, knitting, nail art, writing, dyeing yarn, spinning yarn, etc etc etc), he's got the most beautiful tattoos all over his body (many of which he drew himself), and he loves me so wholeheartedly it's astonishing. I've never been loved, or loved someone else like this before. I am so, so, soooo lucky to be with him. He is the bacon of my heart and soul <3

 Don't forget to check out the other awesome entries as well!

Hurricane Mani, as Promised :-)

First of all, I just want to say that I'm astonished at the way Sandy devastated the lives of so many people... less than a mile from me. I'm truly convinced that nothing less than a nuclear attack will knock Harlem down. My heart goes out to all those whose lives were changed for the worse because of Sandy. I am one of the lucky ones, as all I lost was a significant amount of income from not being able to work for a few days. Rent is late, but that's all. I still have a home. May the universe bless those in need, with what they need as soon as possible.

So, onto the nails I got to stare at while I was shacked up with my fella for 5 days. They started out with CoverGirl's new Outlast polish in Forever Festive. It's a deep, glowy, candy apple red that can best be described as pure sex on one's nails, hahaha.

The last photo is after I added about a gabillion coats of glitter, all various types. My nails resembled mini Klimt paintings actually, & it was kind of nice... except for the killer tip wear/ shrinkage which just drove me batshit  insane! The polish was literally begging to be peeled off... which I'm ashamed to say I couldn't resist :-( My nails look terrible at the moment now, so I'm going to keep polish changing to a minimum for a while. Never fear though, I've got some more manis to show you soon, including the ugliest color to ever find itself on my nails!

To close this on a totally unrelated note, I'm just gonna go ahead & say that  Glass Houses by Billy Joel is one of the best albums ever. Cor.

Franken Friday #7! (right?)

Dream Warriors! Yes, named after that Dokken song. The polish itself is like painting with rice krispies... it's surprisingly thick with glitter, but even more surprisingly easy to remove. Really pretty though, in a murky, misty sort of way.

and here's the song, in case you don't know it.

Enjoy! Coming up soon, I'll show off the mani that lasted through hurricane Sandy. I really hate the bitch right now, ugh. More on that later, though... ;-)