Franken - My heart bleeds for you

I received the latest Layla order today and did a whole lot of swatching.  I actually really enjoyed it.  I swatched all the Layla Mirror polishes and I can't wait to show them to you.  

But first here is a monstrous custom polish I created and called 'My heart bleeds for you'.  The idea was magical in my head, but oh dear it's not a nice outcome in the end.  But hey, I'm here to show you the ugly creations, not just the pretty ones, so listen up on how not to create this.

In my head I imagined a red jelly with gold flecks - check.

Then floating in the golden blood polish were sparkly golden holo hearts - check.

Unfortunately the gold hearts are lost in the richness of the red jelly and don't even look gold anymore, and they seem to stick out something terrible.

One of my worst yet.  I hope this post makes other frankens feel better about some of their FRANKEN FAILS!  They happen to everyone.

Holo diamonds

The sun was out on the weekend, so I grabbed my holos again and played around with one of the temporary tattoo designs I had printed.

This one didn't quite turn out how I had imagined in my head.  On the paper these were beautiful enlarged brilliant cut diamonds that showed all the facets in different shades of grey.  But on my nail they look more like star bursts or shards of glass or something?!?.

I'm not going to call it a fail, just different to what I had imagined.  This photo in the shade shows the shades of the faceted diamond better, which seems to get lost amongst the holo.

Still, it was something fun to spice up a holo polish, especially indoors.  Cause sometimes holos can look a little uninteresting indoors when they aren't flashing all the colours around.

Franken - My moon and stars

I got some new solvent stable glitters the other day and decided it was time to make up some new custom polishes.  Here is the first polish I made up, which I have called 'My moon and stars'.

It has small and medium sized turquoise hexes as well as turquoise holo moons and silver stars.

The base is a dark blue jelly which is made with suspension base, a few drops of Blue 1 tint concentrate, two drops of Ferric Ferrocyanide tint concentrate and one tiny drop of black tint concentrate.

This is two coats on its own, and while it might look like the edges of the stars are sticking up, they are actually smooth beneath the glossy top coat of Ulta3 non-chip x2 and Seche Vite.

I have a whole range of other franken polishes / custom polishes in mind, I just need the time to make them and wear them.

Our Aussie supplier for suspension base (or untinted lacquer base as they call it) has recently set up a section on their website with all their franken supplies listed. The suspension base they sell is really fantastic, it suspends glitter really well, dries glossy and is big 3 free.  I'm a huge fan of it and have personally used more than a litre of the stuff for just my own mixing.  I also highly recommend their tint concentrates.  I purchased some of every colour and they make the most amazing jelly colours.

http://beautyworld.com.au/franken_polish_supplies

They do ship overseas, but only items that are not classed as dangerous good such as glitter and the like, so please don't ask them about shipping suspension base overseas.

Ahoy me maties - Mr 3 turns 4

Oh Boy, what a busy couple of day's we have had.  I'm going to have to keep it short and sweet tonight so I can have a rest and recover.  

Our Mr 3 became Mr 4 today and we celebrated with a Pirate Party.  Everyone who came had made an effort to get into the spirit of things, mainly with home made hats and bandanas and the like, and it was really fun to see.

Naturally, I had to put on some specific birthday themed nails for the occasion, and one doesn't get a much better excuse to wear skulls and cross bones in their mani than when they are dressed as a pirate!

I used Kleancolor Metallic Black for the base, which is an awesome one coater with a silvery shimmer, but it does take a bit to dry!  I then stamped using Konad special white polish, the number four for the birthday boy, and various other pirate themed designs.  My thumbs also had large skulls and cross bones.

I was very happy with my efforts for his birthday cake.  I make a treasure chest which was filled with chocolate gold coins, candy bracelets and other jewel looking lollies.  It tasted really good too.

And here are my two littlies. Mr 4 in his home made hat and favourite pirate tee (not showing his aluminum foil hook his dad made him, his cutlass or his telescope!). Miss One dressed as the crocodile that ate Captain Hooks hand - and a very cute crocodile she was too!

Have a great evening everyone!

Autobots: Roll Out

I couldn't decided what to title this post, I nearly went with "More than meets the eye", but I figured only my older readers would get that!

I'm totally geeking out with this fun stamping plate I got through Fab UR Nails blog. This is plate QA4 from the QA image plates, although I don't think she has these anymore :(

My husband loves his transformers.  Despite the fact that he is in his 30's, these were the toy of the 80's, and from all accounts, he had quite a few of them.  In fact he still has some today that he has kept in a box in the garage. One of my favourites he still has is Soundwave - which in the movie was a satellite orbiting the earth, but his classic version transforms into a cassette player!  Even the cassette that went into the player transformed, his transformed into the panther, Ravage - which was also in the move, but totally different.  Ah I remember cassette players!  I know there is a lot of you readers that wont!!

The base polish I'm wearing here is the beautiful aEngland Ascalon.  It's a purple to green duochrome holographic polish.  But there was no sun today, so you wont get to see any of the holo.  I stamped the three transformers designs (the Decepicon icon, TRAN FOR words and the Autobot icon) using Sally Hansen Canary Diamond Chrome.

I'm really excited to get the new Layla mirror polishes for stamping.  They posted some swatch pictures on their facebook page and I'm pretty happy, cause they look amazing (and our group order is in Sydney ladies!)

Holo rainbows using temporary tattoo paper

I have something very special today that I have not shown very often on my blog. No it's not that I'm using the temporary tattoo paper again (although I am).  The special thing I'm showing you.... is my right hand!!

I had be nursing a chipped corner on my ring finger on the left hand for about a week, and after filing my nails last night it came off and couldn't be reattached with super glue.

Kudos to you girls that swatch and post photos of both hands.  Let me tell you, I felt like a complete nuff nuff photographing my right hand.  My hand was twisted and fingers misaligned, and then trying to press the shutter button on the camera with my left hand resulted in many pictures with my hand shadowing the photo.  Anyway, enough about my cacky right handed pictures, let me tell you about what I did here.

Here is another design I did using the temporary tattoo paper, but this time as a full nail design.

I first put on two coats of Layla Mercury Twilight and then I cut out my tattoo paper in shapes to fit my nail.  I decided to curve the base of the design so it would hopefully have a neat finish at the cuticle.  I'm really happy how that part worked out, as it is much neater than trying to clean it up with acetone.

I did learn two new lessons applying the temporary tattoo this time. Number one, and evidenced on my pinky finger, was having fingers that were too wet when handling the paper.  What happened was, I picked up the cut piece and where my finger was wet, the paper soaked it up.  Then when I tried to remove the transparent backing, I couldn't separate it from that edge, instead the paper was just coming away.  So I then peeled the transparent backing off from the other end, but as soon as I did that, the end where it had already become loose from the paper curled up and stuck to it's self.

Lesson 1 - do not handle temporary tattoo paper with wet hands.

Lesson two is one that I learned on my index finger of the left hand.  Firstly as you can see on my left hand, I had to file this hand quite a bit after the break.  What I forgot to do after that was shorten the design so some of the red would show, but that's not what the lesson was.

You can see the bit of blue missing on my index finger, this was because there was a bubble in the paper after I had stuck the transparent piece to the printed piece.  This bubble torn slightly as I removed the backing, and then when I put water on the nail, some of the inkjet colour just ran and disappeared.

Lesson 2 - make sure there are no bubbles after applying the sticky transparent backing.

I also found that I got a neater finish at the tip of the nail if I filed the temporary tattoo paper off, rather than trying to removing it with acetone.  Even with acetone, it seems to take ages to dissolve and ends up just a sticky gloopy mess on the tips of you nail.

I'm planning to do a few more of these temporary tattoo designs over the next few weeks, but I still need to work through that drawer of untrieds.

Until next time all you polished lovelies!

Color Club - Gingerbread

Yesterday afternoon I planned out a whole new sheet of temporary tattoo paper, ready to print out and apply some last night.  But of course I ran out of printer ink just as I was printing the test page!  I was so psyched to wear one of the new designs and then I wasn't able to. So I had to go to my untried drawer and find something pretty to wear.

The one colour that was guaranteed to pep me back up is gold, and gold glitter is even better.  This is Color Club Gingerbread from their Holiday Splendor collection last year.  It is a light gold polish with lots holographic sparkles.  I layered two coats of Gingerbread over Periperia Crystal Gold.

I wish I knew why it was so hard to photograph amazingly blingy glitters like this.

As you can see, it's not just gold glitter in this, there is a huge array of different coppery and bronze glitters too.  I can also seen light green in this shot, but that might be the gold holo??

I love this glitter so much, mainly because it's a cool toned light platinum gold glitter and not warm orange looking gold. This is only the second polish out of the Holiday Splendor collection I've tried and they are both amazing.  The bottles of the others looks like they will be awesome too.  I'm so glad I grabbed this collection!

Off to replace my printer cartridge now...