Spring Curtains through a Window Frame

My co-worker, L, has decided that she is going to name all of my manicures. I was really just going for plaid with this nail art, but she decided that the blue and light brown looked like curtain fabric behind the dark brown window frame, so the blog title was born.

The base color for the designed nails is Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau, and the plain nails are Barielle Aura Angora. Also used on the designs are Cherimoya Vernis Classique Cappucino and Primark Beuaty Neon Blue.

My left thumbnail decided to smudge the next morning even though it had been dry before I went to bed the night before. It was fine when I woke up, but after getting ready for work, the polish had smooshed itself back. I smoothed it out as best I could, but the closeup pics are tattletales!

Random Plaid Mani

You know, I should know better than to join a nail art challenge that requires two manicures a week, and then ends with three days in a row. I should have known my ADHD would rear up and make me lose interest in it. I did actually manage to do last Friday's challenge, "witches", albeit on *Saturday*...but then I never got around to taking pictures of it. I'll try to convince myself to do that tonight. If I do, you'll just have to ignore the tip wear. :)

I'm clearly not going to be able to finish the last three days of the challenge, though, because I haven't finished our Halloween costumes, so I'm going to be SEWING for the next two nights! And then Tuesday night I will have to do my manicure to go with the costume, so it will not fit with the challenge. Ah, well. I need to be more honest with myself before jumping into things, I guess.

In the meantime, here's a manicure I did some time last month, because I needed something on my nails besides Halloween for a committee meeting. I rarely do a manicure to match my clothes - since I only do my nails around twice a week, I usually choose my clothes to go well with my nails rather than the other way around. :) But I had just bought this dress the week before, and I was wearing it to a committee meeting, and I thought that I could do a manicure that went well with it. I suck at plaid, but I think this one came out well enough (although admittedly it was my second try!)

First, here's the dress:

I started with a base of Nailtiques Milan, then I did stripes of China Glaze Stone Cold, and thinner striped of Liquid Leather.

I finished it off with NYC Matte Me Crazy to give it that soft fuzzy look to go with the soft knit of the dress. I'm always annoyed at the difficulty in clean-up with any red polish, but I do think the manicure as a whole came out very nicely.

Plaid and Polka Dots

I love plaid manicures. I really do. But previously I've failed at creating a plaid manicure that I actually liked. I decided to try painting on scotch tape, cutting the tape into thin strips, and then putting those on my nails. Well, I love the way it looked, but it was sooooo time consuming to put down each little strip of tape, and very finicky at getting them positioned, that I realized that it would take me twice as long to position them on my dominant hand. So instead, I used the same colors to make polka dots!!

I am happy to say that I won Girls Night In's first ever giveaway recently (that makes three I've won in the past few months! My husband is wondering about the influx of packages! ;) and check out what she sent me!

From left to right, Ulta Eye Popping Poppy, China Glaze For Audrey, and Orly Fowl Play. Also a buffing block and a tube of foot scrub. (And a couple of pieces of candy that had my son complaining because he didn't get any. :P Mine!)

So I started this mani by painting all my nails with two nice coats of my favorite pale blue - Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau. I used Fowl Play, For Audrey, and China Glaze Frostbite to paint a few inches on Scotch Tape. After that was dry, I cut it into strips, put them onto my nails in a woven pattern, and top-coated the whole thing!

It was very tedious and took a lot longer than I expected it to. Much of it was spent with fiddling with the tape trying to get it into the right place, and straight, and weave it in with the other strips while not making it move again... I decided that it would probably take twice as long using my non-dominant hand to finagle the tape on my right hand, so I took the easy way out and used a dotting tool. Same colors: Orly Fowl Play, China Glaze For Audrey and Frostbite, and voila! (My Grammar!Bitch side is showing - doesn't "voila" have an accent on it somewhere? Harrumph.)

See my poor little index finger nubbin?? I am in dire need of more of the Haken Nail Magic base coat I used with such good results for months. I picked up the wrong one (still Haken, but not the same variety) last time I bought new base coat, and the original problem I had with flaking hasn't come back, I have had several side-breaks right at the edge of the nail bed that I've had to use the tea bag repair method on, and a few of them have broken off when they got a few millimeters past the end of the nail bed. That's why I trimmed down all the rest of them to a shorter length, so the nubbins wouldn't stand out so terribly badly!