Doctor Crafty's Green and Orange Abstract - NCC Recreations

Hey y'all!

It's finally Friday!  This makes for exciting news for most of the us, and today I'm excited to be able to bring you my final recreation for this month's Nail Challenge Collaborative theme, celebrating 3 years of nail art goodness.  Today I've decided to recreate Doctor Crafty's Green and Orange Abstract Geometric nail art, which I thought was a really unique and colorful, fun look.

Geeky Owl's New Year Confetti - NCC Recreations

Hey y'all!

Happy Friday!  It has been a bit of a hectic week around here, so I've not had a whole lot to say, but I'm really excited that today I get to show you another recreation to celebrate the third anniversary of the Nail Challenge Collaborative.  I feel like although I've only just joined the NCC myself, I've been a fan of so many of these ladies for a long time, and that certainly includes the artist I'm recreating today.  Here is my version of Geeky Owl's New Year Confetti nail art.

FingerFood's Daisies - NCC Recreations

Hey y'all!

Happy Friday!  Today we kick off my second month in the Nail Challenge Collaborative, which happens to be celebrating its third anniversary this month!  In honor of 3 years of talented nail artists doing monthly themes, we've decided to use this month's theme to recreate some of our favorite NCC looks from days gone by.  Today I'm recreating a really sweet look done by a former NCC member and an all-around really cool chick, so here's my version of FingerFood's Sugar-Coated Daisies.

Teal and Plum Dot Flowers - WIDW

Hey y'all!

Happy April to you!  The first three months of 2015 have absolutely steamrolled me, and I can hardly believe it's already springtime, and more importantly, birthday time for me. :)  Today's What I Did Wednesday plays on that spring theme, and I've used Monday's swatch of Plush to create some drop-dot flowers in this colorful and playful look.

Funky White Negative Space Nail Art - NCC Inspired By Fashion

Hey y'all!

Friday is here again, and that means it's time to delve back into some nail art as inspired by fashion for the Nail Challenge Collaborative.  This week I'm presenting some more funky, abstract nails with a hint of negative space, pulled once again from a look in the pages of a fashion magazine.

31DC-D17 - Recreate a mani

Hey y'all!

Happy Saturday!  Today's prompt for the 31-Day Challenge is "Recreate a Mani by your Favorite Blogger."  I actually have far too many "favorite" bloggers to be able to pick just one, but I've had a few manis in my hat for future recreations, so I've just pulled one of those out of the vault.  Jessica at BeHappyAndBuyPolish created this awesome dark blue and neon coral dotticure for her "What You Need to Have (And Keep) Great Nails While At College" composite post, and I loved the color combination so much that I knew I wanted to have a go at recreating it.  Although I didn't have the same colors as Jessica, I approximated them with what I had on hand, and came up with this look.

31DC-D11 - Reversed Polarities

Hey y'all!

Today's prompt for the 31-Day Challenge is Reversed Polarities, which confused quite a few people, apparently.  Originally I had intended to do a purple and yellow half-and-half nail with some needle dragging in concentric circles, but after Debbie explained what she meant with this prompt on a group discussion board, I had to rethink what I was doing.  The less confusing term for this look would be something like photo negative, or inverted colors, where the colors of a nail art are flipped to the opposite color.  I almost immediately thought a skyline mani would look cool with the colors inverted, and possibly because we just booked our next trip to Austin, I just had to give it a try with my hometown's skyline.

31DC-D5 - Dotting Tools

Hey y'all!

Monday's here, and I guess it's officially time to get back to the grind - the holidays are over and we've got a brand new year ahead of us.  I hope if you made resolutions and/or goals that you've not already given up on them.  Remember that even if you stumble, you can get right back up again and keep going!  This year I'm going to start working on getting out and interacting with my new community more than I have been thus far - between the culture shock and my own social anxiety, it has been incredibly hard for me to try to make new friends here locally, so it's become a goal of mine to change that.  I have no clever segue from that into today's nail art, so I'll just say that today we're working with the theme of dotting tools, and I created this fun look that I'm calling a peanut butter and jelly dotticure.

31DC-D1 - Follow a Tutorial

Happy New Year, y'all!

I hope you all had a great holiday.  I spent most of the last week binge-watching Lost with Mr. Faff, which put me into a serious time crunch for starting off my first goal for the new year - the January 2015 31-Day Challenge, as hosted by Crumpet's Nail Tarts!  This is my first ever 31DC, and I had intended to get so much work done ahead of time to make it easier on myself, but then I felt guilty for not spending any time with the hubs, so... the challenge got pushed aside.  Here's hoping I'll be able to get some serious work done this next week to get myself ahead of the game for the rest of the month!  The first prompt for this challenge is to Follow A Tutorial, so I scooted over to YouTube to find a simple but elegant tutorial for NYE.  I followed this "Elegant black & pink nails with dotting nail art" tutorial by LifeWorldWomen but changed up the colors just a smidge, because, ew, pink.

12DOC: Santa!

Hey y'all!

Happy Sunday!  We've officially put the first week of December in the bag, and as such, today's prompt for the Challenge Your Nail Art 12 Days of Christmas Challenge should bring a few very familiar faces to you, because today we're doing Santa and/or Elves!  I know you'll be shocked by this, but I have *another* nail charm for this prompt!

Black and White and Pink All Over

Hey y'all!

Happy Humpday! October is turning up to be a sort of surreal month for me.  It's a little too personal to share with the whole wide world, but suffice it to say that I'm going through some growing pains as an epat and as a wife.  I haven't been participating much lately with the Axis of Ineptitude, mostly because I just haven't felt like "writing," and the writing I have been doing is all nail stuff.  The "nail stuff" has pretty much consumed the last couple months for me.  I've thrown myself in to creating as much content as possible and for a few weeks there, I was posting new content 6 times a week!  That's an incredible pace, which I cannot maintain, so I'm slowing it down and will be trying to regulate my posting to Monday-Wednesday-Friday-Saturday.  That should be 3 days of nail art during the week, and swatching on Saturday.  I think that's a liveable pace and shouldn't rattle me too badly.  Today, I'm tying in to two different prompts - one for the Pick-n-Mix challenge, and one for the Axis, so I'll start by showing you the nail art, and then I'll do some faffing at the end for those who want to read it.

Aquatic Gradient nail art

Hey y'all!

Happy Friday!  Today's nail art comes to you courtesy of me fiddling around in my untrieds again, where I noticed I had a sizable number of blues and teals accumulating, so I decided to pull a few out and make some nail art with them.  The result is this aquatic-feel gradient with an accent nail that I think ended up looking like octopus suckers, though it wasn't the intention.

Spots and Stripes - TPTC

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It's Tuesday, and that means it's time for the last pink/purple/green Tri-Polish look this month.  I decided to do a little playing with dots and stripes to create this glittery nail art.

Casual Pi Day Confetti dotticure - TPTC

Hey y'all!

Happy Tuesday!  Whereas March 14 is Pi Day (3/14), today, the 22nd of July (or 22/7 in Euro shorthand) is Pi Approximation Day or Casual Pi Day, so to celebrate the occasion I have created a little dotticure that reminds me of confetti, and oddly, not pie.  *shrug*  It's also Tri-Polish Tuesday, so I've used this month's colors of purple, green, and pink to create this look.

You look positively Orange with loneliness - CMC

Hey y'all!

This week the Colour Me Crazy prompt turned to orange, and since no other word rhymes with orange, it must be a very lonely color indeed.  I dunno, that's just what Big Bang Theory taught me.  In reality I love orange and took this prompt as an opportunity to have fun with several different orange shades in my collection.  Also, I'm not into prison-chick naughtiness, so I'll have none of that OITNB nonsense, do you hear me??

Yellow Pig's Day!

Hey y'all!

Something synchronous happened recently, which led to the GOT prompt  for this week (yellow) falling on July 17, otherwise known as Yellow Pig's Day, and I had to do some celebratory nail art to salute the universe for such an occurrence.

Red and Copper mixed dots nail art

Hey y'all!

I wanted to show y'all the project we've been working on this week in the SIMPLES group - it's Mixed Dots!  Last week we did straight up polka dots - very organized and neat.  This week we mixed it up by adding differently sized dots in random order.  There's no pattern here!  I chose to mix up a coral red with a gorgeous copper.

ManiMonday: Wimbledon Nail Art, featuring e.l.f.

*** This post contains some sample products which were sent for review. ***

Hey y'all!

In the midst of all the World Cup frenzy, another big sporting event has been taking place right here in England.  Wimbledon's final matches are this Friday, so I thought y'all might wanna see some nail art inspired by the Wimbledon Championships.

Polka dot skittles - TPTC

Hey y'all!

Something that I haven't been posting about here is that I recently joined a Facebook group created by Debbie (of the Crumpet-y fame) dedicated to learning nail art from the cuticle forward, as it were, called SIMPLES.  I wasn't sure when going into it exactly how much interesting blog content I'd be able to derive from this process, but it was important to me to be able to join a group of ladies with ALL LEVELS of experience and sort of go "back to school" with techniques.  If the Techniques Challenge has taught me anything, it's that my skills definitely need practice and honing, and so I thought this might be a good way to go about it.  We spent the first 4 weeks going over some real basics, like glitter accent nails and simple skittles.  This week we've moved on to dotting tools, and Debbie set us with the first lesson I'd never attempted before:  the polka dot pattern.  Since this was a first for me, and also because I needed to save myself a little bit of time this weekend with painting, I decided to combine today's TPT with this week's SIMPLES and so I give you my tri-polish polka dot skittles!

Freehand Jacquard and Corset nail art - LNTC

Hey y'all!

Yesterday marked the Faff's one year wedding anniversary, and in good fashion, of course I spent a good part of the evening getting this post ready to publish while he took care of planting the evergreen sapling that was my gift to him (he gave me complete box sets of Heroes and Sherlock).  We're pretty low-key in this household, so festivities involved a "special" homecooked meal of slow-cooker steak in mushroom gravy and jacket sweet potato, a bit of wine, and some televisual feasting.  It's really, really, really hard to believe we've been married for a year now and that I haven't murdered him in his sleep.

Yet.  ;)

I digress.  Today's penultimate prompt for the Llama Nails Technique Challenge is Freehand design, and I was a bit flummoxed for ideas on this until I browsed my Pinterest inspiration board and remembered that I'd always wanted to give a corset nail another try.  Once that was set, the jacquard print fell into place and I had some nail art!