Black & Gold Skittlette

Happy Friday lovelies!

I love the weekends! Tonight we are having our first of several Christmas meals. We will be dining at Loch Fyne with six of our close friends and I cant wait. We booked it several months ago and have already picked our food so all that is left to do is drink fine wine and enjoy ourselves!

Saturday we will be wrapping our Christmas presents and drinking a large amount of Baileys as is traditional in our house! Then on Sunday we are meeting up with lots more of our friends to go for a roast dinner to celebrate Tasha's birthday. Busy but fun.

Onto my NOTD... Black and Gold is such a great combo

For my little finger and thumb nails I used Barry M Gold Mine Glitter. It is the first time I have used this and I love it. Easy to apply and very effective.

 For my ring finger I painted the base with two coats of W7 Black and then stamped this gorgeous and detailed lily flower design using Barry M Gold Foil. The design is from plate BM 314.

Now here is where I admit to a nail fail :-(. I originally painted my index and middle fingers with three coats of OPI Don't Pretzel My Buttons and then stamped the below filigree scroll design using Konad Black. Unfortunately even though I left it to dry for 35 minutes and ran both nails under cold water to 'set' the design they still smudged terribly. Why does Seche Vite hate Konad polish so much?



I couldn't leave it looking all sad and smudgey like that so I quickly removed those two nails and returned to my trusty W7 Black and simple gold studs for added detail.


So how do you like my black and gold skittlette? I think it looks classy :-)

I will return to that beautiful filigree scroll design in the near future

Have fantastic weekends everyone

Louise xx

Pink Lily

Recently a popular monthly magazine was available with a free nail polish attached to the front cover. This particular nail polish is a new brand to me but I instantly fell in love with the beautiful bottles. The brand is called Ciate and the polishes retail for £9 each. I then realised that the magazine actually had three different shades to give away which meant in true crazy nail polish lady style I had to buy exactly the same magazine three times to ensure I had all available shades. I reassured myself that this was in fact sensible shopping as to buy the three magazines cost me £11.25 where as to buy the three Ciate polishes without the magazines it would have cost me £27. That in my mind is positively a bargain!



In direct sunlight

This shade is called Jelly Bean (cute name) and is a bright pink creme polish which has a subtle blue shimmer making this cool toned on your nail. The shimmer is very obvious in the bottle but does not translate either to your nail or in the pictures.

Beautiful bottle



Jelly Bean swatch

 

I stamped this full lily design using Barry M Gold Foil and stamping plate BM 225. I am really happy with the results and looking forward to using the other two 'bargain' polishes I have from the Ciate collection.

Thanks for stopping by, as always I look forward to reading any comments you would like to leave me

Louise xx

Blue & Silver

Todays nails are truly beautiful in real life but so very hard to capture on camera. Annoyingly the silver clashes with my camera and so it will be hard for you to see the prettiness of the pattern I used but I hope you still enjoy the creamy goodness of Barry M Blueberry Icecream.

Amazingly considering this is part of a pastel collection, Blueberry Icecream is almost a one coater.To be honest if I painted in thicker coats it would 100% be a one coater, but by nature I layer up with thin coats and never wear less than two.

Base colour - Barry M Blueberry Icecream
Stamping colour - Barry M Silver Foil
Stamping plate - BM 205
Top coat - Seche Vite

I am sorry I was unable to do this particular combination justice in picture but believe me when I say this is worth a try and I will definately wear these colours together again. I have kept the pictures small as it minimises the blur caused by me trying to zoom in.

As I was taking these pictures I had a little helper...

We are very lucky to have two gorgeous staffies - a handsome boy called Tuscan and this pretty little girl called Lily. Tuscan is a little camera shy but I will make sure he is featured on the blog very soon.

I have some really good manicures planned over the next week or two as my mani to do list is getting crazy long so I am going to concentrate on ticking lots off and getting lots of great pictures along the way.

Take care

Louise xx