Hello, Gorgeous!

Good morning, Kitschies!!  It's been another busy week over here in Suburbia.  Work "restructuring", sick kiddo, derby, new part time job for the hubs.  My head is spinning!!  The bestie and I managed to make an brief escape on Saturday for lunch and some retail therapy - it was soooo good to get out of the house for some girl time (when are we going again, Ms Zombie?).

I have a gorgeous polish to show you today.  I do NOT know why I waited so long to get this one.  Seriously.  One of, if not THE most, awesome polishes I own.

In the shade, this looks like your typical silver foil polish.  But don't let that fool you because...

WAPOW!  Silver holo awesomeness!  I know all you lacquerheads out there know already, but this is Nfu Oh 61.  Or, as I like to call it, the Queen of Holos.  I used 2-3 coats (depending on streaks) over 2 coats of Nfu Oh Aqua Base.

Nfu Oh has the best holos, IMO.  Strong linear rainbow-y goodness!

I just don't know what else to say.  Just stare and drool.  Stare and drool.

Happy Wednesday!  I hope today is a good one for you.

Big Days

Good morning, Kitschies!  Good evening, Kitschies!  I started this post this morning and got as far as the opening.  *sigh*  It was a long day...and we didn't even have patients!  We spent the day in training for diagnostic ultrasound.  While interesting, I can only see "normal" joints for so long before I lose interest. 

It was a big day yesterday!  Nate had his first day of Kindergarten.  *sob* 

He had so much fun (even though he rolled his eyes at going outside a lot) and he didn't want to leave when I went to pick him up.  And he was even excited to go again today!  I know *that* won't last forever, but I'm glad he had a good first two days.  When it was time to line up for his class on Monday, he told me: "It's OK, Mom.  You can go now."  OK...does that mean I can go to my car and cry for a little while?  I was good - I didn't cry...much.  My mom sent me a text about being and good parent and that made me tear up.  I had it coming from both side on Monday!  LOL

Then, Monday night, I went to my first roller derby practice.  And...OMG...it was SO much fun!  Seriously.  I was a lot steadier on my skates than I expected I would be - I only fell 3 times (I think *everybody* falls at least once a practice).  For being my first time in anything like this, I held my own.  And all the girls were so nice and encouraging.  I was afraid that they would be extra hard on the noob, but they really weren't.  The only places I'm *really* lacking in skills are balancing on one foot (picking up my right skate and touching across to my left hand <and visa versa> is *not* happening yet) and hitting/blocking.  I am so excited to do this!  I've wanted to do something more active for a while but wanted to do something different.  Ya think roller derby is different enough?  Yeah.  Me, too.

OK.  Enough of that.  Now for the *real* reason you come to my blog.  The pretties!  I've got a good water marble for you today.  Remember my last marble (it wasn't all that great)?  This one made up for that one.

I'm not saying this marble is *awesome*, but it's definitely better than the previous one!  I wore this in the beginning of June for my vacay to Cali.  I started with a white base (OPI Alpine Snow) and then marbled three ChGs from the Tronica collection: Hologram (silver holo), Hyper Haute (magenta holo) and Techno Teal (teal, duh).  My index and pinkie on my left hand (pictured above) were my favorite out of the group.

I don't know why, but I only got 2 decent pics from this mani.  And, wow!  I'm amazed at how much my nails have grown since early June!  It's hard to really capture the holoness of these polishes, but if you enlarge this pic, you can kinda see the holo effect on my thumb.

I want to do more water marbles, but I always have a hard time coming up with good color combos.  I know I have a really nice one still waiting to be prepped.  Suggestions for colors?  Lemme have it!

Well, I'm going to relax tonight and do my nails with a new OPI color I picked up at Ulta yesterday.  Have a great evening!

On Wednesdays We Wear Pink: Shrimply Divine

Good morning, Kitschies!  It's Wednesday.  Again.  Nothing too exciting going on in the land of Suburbia.  I'm typing this out on Tuesday night because Wednesday morning we have some lame training at work, so I thought I better get a jump on this before I miss the bus completely.  And I'm pretty tired tonight, so it's probably going to be a short post.

It's Wednesday, so it's time to link up with On Wednesdays We Wear Pink!

Quite a while ago, ok, a LONG time ago, I asked the bestie what color combo I should do for a funky french mani.  She said pink and black.  This is what I came up with.

I started with a base of SH Complete Salon Manicure: Shrimply Divine (thanks Emily!) then creating a chevron tip, I used Finger Paints: Easel Come, Easel Go and SH Black Out.  Then where the three colors meet, I added a pink rhinestone. 

I don't remember exactly, because it's been so long, but it looks like I must've used Seche Vite as my top coat because I have quite a bit of tip shrinkage. 

I like this mani, it's cute, but it's not one of my favorites.  I need to do more chevron french tips - they're different and there are so many great color combos!

Short and sweet.  My kind of post!  LOL  Check out On Wednesdays We Wear Pink for other great participating pink blogs!

And don't forget to enter my GIVEAWAY!

The Silver Lining

Good...Monday?  Really?  It's Monday?  Man!  The weekend went by so fast, it's like it didn't even happen!  And that's even with an extra day off.  Highlights of the weekend: helped the bestie move, went to my SIL's 16th birthday party, cleaned up around the house, started laundry, grocery shopping, went to my SIL's little girl's 1st birthday party up in the mountains...and that's just the highlights.  *whew*  And it doesn't stop this week - the whole month of April has been like that!  This is one case where I'll be glad if time flies.  The silver lining?  Apirl is more than half-over and May will bring us back on track (sort of).

Got some pretty nails to share with you today.  When I heard that ChG was releasing a new collection of holo polishes, I was geeked!  I missed out on OMG (just by a little bit) and the Milani holos are pretty, but they're just ok (the formula isn't the greatest).  I waited (rather impatiently) for Tronica to come out.  As soon as I got the thumb's up that they were in-store, I ran down to Sallys as fast as my little wheels would carry me.  I grabbed quite a few of them but have only used 3 so far.  This is the second mani I've done with Tronica.

This is ChG Hologram from the Tronica collection (indoors with flash).  It's a pretty silver holo that's not overly holo, but for a girl who doesn't have many holos, it'll do until another company releases something better.

Not that it really needed anything else, but I grabbed Bundle Monster plate BM12 and Konad special polish in blue and stamped these pretty flowers at the base of each nail.  This pic was taken indoors in direct sunlight.

Indirect sunlight.  Tronicas are best viewed in direct, bright sunlight.  Even without the holo bling, it's still pretty, just not quite as pretty.

I miss my long nails. *I haz a sad*  Anyway...the wear on this was pretty good, especially considering most holos chip very easily.  If you haven't picked up any of the Tronica collection, high-tail it to Sally Beauty Supply - they had a couple when I went a few weekends ago and they're having a buy 2, get 1 free on all brands of polish through the end of April.


You know what I just realized?  Easter is this Sunday!  I have some baskets to fill - quick!  Have a great rest of your day.  I've got some great recipes to share this week - stay tuned!!

Two for the Road

Good day, Kitschies!  Yep.  You're reading this right.  Two posts in one day!  It's much less chaotic here at the clinic and I missed a post on Tuesday, so I'm making up for it today. 

I know nail bloggers don't post many pedicures.  Why is that?  I know...toes are (generally) gross, but if you take the time to give yourself a pedi, why not share the pics?  Saying that, I hope I don't repulse you with my post today.  If I do...get over it.  LOL  Everybody's got toes.  Let's move on, shall we?

This is Zoya Jacy.  Isn't she beautiful?  This is a medium magenta with a purple shimmer.  The shimmer is rather subtle, but it's gorgeous.  Very opaque, I could've gotten away with only one coat but I used two.  I got Jacy from the Facebook offer Zoya had a couple months ago (in January?).

Toes!  I couldn't just leave this a plain pedi, so I grabbed my silver striping polish and a purple-ish rhinestone.  I don't know what's with the design, but this is how it turned out.  The hubs asked if it was "wings".  I don't see wings.  Do you?

Now, the second pedi is a little more up my alley. 

I started with a base of Finger Paints Easel Come, Easel Go (silver metallic).  Then using the black and magenta striping polishes I picked up at Ross (I think they're Art Club...I can't remember).  I was really surprised at how opaque the magenta was.  I was going for a plaid design which I got to turn out ok on one of the toes.  The other one?  Yeah.  It's plaid...though not like the other one.  Oh, well.  Nobody sees my toes this time of year anyway.  Good thing, huh?

Here's my question to my fellow nail bloggers.  Why don't you post pics of your pedis?  Or do you just not do your toes?

An American Holiday

Good Monday morning, Kitschies!  I hope you enjoyed your weekend.  Mine consisted of some time at the clinic (very productive time), a bit of time with the bestie and two of her kids and then cleaning and chores for the rest of the time.  I'm really behind on prepping pics for the blog, but I did manage to get one or two sets done.  This is one of them.

Last Monday was Presidents' Day here in the US.  I didn't get the day off, but I did a mani to celebrate!  Just a side note...my next holiday off isn't until the end of May. *sad Megan*


Here's what I used: Orly Royal Navy (after shaking and shaking and shaking for about 5 minutes), Finger Paints Easel Come, Easel Go, Studio M Magic Attraction and Art Deco nail art polish in red glitter and white.

A note on Orly Royal Navy.  This is one awesome color, but the fact that the sparkle *always* separates from the base color is the suck.  I don't know what the deal with that is, but if you take the time to shake it, the color pay off is worth the effort.  Blue jelly base with blue (almost teal?) sparkle is so right on the money!  On to the mani pics!

Full sun pic.  Ignore the tips - I had quite a bit of shrinkage with the silver for some reason.  The day after I did this, I filed down the tips a bit and got rid of the ugly shrinkage (my nails needed a little cleaning up anyway). 

I also got a bit of shrinkage along the edges, too.  I love Seche Vite, but I hate it, too, because of all the shrinkage I get (among other things).  I had been using ChG speed top coat (whatever the name is), but I picked up the SV top and base coats a few weeks ago at Sally's because they were BOGO, but ChG is my go-to/preferred brand.

If you click on this one to make it bigger, you can really see the gorgeous sparkle in the blue.  I loved this mani and I got LOTS of compliments!  I like it so much, I wore it for 4 days.  And without much tip wear and no chipping.  I'll definitely be doing something like this for 4th of July!

Oh, how'd I do it?  I started out with two coats of Royal Navy on the whole nail.  Then I took Easel Come, Easel Go and painted the outside corner.  It was missing a little something so I did one coat of Magic Attraction over the top of the silver metallic polish.  Once that all dried a bit, I took my red glitter striping polish and went along the edge of the silver polish.  Repeated that with the white and the red glitter again.  For the final touch, I took the red glitter striping polish and went from the inside edge, about 2/3 of the way down the nail and dragged it in a diagonal to the top.  Top with a coat (or two, I think it was) of top coat and you're good to go!

 So now that the awards show season is over, what shows are you looking forward to watching?

We Are Magic

There's a flashback for ya!

Happy Monday, dear Kitschies!  I hope you had a great weekend because I definitely did!  I took Friday off because the hubs was off work, too.  We decided to take the boys to Capulin Snow Play Area in the Sandia Mountains for a little sledding.  It was SO much fun!!  All 4 of us had a blast sledding (and tubing a time or two) and even Mason got over the fact that his little fingers were cold.  I took a couple good spills out of the sled, but I was having so much fun, it didn't bother me - til the next morning.  LOL  Let's just say that I'm not as young as I used to be.  Friday night, the hubs arranged a sitter (the first time a non-family member has watched the kids) and we escaped to dinner and a movie.  We finally got to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - very good!  I can't wait to see installment 7, part 2!

So.  Why the magic?  Well...a while back, I asked Emily of Wife, Check. Mom, Check. Now What?, if she'd be willing to pick up a couple polishes for me that aren't available here.  She said yes and I got 3 gorgeous polishes.  I finally got around to trying one of them out.  This is one of those car wreck (can't-stop-starring-at-my-nails) kind of polishes!

This is Studio M Magic Attraction layered over a gunmetal gray color.  This is more of a glitter than a true holo.  Meaning?  It's pretty chunky and rough.

Blurred for maximum glittery gorgeousness.  Both of the above pics were taken indoors with flash.

 You can kinda see the holo-y sparkle in this picture without it being so blury.  And no matter what I did, I could not get a good pic of the polish in the bottle.

Inside in direct light, you can see the bling of this polish.  The thing about holos, at least for me, is that they're impossible to capture accurately.  This is about as close as I could get to magic that is this polish.

Don't you hear the angels singing?  Seriously this is one gorgeous polish.  The downside?  It's thick and it's chunky.  But...nothing that an extra layer of topcoat can't cure.

One more pic for good measure because who doesn't like to look at pretty things?  LOL  Oh, and I highly recommend the foil method to remove this polish.  Without that, I would've sat there forever trying to get all the glittery goodness off my nails!  Check out All You Desire's great tutorial HERE.

Now on to part two of my post...





Last week, I was reading Dandelion Wishes and I noticed a cute little button on her blog.  It has to do with replying to comments.   I love, love, love getting comments!  But, do you know what I love even more than getting comments?  Responding to comments!  It bugs me so much when I go to respond to a comment, get ready to push send only to realize that that person is a no-reply blogger.  That makes me has a sad.  So...what do you need to do?  Enable your email!  How do you do that, you ask?  Well, let me tell you.  Go to your "dashboard". Click "edit profile". Click the little box next to "show my email address". Click "SAVE".  It should show the same address that your comments are delivered to. If you want email sent to a different address you will need to change your address.  Please!  If you want to join the revolution, please add this cute button to your sidebar to let everybody know.

Randomness

A bonus entry for the day.  The hubs is playing Star Wars on the Wii with Nate and Mason is napping.  I was going through my pending and pics folders and realized that I had a couple manis I hadn't shown you.  Why?  Maybe because they only had a pic or two or because they just weren't all that great (in my mind).  Either way, in an effort to start the new year off right and a bit more organized than when I left it, I'm going to show you some randomness.

I did this one for a black & white challenge on FAB UR NAILS.  I didn't really care for it, so I never submitted it.  Therefore, I never posted it.  Til now.  This is SH Black Out, Maybeline Express Finish in Shooting Stars (the glitter) and Finger Paints Papier Mache (white) with light blue rhinestones.  I'm still meh about this one.  I really like the glitter but it's PIA and takes FOREVER to dry - even with FDTC.

This is another FAB UR NAILS challenge, but I submitted this one.  I really do like this one; I don't know why I didn't post it on my blog.  This is ChG Foxy with gold and green acrylic paint and a gold rhinestone in the corner on the ring finger and thumb.

Love. Love. Love this color but it's super PIA to capture accurately.  This is OPI DS Extravagance - a GORGEOUS berry holo.  I think I didn't post this because I wasn't happy with the pics.

Another OPI.  This is Rumples Wiggin.  I like the color and the stamping (Color Club Wild At Heart) is cute, but I only got two good pics out of the mani.

OPI again.  This time it's William Tell Me About OPI.  I loved this color in the bottle because you can actually see the super dark plum color, but once it dried, it was darker and it was practically black unless you were in bright sun/light.  I think I wore this mani plain for a day and then added SH Hidden Treasure over top.  I liked it a little better after that.  Again, the pics aren't the greatest.

One more OPI for good measure.  This is Yodel Me on My Cell.  I do like this color, but it ended up be quite a bit more sheer than I expected it to be.  This was the standard 3 coats, but you can see on my thumb and pinkie that it could've used another coat.  Oh, and the stamps (stars done with Finger Paints Easel Come, Easel Go) didn't show up as much as I would've liked.  That's my big fat fatty kitteh, Sol, in the first pic of this set.

Zoya has yet to let me down and this one is no exception.  However, the pics aren't great and that's why I never showed you.  This is Gloria from the Fire & Ice Flame collection.  It's a really pretty light raspberry pink glass fleck.  The pictures aren't great (are you noticing a trend here?) and so it stayed in my blog pics file.

Zoya Mimi.  Beautiful medium purple glass fleck.  This is the *only* pic I have of this one for whatever reason.  This is more purple than blue as it shows here.  Why are purples so hard to capture accurately?

So, there ya go.  I get to clean up my folders a bit and you get to point and laugh at the horrible pics.  Which one is your favorite out of this?  And the worst?

Go KINGS!

Hello everybody!  How is the day going?  My day is...being difficult.  It seems no matter what I try to accomplish today, something goes wrong or something gets in my way.  It's nothing major, it's just little things here and there that cause the day to not go as smoothly as it usually does.  Not to mention the obligatory tension following our monthly staff meeting.  But I'm not going to get in to that.

Anyway...last week I posted on Facebook that I planned to do a water marble mani by the end of the week.  I asked people to suggest colors (up to 3) I should use.  My sister said I should do "purple, black and silver. GO KINGS!!".  And one of my other FB friends agreed with her.  So, off to their website I went.  Why?  Because I don't follow hockey.  I have no idea who the Kings are.  Rio Rancho even has a hockey team - I've never been to see them even though they play in an arena just a mile away from my house.  I like hockey, I just don't follow it.  Enough about that.  On to the mani.

Here's what I used.  China Glaze Spontaneous (medium purple creme), Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Black Out (black creme), Finger Paints Easel Come, Easel Go (silver foil).  I started off with one coat of Spontaneous as a base.

This is the left hand.  This is the first time I've used three colors and it was a little tricky for me at first.  But, once I got the ratio of colors down, it wasn't too bad to work with. 

The right hand.  Now that I've got this water marbling thing down (I am in no way an expert), I really enjoy doing them.  Water marbling is just one of those "practice makes perfect" things.  And I don't get how some people are able to get almost exactly the same design on every finger.  If you can do that, could you tell me how you do it?  Please?  I like that every finger comes out differently, but it would be nice to know how to do it that way, too.

I usually only have one nail that ends up being my favorite, but this time I had two.  This time it was the ring finger on my right hand (second from the bottom on the right above) and my left thumb (the bottom one below).

OK, so.  The purple is lighter than the official Kings colors, but I think it was close enough.  My sister was happy with this - and that was just with crappy cell phone pics.  Which, by the way, she looked at while at a Bakersfield Condors game (read: hockey).  I like this combo, but I think I'll stay away from sparkly next time because I used a sparkly color in 3 of the 4 water marbles I've done!  Any suggestion for the next one?  I already plan on doing a red and green marble next, so then the next next one.  LOL