Fancy Friday #39: Music

The challenge is music - and I stamped. I reused my Dior mani from Tuesday and used the gold polish from my YSL Manicure Couture Duo no. 2 to stamp with. Worked like a charm :D

One of the plates I bought from Moyou London last year was one of the Rockstar plates: Roxy Collection 06, so I immediately grabbed that and looked over the faces. I've been a Prince fans in like forever so I used that stamp as an accent. The other two images are from a random plate I purchased at Messy Mansion, CF09.

So here is the finished look:

Next Fancy Friday is "Something about me" and for that I've got something REALLY exciting to show you!!

Golden Oldie Thursday #3: Blue

Well I'm a blue kinda girl so I have a lot of polishes in that colour spectrum in my stash - and also some that are more than a year old...and some that are untried...

It's been ages since I last wore any of my butter Londons so I thought I'd show it some love here.

I really love doing tape manis but at the moment it is really hit and miss for me. It was slightly off today once again but I really liked the end result so I didn't want to change it. Though I doubt I'd ever get it as crisp as Sarah from Chalkboard Nails who inspired these nails with this mani.

So here it is with those slight faults that I ended up with.

butter London Blagger

Illamasqua Nudge

GOSH Attitude

Are you also a fan of blue polish or does it leave you cold?

And remember to check out the rest of these wonderful blue manis :)

Darling Dior - beware of a picture heavy post

So a bunch of my fellow blogger friends and I are having a huge love affair with Dior polishes at the moment and we decided to do a collaboration post on it to share our love with the Nail Polish Community.

At first I was going to do some nail art but I'm doing a lot of that these days so I felt like clearing the palate and just show you this polish as it is!

It is the most prized Dior polish I own and perhaps it is even the most prized in my entire collection - which is rather large so that is actually saying a lot...

It is also a really HTF (hard to find) polish and I've wanted it ever since I saw swatches of it over at All Lacquered Up back in the day. I finally found it pre owned last year and paid less than retail for it :O

I give you Dior Mélisse aka Lemon Balm!!!

This polish is so beautiful but unbelievably hard to actually capture in photos - it is a polish that is so much more beautiful in real life. There is a plum or maybe purple gleam to the coppery-taupe-brown like colour that really sets it apart - and that shimmer...

I wasn't let down by the formula or application either. Perfect self levelling attributes and a one coater, though I did two thin coats here. Easy to work with and as much as I love the flat paddle brush in my newer Diors, the older brush is REALLY fantastic to work with.

It really is an outstanding polish...

I hope you liked the look of this polish as much as I love wearing it. And do take a look at what Diors the rest of the girls have chosen, I know you'll enjoy it ;)

Fancy Friday #38: Favourite Technique/Go-to mani

This was supposed to be a tape mani since that is my favourite technique these days - BUT everything I tried failed in a way that I didn't even wanted to show you, so instead I did my go-to mani which is the Skittlette. The term was coined - as far as I know - by Nail4Dummies in reply to Marta from ChitChatNails in fall 2012 when Marta asked on twitter what one would call a two-accent-nail mani. You can go and check out her very informative blog post about it HERE where there is a basic how-to if you should feel encouraged to try it out after you've seen my version of it.

As you will notice I am not doing the same pairing of nails that she does but that is what is so wonderful about the Skittlette - you can combine it almost endlessly as long as you keep to the 1-1-2-2-3 rule. How you mingle that combination around is all up to you!!!

First off I had to decide which colours and nail combination I'd use. I set out that I wanted to do a 1-2-2-3-1 combination. I used nails inc. prince albert road for my thumb and little finger, OPI Purple with a Purpose for my index and middle finger and nails inc. montrose place for my ring finger.

So with the colour combinations covered I then thought how I'd "dress" them up. And since I put the glittery one on already I just had to decide what to do with ring, middle and index. I had some very large non-solvent resistant glitter circles that I've wanted to use for a long time so I put them on the ring finger. Unfortunately they went all Taco on my after ten minutes, as you can see several of them started dissolving. Then I stamped the middle and index with a dark lilac stamping polish, using my Moyou London plate Pro 02.
 

 And...TA-DA - a Skittlette mani to enjoy ;).

Please also go and check out what the other girls have as their Go-to mani/Favourite technique.

Jeg havde egentlig lagt planer for en vild tape mani, da det er min favoritteknik for tiden, men alt jeg lavede var så fyldt med ARGH at jeg ikke engang synes det var værd at vise frem her. I stedet har jeg så valgt min go-to manicure og for mig er det Skittlette. Hvis du følger linket oppe i starten af indlægget, kan du der se en introduktion til den type mani. Jeg laver næsten kun skittletter når jeg skal lave noget "udenfor" bloggen og instagram, og jeg er vild med den fordi kombinationsmulighederne er uendelige - for slet ikke at glemme at jeg får brugt tre lakker på én gang :D.

Golden Oldie Thursday #2: Stripes

I have quite an extensive High End Brand collection and I thought it would be good to use some of them for these challenges since I seem to only wear them once and then they live a forlorn life in their Helmer Drawers.

This week I decided to pull out two of my Chanel polishes that I haven't worn in three years or something like that - and they really need to be showed off more often they really are lovely.

I chose Blue Satin and Nouvelle Vague, and I really think they look gorgeous together:

 

Fancy Friday #37: Waterfall Mani

Friday again and that means another fancy one :D. I must confess I've never tried this look before though they've been all over the nail community after Sammy from the Nailasaurus made a tutorial on it. And I can relate to why. This is probably one of THE easiest nail art techniques to master and you get an outstanding look on your nails.

Remember this is my first, and it has its faults but that being said with some practice this could look spectacular. And that is before I have even begun to think of different colour combinations. So a total win here!

 

For this look I used last week's FF mani as base and used three Sinful Colors polishes and one Sea Lore Polish.

Sinful Colors Under 18:

Sinful Colors Fig:

Sinful Colors Rich in Heart:

Sea Lore Arctic Otter:

This is definitely not my last waterfall mani, I really love that the possibilities are almost endless with this look!!

Remember to check out the colour combinations from the rest of the Fancy Friday team.

Fælles Fredag er i dag med vandfaldstema. Det er min første waterfall mani og jeg kan med det samme afsløre at det bestemt ikke er sidste gang jeg lufter det her look. Det er simpelt, men ligner en halv million!!! Helt klart den nemmeste nail art teknik, jeg er stødt på i lang tid.

Golden Oldie Thursday: Pink

So the new year brings a new challenge. I'm part of The Crumpet's Nail Tarts but I haven't had the guts to get in on the challenges - but since this is all about giving some love to our older polishes I thought I should at least try to make an effort, I have so many unappreciated polishes that really need some attention.

The rules for this challenge are simple:

* the polish you use should be at least one year old
* if you haven't been a polishaholic that long, you can use the oldest polishes you have
* the polish should be previously used, but if you're stuck, you could free a yearling from Mount Untried (seriously, some of mine are reaching puberty out there)
* you can use more than 1 polish as long as it fits the theme and the rules

So straight on to this first challenge: Pink. Which is one of those colours that I really don't own a lot of - so it was really easy to pick this one cause I do believe I only have three pinks that I have tried. And to make it an even easier challenge(yes I am taking it slowly) I have only used one of them for this challenge :D - but I digress.

May I present: nails inc. montrose place

 

I am sure the rest of the awesome ladies doing the challenge have more inspiring manis than mine so do check them out ;)

A sort of Bucket List

Like last year I've been doing some thinking on what's to come in the following year - and just for the fun of it let's take a look at what I set as goals last year at this time:

So what's to come for me in 2013?
Mostly I'd love to do a refurbishing of my little corner of the nail blogging world so watch out for a new look during the next couple of months. And then I would hope to get even more posting done. I was going to join the Crumpet 31 day challenge here in January but who was I trying to kid? I haven't even finished my 52 week challenge yet for God's sake!! So I will be looking around for some new challenges throughout the year.
On my facebook page I was talking about doing Untried Sunday to get through the polishes I still haven't worn and the more I've thought about it the more I am liking that idea. So starting from next Sunday that little challenge will be set in motion.
And to set myself an overall goal for 2013 I have decided to aim for 120 posts for the coming year. Hopefully it will be many more but this number seem attainable to me and that is what is important I think.

As the more perceptive of you have realised THAT refurbishing never materialised though it still is a huge want for me. Untried Sunday was a fun but short lived idea - I might pick it up at another time though, if I can fit it in. And the 120 post aim...well we can all see that I was 9 posts short of breaking even with the amount of posts for 2012 :D

So am I disappointed? No, not in the least. Because this year I started a nail art challenge that I've actually stuck with - and only done bulk posts twice. My Facebook page got more than a 100 more followers than the blog. I got on Instagram in August when I got my new android phone - and after five months I have 259 followers which I find AMAZING. My nail art skills have improved dramatically and I seem to actually keep getting inspiration for manis that doesn't feel too "done before".

To me it is all about enjoying the good things in life instead of dwelling on the less fortunate stuff.

So what's to come during 2014?

Well I will continue the Fancy Friday challenge, we've been going for seven months and there are challenges planned up until April.

I will be showing you guys my older stash - or at least a part of it because I am joining The Crumpet's Golden Oldie Thursdays, with kick-off thursday next week.

I'm still keeping the refurbishing idea alive, I really want that to happen this year.

Oh and I'm aiming for 500 followers on Instagram when we get to September and 800 Facebook followers before summer.

I also chose the 12 designs I liked the most this year and made a collage - something I really need to work on...

Yeah I know, I got two pictures of my Doctor Who 50th anniversary mani - I really, really liked it

 

Have you made a bucket list? Or do you just take it easy and see what comes along? Either way I'd love to hear what you would like to happen with your blog during 2014. Feel free to leave a comment below.

Fancy Friday #36: Naked

Happy New Year to all of you, my lovely readers, I hope you all had a wonderful evening with lots of festiveness and fireworks.

The first post of the year is also the first Fancy Friday challenge of the year - and this is a welcome one since I have fallen ill with a terrible cold and a debilitating cough - which means less energy to do my nails. So I took the easy way out and found one of my few nude polishes in my huge stash.

Cult Nails Cruisin' Nude is quite gorgeous but I still think I look a bit weird with colours like this - though the shimmer really sets this one apart!

This picture is with flash - unfortunately it makes the polish look way more yellow than it really is, but it does show the shimmer in the bottle.

Unfortunately the shimmer wasn't willing to play without flash - but the following pics are colour correct:

Make sure to check out how the other girls interpret this week's challenge.

Denne uges tema er Naked. Jeg er syg med en forfærdelig hoste så jeg har taget den lette udvej: en anderledes version af en hudfarvet lak. Jeg har overvejet lidt at bruge den som grundlag for Waterfall manien som er næste uges udfordring, men nu må vi se om jeg har overskud til det.