Above the Curve Moon Dance

I was so lucky to get the beauty I am wearing on my nails for New Years Eve. Above the Curve's Moon Dance was a limited edition polish. I am not sure from when although it looks like the most up to date bottle design so maybe some time in 2014 - I was lucky enough to buy it when a friend in the UK was having a destash. I couldn't find any swatches on line, but I could see from the pic that it was dark, and it was Above the Curve so chances were I was going to love it!
I was actually quite surprised when it arrived to find it was a glitter polish since I know ATC mostly for fabulous holos - surprised but not disappointed, I love glitter too!
This is a mix of blue, teal, pink, purple and I think I saw a flash of red too, with tiny silver micro glitters, all in a deep dark blue / indigo base. The base is slightly sheer. Based on a quick swatch I did, I think I would need 3 coats for full coverage but I am fussy about how much glitter, so I did a coat of dark blue as undies first and then added 2 coats of Moon Dance.
I haven't worn dark nails with glitter for absolutely ages, it's all been stamping and holos, so this makes a really nice change.
Also, my blog was 2 years old yesterday, and I started it with dark glittery nails so I think it is appropriate to be wearing dark with with glitter now. This beauty doesn't just celebrate New Years Eve but also the 2nd birthday of Knitty Nails.
Moon Dance is lovely, it is a shame it's limited edition, I don't expect there are many out there but do snap one up if you see it!!! It is so dark and glossy but sparkly too - the coloured glitters really glow when they catch the light!!! Moon Dance is a really beautiful addition to my collection.

Above the Curve Moon Dance

 

 

 

  

Stamping and Saran wrap! Messy Mansion 20 and some pretty pastel flowers

Earlier in the week I was wearing Above the Curve Cold Rain, but I was bursting to try Messy Mansion 20, which has a sort of reverse image on it, where you are effectively stamping a background, and leaving the flowers as the base colour. I also had an idea I wanted to try out for a more colourful base which I thought would look good under black stamping.
I have done a few saran wrap manis and love the finished marbley look you get with very little effort, so I wanted to try a sort of saran wrap gradient thing! I chose 2 colours that went well with Cold Rain. Staying with the same brand of polish I chose This One's for My Peeps, a pinky lilac shimmery holo and Caty Perry-winkle which is a lilacy blue shimmery holo. Both these polishes have great opacity so I was pretty certain they'd work for a saran wrap mani.
I used the pinky one to do the lower half of my nails and the blue one for the tips and allowed the colours just to meet in the middle. I think the combination of colours look lovely together and had I not been so keen to stamp, I would probably have worn the mani just like that for a day.
I took a couple of pics and then started stamping. I used A England Camelot to stamp with and I did have a bit of a problem picking up the whole image so the stamping is not perfect. I do seem to struggle a bit with images where you have to pick up a lot of polish and I am thinking I should try this plate with one of my Mentality polishes and see if it is a bit more successful.
To the naked eye they look fine and I am really pleased with the finished look but blown up on the laptop you can see all the bits that aren't black when they should be.
I really like the black stamping with the pastel coloured flowers showing through - imperfections apart, they turned out exactly as I'd hoped and I absolutely love them!!

Saran wrap with Above the Curve Cold Rain,
This One's for My Peeps and Caty Perry-winkle

stamping with Messy Mansion 20

 

  

 

 

 

 

Above the Curve Cold Rain

Yesterday's polish is from Above the Curve's Best Things About Fall collection. Cold Rain is a delicate teal holo and it is really pretty. It is quite a green teal, and I think that's one of the things that is making me really love it, some paler teals are too blue for my skin tone but I am delighted with how this one looks.
I don't have a lot of pale, pastely shades but I do like this one. It is a lovely wintery shade and I can imagine this with some frosty nail art at some point.
Coverage was great with 2 coats and the finish is lovely. The holo is very pretty, not too strong and there are tiny blue flakies too although you need good light to see them.
I think the pictures are reasonably colour accurate and taken indoors with topcoat which did not dull the holo at all.
Added a couple of outdoor pics as the sun the sun came out today :)

Above the Curve Cold Rain

 

 

 

Stamping: Emily de Molly EDM09 and some sharpie pens!

Boxing Day was a nice quiet day, no work to do, all up to date on housework so I spent a rather indulgent afternoon trying out a few idea on my nails.
I've seen quite a lot of pictures and posts recently of stamping over nude nails and lead lighting so I thought maybe I'd have a little play.
My really nude nails are too yellow to do anything with so I painted a couple of coats of Leighton Denny Stunning as a base. Unfortunately I don't find this polish opaque enough to cover much on my nails, so I didn't even bother to take a picture, but at least it gave a nice base to work with.
I stamped an image from Emily de Molly EDM09 using A England Lancelot. I have to say that didn't do a lot for me either, I think I'd need to use a nice opaque nude like Nails Inc Porchester Square to carry off that sort of stamping but I'll include the picture anyway so you can see.
So having established that stamping over bare nails is definitely not for me I set about having some fun.
I don't have any lead lighting polishes, but I do have a lovely set of 24 Sharpies (a secret stash that my children don't know about or I'd never see them again!)
I coloured the central part of the image in blue, next round in purple and the rest in 2 similar shades of deep pink. I started dotting the ink gently, although some of the pens seemed OK for actual strokes of the tip. Once I'd coloured most of the nail I sprayed them lightly with hairspray and top coated them.
I had forgotten that some of the Sharpies are neon, not sure which ones and it wasn't obvious when I was using them but either the hairspray or the top coat brought out the neon-ness and all of a sudden they were way brighter!!
As this afternoon was all about fun and experimenting I then added a coat of Above the Curve LeeLoo which is a holo topcoat in a slightly pinkish base. Obviously this mani does not show LeeLoo off to its best but it was nice addition as it softened the overall look and I think the final result is pretty.
A productive afternoon and the feedback for the pics on Instagram has been very positive, so I'll be trying some more of these mani's and giving some serious consideration to acquiring some proper lead light polishes, although I do like the controllability of my Sharpies.

EDM09 over nearly nude nails

EDM09 coloured with Sharpies

 

EDM09 coloured with Sharpies,
and Above the Curve LeeLoo holo topcoat

 

 

 

Mini Hot Water Bottle Covers

I was doing some idle surfing a few weeks ago and came across this cute mini hot water bottle cover that Sarah from Crafts from the Cwtch was making. She promised to be releasing the pattern soon, so I ordered some of the hot water bottles from the Amazon link she had shared and stalked her blog until she released the pattern.
I hadn't done any knitted presents this year but I thought these little cuties would be great for my nieces, and it occurred to me that once they saw them, my two children would want one too.
They were pretty easy to make, by the fourth one I was just whizzing along! I didn't master the cast-on that Sarah suggested, I need to go back and look at that again but at least I know it exists, so it's something I can go back to.
I didn't use the wool suggested, just some oddments from my stash and few balls of wool I picked up really cheaply in the Deramores sale. I tried to choose similar wool to Sarah's for 3 of them, but went for a bit of a Jack Wills tie-in with the one I did for my daughter and that was the first thing she said when she opened it - "Hey, Jack Wills" so I think that was a result!
My son and nieces loved theirs too so I am glad I did these although I was knitting right up to the very last minute!

Mini Hot Water Bottle Covers 

Stamping! Snowflakes

I have some very pretty snowflakes on my nails today, thanks to a very last minute purchase.
Back in October, when I was only just trying out stamping to see if I liked it, lots of people were talking about festive plates. My cautious and accountanty logical brain said, oh no we won't be bothering with festive plates, we won't get the use out of them, so I didn't buy any. Then of course I discovered I really enjoyed stamping and the whole world of nail people seemed to be stamping the most beautiful Christmas manis, I wanted to be part of it and I'd left it too late.
I have a couple of snowflakes on a set of mixed plates but for whatever reason although the plates are good ones, these 2 images refuse to stamp, so that was it - no snowflake manis for me :(
And then, on the last posting day before Christmas She Sells Seashells had a small number of snowflake plates, so I pounced! The plate arrived the next day and it is so pretty - it also includes some hearts, so there'll be a couple of Valentine manis too.
The plate has a strip of various snowflakes and I selected just one end for this mani.
I stamped over the beautiful sparkly Above the Curve Gryffindor, using Mentality White Opaque, which I have mentioned before does seem to come up quite silvery.
The polish and plate worked well together, despite the frustrating need to clean very thoroughly between stampings, and my biggest issue was with placement since my stamper is also white so I couldn't see the image too well, and non perfect images that I would normally discard and re-do did make it on to a couple of nails.
Despite that the end result is a very pretty mani. The silvery white over the shimmery dark red looks so wintery. I can still see the holo sparkle, which adds to the frosty look I think.
I am so pleased I got this plate and I reckon I can get a fair few snowflakes manis out between now and the end of February, because it is bound to be cold until then at the very least!

Snowflake mani

 

 

 

 

   

Above the Curve Gryffindor

What am I wearing for Christmas day ? - well I think it had to be a polish by one of my most favourite brands. Gryffindor is from Above the Curve's Harry Potter Collection released earlier this year.
I bought mine from Sally Magpies along with a few others from the same collection which I am looking forward to wearing in the new year.
For Christmas though I wanted something sparkly, and I think this is perfect. Gryffindor is a deep burgundy red, which appears more bluey purple  in some lights. It's holographic but it is sparkly too with red and gold glitters.
I did find this polish to be a little sheer so I have applied 3 thin coats for really good coverage, and because it's so glittery I did use 2 coats of top coat. It is a real stunner, and looks different in different lights. Yesterday there was no sunshine, but I could see the red, gold glitters and the polish did look more red. Under my desk lamp which throws a very cool light it's almost purple, and the holo is just fantastic. Today the sun came out and the polish looked more red again and the holo was beautiful.
This was a challenge to photograph, I really struggled to capture its beauty. Flash pictures bleached out the colour, the sun was too low and made most of my pictures look really odd but eventually after discarding about 100 pictures I think I've got enough to make a blog post, including a fairly random shot I snapped whilst trying to finish my Christmas knitting.
The advantage of blogging after 2 full days of wear is that I can also report that this polish is wearing really well, no sign of tip wear and the shade is just very wearable. I think I've made a great choice for Christmas!

Above the Curve Gryffindor

  

  

 

 

 

Stamping! Mentality Beige Opaque over Smitten Seasonal Lattes

I have some more stamping to show you today. I think I had already bought the plate I have used today when Smitten Seasonal Lattes arrived, and I knew that whenever I got round to trying the Smitten this is the plate I'd be using to stamp over it. I first saw this plate on a posting by Anne from Betty's Beauty Bombs, and I just had to have it! Plate no 10 from CICI&SISI includes an image of coffee beans and it was that that caught my eye so of course it was the right stamp to use with Seasonal Lattes.
I was thinking of using a cream or white but I want to use white for snowflakes later in the week so I have used Mentality Beige Opaque. This has actually ended up looking gold, but I think that's OK - it goes nicely with the warmth of the brown holo.
The stamping is not perfect, I am finding different plates seem to need different levels of scraping, some harder than others, some in different directions or at a varied angle and I obviously need plenty more practice but I think the small imperfections in the stamped image add some depth to the mani.
The Mentality polish stamped well, and it was reasonably easy to clean up afterwards. I did smudge one nail when I top coated, I have to remember to float the brush very lightly across the nail, and certainly not to go back and do a 2nd sweep which is what I did on the little finger.
On the whole though I think these are OK, I like the contrast of the satiny finish of the Mentality with the depth of the shimmery holo, the glimmers of rainbow still peeping through.
No sunshine today, so I have some outdoor pics, some indoors using the desk lamp, and 1 with the flash.

Mentality Beige Opaque over Smitten Seasonal Lattes 
with CICI&SISI 10