December Challenges - Winter Wonderland

Today's challenge for #clairestelle8dec was Winter Wonderland.
I started with the gorgeous dark purple of Freckles Polish I'm The Fairest. This was from the November Paint the Rainbow box and is a wonderful deep dark purple jelly packed with sparkly glitter.
This polish applied nicely but as it is a jelly, I probably needed a third coat or a layer of undies. I would probably go for undies as I tend to get uneven patchiness as I layer up jellies no matter how hard I try. Anyway, it is gorgeous, I love a deep blue indigo type purple.

Then I stamped with one of the very new and exciting Messy Mansion plates which I got from Nail Artisan. Messy Mansion have just brought out 3 new ranges of plates and this is one of the Tristaenia range. All the plates in this range are split so one half is the negative of the other - I couldn't resist although I did only get 2!! Obviously I used the Merry Christmas one for this mani.
For my winter wonderland I chose the street scene, houses and trees, and stamped using 2True Pro Metallica Artemis.
Then I added a few snowflakes with QA86 and then OPI Pirouette My Whistle, just to make sure it looked properly wintery!

Freckles I'm the Fairest

 

Messy Mansion Tristaenia Merry Christmas

Messy Mansion Tristaenia Merry Christmas and QA86

Messy Mansion Tristaenia Merry Christmas
and QA86 and OPI Pirouette My Whistle

December Challenges - Charming Tale Polishes and Snowflakes

I do like to try and support the UK Indie Makers, and last week I bought the Camelot Collection from Charming Tale. This is a collection of 5 lovely shimmery polishes and I have used two of them on today's mani.
I started with The Sword, a silvery white polish which applied really nicely and gave great coverage with 2 coats. It has tiny flakies in but I don't think I managed to catch any in the photos.
Then I did a gradient with The Sword and The Wizard. The Wizard is an intense bright blue shimmer although it looks very slightly tealy in some of my photos. There are little flakies in there too, which I hope you can see in some of the pics. The blue would obviously be more intense used as a polish rather than sponged on but I think these two made a great gradient.
Finally I added snowflakes for #wnac2015. I used QA86 that I bought from She Sells Seashells last year. This is a really pretty little plate and stamps beautifully. I used Avon Classic Fit and Hit The Bottle Snowed Under and lined them up as well as I could to stamp blue on white and vise versa.
I was really pleased with the outcome, the shimmer of the Charming Tale polishes was the perfect backdrop for the snowflakes, and I think you can see the little flakies in the zoomed in shot (not a proper macro as I wanted to catch 2 nails in the shot).
Loads of pics because I was so pleased with these :)

Charming Tale The Sword

 

Charming Tale The Sword and The Wizard

QA86 with Avon Classic Fit and
Hit the Bottle Snowed Under

 

 

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