Last night was Art Step. Art Step is three times a year and takes place during First Friday in Downtown Bryan. Somehow I’ve lived in this town without knowing about this existed until recently. I only found out due to two of my professors putting some of my work this semester in it. Pretty cool no? I was not feeling 100% last night due to some school stress and getting over feeling under the weather so I honestly didn’t enjoy the experience as much as I could have.  I hope to go back though, and hopefully in a bit warmer weather. Every time we sat down my rear was numb in a few minutes.

I wanted a fun and bright set of nails to get me through it because I knew there would be a lot of people around. Earlier this week I made a stop by Ross after reading from others that had spotted some nice Color Club collections at locations in their state. I hauled you guys! I walked out with Color Club’s Foiled & Beyond the Mistletoe sets as well as three interesting polishes by Cosmetic Arts which are really various Color Club polishes bottled under a different label. I’m sure there are plenty of pictures of the sets but I do want to share the re-bottled polishes.

In order these are dupes for Verry Berry Merry, Covered in Diamonds and Orna-mented. So pretty in the bottle and only 1.99 each! Orna-mented and Verry Berry Merry are not scented though which I thought I was happy about until I was told the scents are yummy!

Did I wear any of these for Art Step though? Nope! I wanted to try a layering combo I’d seen done with two of the Color Clubs. A glitter over a matching foil might be my new go to manicure when I’m feeling too lazy to do anything creative.

This is one coat of Color Club Jingle Jangle over one coat of Color Club Cold Metal. I used two coats of Revlon Quick Dry Top Coat here but rally I should have gone the Gelous then top coat route because this glitter is so very hungry. They don’t feel gritty but there’s not that glossy shine that I usually aim for. They had to design these collections to go together because each of the polishes in the Beyond the Mistletoe collection line up just perfect with one of the polishes in the Foiled collection! I love it!

I took these each under a different light but you can’t really tell. Oh well, maybe I’ll try some pictures in the shade and in full sunlight before I take it off. Look at how much it sparkles! All day today while working with my hands I’ve taken moment after moment to stop and wiggle my fingers in the light to see the glitter shift in front of my eyes. Last night I managed to see it sparkle in really dim light too. I took a picture with my cellphone as I was not about to carry my camera downtown at night. This is not going to be the greatest picture but I can’t resist sharing it.

Look at the sparkles! I think it’s funny how my cell camera seemed to focus better on the very distant background but for a really old cell with a 2.0 megapixel camera I won’t complain. I took a short video of it as well but YouTube was giving me trouble uploading so I’ll have to post that later. I’ll upload pictures of what I had in the art show soon, I’m still a little shy about showing them off so soon. I like to let things simmer for a few months while my mind decides if I really like what I’ve made. For now though off to bed I go! We get an extra hour tonight and I intend to use it in nice blissful sleep.

It’s a shame too because I don’t like pumpkin pie enough to warrant making an entire pie. Now if there was a recipe to make just a slice of pumpkin pie I would be all over it! These tiny pumpkin earrings I made will have to do! I made a pair for myself and put some up in the shop to share with someone else.

I love the scene from Cinderella where the pumpkin turns into a carriage  and as soon as I took this picture I imagined these sprouting wheels when I was not looking to carry a tiny princess off to a ball.

I could not resist hanging them on the side of my wee measuring cup. This one came in a set of four from a thrift store and I will never use them in the kitchen for fear of dropping them. So they sit out on a bookshelf to make me smile.

As if that was not enough it made me want to pumpkinize my nails. Yes pumpkinize! I’d originally wanted to do candy corn nails but I knew in the end it would just make me crave candy corn and the craving would not stop until had the precious treat in my tummy. Plus I really try to wait until the day after Halloween when it’s discount candy city at the grocery store and I can do my own adult version of trick-or-treating.

This is Cauldron Drippings by Lynnderella. I love this polish! Here’s how Lynnderella describes it on her site:

The first random glitter: every bottle is intentionally different. But basically oranges in an sparkling orange base, plus whatever happens to be in the cauldron at the moment. Does not contain eye of newt, graveyard dirt or possum particulate matter.

I love that each bottle is a little different from the next. So far in mine I’ve seen various sized hex, square, and bar glitter all floating in a squishy orange jelly base. It’s name is so fitting because you get a random bit of everything on each nail.

For this look I first applied NYC Spring Street as my base. It takes 2 coats for opacity but I just did one as any glitter would help hide VNL. Next up was one coat of Cauldron Drippings. I had a few glitters want to stand up  or stray off the nail edge on me so I pushed them down into place with an orange wood stick. To top it all off I applied one thin layer of OPI Y’all Come Back Ya Hear? to give it all that suspended in jelly look. One nice thick layer of top coat and we’re good to go.

As I was going through the pictures to upload I found where I’d used Cauldron Drippings as an accent nail for my mother’s nails.

So shiny! here I used it on her ring finger over Zoya Tamsen. If I recall correctly I used two coats of Tamsen here and there’s a tiny bit of VNL but the shine really draws your eye away from it.

That’s it, all of this talk about pumpkins and cauldrons is making me want to watch a nice Halloween movie. Hocus Pocus anyone?

Say that title ten times fast! It’s been a rough week and I’ve not made a post in mooooonths so I figured I’d come back with a bang!

I used quite a few polishes so here’s the order I applied thesm in to achieve this look:

• Revlon Quick Dry Base Coat
• 1 layer OPI Crown Me Already
• 1 layer Blue Jelly Franken (30% dark blue creme 70% clear)
• 1 layer Lynnderella Bibbitty Bobbitty Boo Blue
• 1 layer CND Silver Sparkling
• 1 layer of the Blue Jelly Franken
• Revlon Quick Dry Top Coat

It was hard to capture this, though part of that may be due to my fancy new camera and I not quite understanding one another yet. I got a Canon Rebel T3 for a photography class I’m taking and every day I learn something new with it! Anyway it is so pretty that I’ve spent the majority of the day with my fingers twirling in front of my face. It’s got this deep rich feel to it and the glitter under the jelly really reminds me of sparkling sapphires.

This is the pendant I made for my father this year. He had hinted awhile back that he would wear some jewelry if I made some more manly stuff so this had been a plan for awhile. I am glad to say that it was very well received. I always worry that I’m going to make something and it won’t be that exciting to the person I give it too and up until they open it and I can read the expression on their face I am a complete mess of worry and stress. He wore it out to dinner though that evening so yay! The only thing I need to do is bring my tools over to shorten it a bit.

I also learned a new method for making bracelets…I say learned but I’ve done it before in a slightly different way. It’s not that hard either once you get the hang of the tension at which you pull the silk cord at. Also, don’t sew it to your hand like I did!

Not the greatest pic but I did not have my light box with me. The bottom is hematite beads on a black leather cord. Did you know we once found hematite on Mars? I think that is so exciting. I want to picture some kick ass aliens landing there, mining it and dashing away to make killer space jewelry! The top bracelet is ceramic beads on brown leather cord. I love those beads so much, when I saw them I instantly grabbed two strands which is good because it took almost both of them to complete this bracelet!

I had to include a close up. Just look at the color on those, I love it! I am thrilled by the wide variety in the coloring from bead to bead and how each one has it’s own little lumps and bumps giving it a slightly different shape.

I’m sure everyone has heard about all of Charlie Sheen’s well…meltdown? I’m not a fan of the guy but I do appreciate the memes that have resulted from it all. that said, there are 3 polishes by Icing that sport Charlie Sheen tribute names. They are Epic Winning, Rock Star From Mars and Tiger’s Blood. I braved the mall awhile back in search of them and managed to find both Epic Winning and Rock Star From Mars though the trip itself was rather fun. Icing seems to cater toward young teenage girls so it is both bizarre and amusing that someone decided to carry polishes in tribute to a guy that’s rather lately all about cocaine and hookers. Mixed signals much? The sales associate there was in shock when I inquired about the polishes and as far as I can tell from no one at Icing really knows or understands why these polishes exist….but exist they do and I had to have them!

This is 2 coats of Epic Winning over 2 thin coats of NYC Skin Tight Denim. Epic Winning was insanely thick and applied like maple syrup so this is definetly not the best application out there. I figured I’d suffer through the first manicure with it and then have room to thin it because they fill these bottles up FULL! You could probably get away with applying Epic Winning on it’s own to achieve bottle color in 2-3 coats but I was trying to conserve it and give a background in case the glitter was sparse in some spots. This has also worn like iron on me. I’m on day 6 with only one chip that truthfully came from my thumb having contact with a cement block and not polish quality. What’s also really great about this glitter is that it’s smooth. I was able to do 2 coats of top coat and get a smooth finish and usually a glitter will eat up top coat requiring a nice thick coat of Gelous to smooth all the bumps out.

Super blurry pic to show the sparkle. It is amazing in person and really hard for me to capture on camera. It’s even more obnoxious out in the sunlight though reading in bed last night I realized the minimal amount of lighting from the bedside clock lamp was enough to show the sparkle well, it practically glows.

This is after 5 days of wear in the car yesterday on the way to Houston. No chips and I’ve got tip wear though I imagine most of that comes from not wrapping my tips well in the first place. I like how much it sparkles here too. Don’t worry I was not driving, I was in the backseat holding on to dear life in that awful traffic that Houston seems to always have. While driving around we had a car come straight over into the lane totally ignoring the fact that we were there. Tons of kids in the backseat and driving like a damn fool, if there had been a car in the other lane to prevent us from moving over it would have been an awful wreck with us in the center of it. We kept an eye on the car for the next few miles while he continued to swerve in and out of lanes and the whole thing made me want to puke.

Okay so big news, well big exciting news for me at least. Part of the trip to Houston yesterday was to purchase a drawer unit I have been eyeballing. It’s called Alex and it’s a tall 9 drawer unit and the perfect height for polish bottles in the top drawers and all of my polish related stuff in the bottom. I’ve acquired so much stuff for the purposes of making polish though that I’m thinking I will have overflow once I’m completely organized but at the very least it’s going to be a lot better. Currently all of my polishes are stored in a plastic 6 drawer container and the drawers just can’t support the weight of those glass bottles very well. I’m going to assemble this thing real soon(with help though!) and then paint it real pretty like and get my polish set up in a new shiny home. Yay!

Today is Father’s Day so I’m off to shower and dress, I’ll be seeing my dad in a little over an hour and I am so excited to give him his Father’s Day gifts and a little bit of that excitement is so that I can finally post some pictures here of the things I made for him! Double Yay! Happy Father’s Day Dad, I love you so much!