PLAYING WITH FOIL

Oh, yesterday felt so good! Sunny and probably at least 60 degrees out on my deck. Nothing feels better than the first time opening up the screen door and letting the fresh air inside after months of being closed up. It just makes a body feel good to breathe in.

The past week or so I was kind of stumped on stamping ideas. I recently bought a bunch of new nail foils and water decals on Ali Express, so I've been doing some playing with those.

This first mani I left on for a few days. It seemed cuter in the night time light when I did it. I was less pleased with it in broad daylight, but people that saw it seemed to like it.

Before placing the foils, I did a basecoat with Julep Janie.

After that was dry and topcoated, I cut up specific sections of the foil pattern. One thing I'm noticing with all of the floral nail foils I bought is the fact that it takes some finagling to actually place them. In order to have any kind of halfway decent look, I did a lot of cutting up into usable pieces. If they were expensive, I'd complain about that, but they were super cheap. I also find that I rarely use any kind of foil more than once.

One nice thing about the floral type foils is the fact that topcoat has no negative effect.

Then Friday night when I was getting ready to do my nails, I thought I'd try this black and silver number.

This one required some slicing and dicing, too. It didn't really apply all that nicely. I was pleasantly surprised that using Seche Vite didn't hurt the silver part of these foils, either. But since I wasn't too happy with the whole look, I only did the one hand, took a pic and then took it off.

After I took it off, I did a stamped mani that I'll show in another post. I really was in the mood to do my nails last night, too, but I really like what I have on so I didn't touch them.

This morning some friends and I headed off to Christmas, Michigan for a slot tournament at the Kewadin Casino. We came home losers, but it was still fun. It was almost 80 degrees there. 

I probably should have just sat my ass in the parking lot and got a tan. It would have cost me less.

ACTUALLY LEFT THE HOUSE

Yesterday I had my follow-up appointment with the doc in Green Bay. It was the first time I'd left the house in three weeks. The appointment went as expected, and my next follow-up is in January.

It felt pretty good to be out and about, and after we got back to town we went out to dinner. I'm kind of paying for it today because I'm pretty sore. It sure will be nice when I feel completely like myself again.

Wednesday night we rented a few movies so I played with my nails while we watched. It was the first time I'd done anything on both hands in awhile. I had kind of played just on one nail the night before but ultimately went with this foil.

I wanted my nail underneath to kind of be a natural tone so I used Zoya Loretta, which is a really sheer, very light pink. 

The foils went on reasonably well although the pinkie had to be done twice. It didn't really go on any better the second time, and you can see the missing area near the cuticle.

I'm still wearing this now, and I'm surprised at how well it's wearing. I think it's a really cute pattern. I like that the non-shiny foils aren't ruined by topcoat.

It's probably a good thing that it's holding up so well. I've got Seven here for the weekend, and since she has been bringing me toys non-stop since she got here over 2 hours ago, I don't know how helpful she's going to be if I decide to do my nails.

I'm leaning toward "not helpful". At all.

FLORAL FOIL

Blah-de-da. It's Monday, cold, gloomy and raining. Seems about right, right? Supposedly it might change to freezing rain or mabes even some snow later. So yup....go us! We luvs it up here!

I hope the dripping sarcasm didn't get on ya.

Yesterday I was sitting around with nekkid nails and just could not decide what I wanted to do. Nothing sounded exciting. That's pretty annoying when I consider I have all of those lovely new stamping polishes. As I wandered throughout the interwebs looking for inspiration, there was just none to be found. Even choosing a color combination wasn't happening.

I seriously spent hours pondering what to do. After I sat on the bed and just stared at colors and stamping plates for what seemed like forever, I opted for trying some foils.

I received these free awhile back when I ordered some foil topcoat from a lady on Amazon. I really wanted to buy some more from her, but she appears to have vanished into thin air. 

Topcoating this kind of foil isn't usually a problem. It's the glossy ones that give me an issue. Still, using Seche Vite is not advised. Without thinking I used the SV on my pinkie nail and watched the small amount of silver in these foils shrivel. Not so cute. I re-did it.

I usually work these by setting up two at a time. The first two fingers I did two coats of my foil topcoat. To add shine I grabbed the Square Hue topcoat they had sent around the holidays. It worked really well. Just for kicks I skipped the foil topcoat and just went with the Square Hue for the rest of my nails, and it worked great! At some point I'm going to have to see what it does to the the more topcoat-challenged foil materials. 

I'm looking at my nails, and the tip wear is not good. Luckily this is a pattern that really called for a white basecoat, so nobody would ever notice that I'm losing some pattern. But I do. This will be coming off tonight.

Just for kicks the other day I did a search for Sally Hansen Prism Turquoise Opal on eBay. Occasionally I do that because I want it. Bad. I found one for $39.99, but yeah, that ain't happening. I found another one that was at $4.99 with only one bid, so I added it to my watch list and crossed my fingers that I'd hear my phone warn me when there was 15 minutes left. I'm happy to report that I snagged it for $11.00, and I am one happy camper. I snagged the Burgundy Orchid one, too, just because I could.

Oh! And I also decided to buy the 12 piece Kleancolor neon set because it was only $14 with free shipping. I couldn't bring myself to buy the China Glaze set because I didn't feel I could justify spending the price when I know I probs already have some very similar polishes. But $14 for a dozen? I'm all over that shit.
 
So yeah, my no-buy is going great!!

TRIED IT - FAILED

For whatever reason, I got it into my head the other night that maybe I could somehow use my nail foils with stamping.

Since I've never managed to get my completely smooth, shiny, multi-colored foils to go on and look like they're supposed to, I thought maybe they would go on in a stamp format and look groovy.

I found a design and started by stamping it in black onto a coaster and immediately put the foil down and rubbed. Pulled it off, and it looked pretty damn cool. Great, I thought. This is going to work like a charm.

I painted my nails black and topcoated. I stamped with the black, put down the foil, rubbed and pulled it off. Nope! Didn't work at all!! Well, wtf? Why didn't that work?? 

I wondered if I could stamp with foil glue. Even bigger nope. The design I was using is one that barely fits on my nails, and I decided I didn't want to have to deal with worrying about size placement. I switched to a different plate that has bigger designs. This time I did topcoat on a ziploc, stamped and did the foil. Better. 

Then I decided I didn't have the patience to do it that way. I painted my nails silver and topcoated. I stamped with black and slapped the foils on. Game over because I was o-v-e-r it.

This is what I ended up with.

I hate it. A lot. I can't believe I actually did both hands and still have it on. The silver base I used is the Nfu Oh 61 holographic. I had also forgotten what a difficult application that particular polish has.

Basically, this whole manicure was a nightmare. Perhaps I'll attempt it again someday using some different method.

It ended up being even more frustrating when somebody posted a video where they were stamping a design on bare nails with black and putting foils on and it was working like a charm.  Bitch.

I do think if I were to try this with a design that doesn't cover so much area it would probably have worked better. At this point I also have to wonder if a couple of my foils maybe just aren't that great to begin with.

It was a cool idea in theory. It should have remained just a cool idea.

FOILED AGAIN AND A WIN!

Geez, in all the rambling about the new car in yesterday's post, I forgot to share something else fun!

Kev and I love going to the casino. Unfortunately this is not usually a good thing. But because I'm a horrible person, I planted the idea in his head last Thursday night, and since he is also a horrible person, he agreed to go instead of telling me to shut the hell up.

So off we went at about 10 p.m. We like going later in the evening when it's not so busy. Of course, because I'm a girl, I have a fave slot machine that I can sit at for hours if it's giving me something to play with.  Sometimes it even does well. Thursday night, not so much.

So after letting that suck some money out of my hands, I wandered over to a set of penny progressives that Kev likes to play. He has won the progressive jackpot on it twice over the years. It's never a huge amount. It is pennies, after all.  Those machines traditionally hate me. But I was pouting over my other machine sucking so I sat down and stuck in 20 bucks. It was cruising along pretty nicely, and within a few minutes I had accumulated 100 bucks. Sweet. That's my magic cash out number, so I did that and stuck the slip in my purse.

Then I put in another 20 which got me nowhere in a hurry, but I figured I'd give it another 20 just to see what it would do. And in case you haven't guessed the end of this story, I won the progressive jackpot to the tune of just over $1,800. Sweetness!!

From there I went and stuck that $100 slip into the machine that earlier hated me, and it had changed its mind. I'd put in $100 and cash out $200. Lather, rinse, repeat, and I cashed in $1,000 worth of slips on that.

In the meantime, Kev had been playing all over the casino and was doing pretty well, too. As I was wrapping it up on my machine, Kev was playing $1 Wheel of Fortune slots. These also traditionally hate me and never let me spin the wheel.  Since it was time to head home, I joined him over there, played two machines and lost $200. Oh, well....it was profit money so it wasn't quite so painful. Still pissed me off, though. The machine Kev was playing was doing all right. Once he decided he was done and wanted to leave, I told him I wanted to throw $100 in it.  Cut to a half hour later, and I had racked up another $600 to take home. 

All in all, a pretty damn good night. It's fun (and rare) to walk out of there with that kind of profit, but it sure felt good!

Sorry I ranted on about that, but I couldn't help myself. I still get excited thinking about winning that progressive.

I'm also looking forward to a fun-filled weekend. I posted on my ex sister-in-law's Facebook wall to ask if I could steal Razzie for a few hours or a weekend to puppysit, and she is dropping him off Friday afternoon for me to play with until Sunday afternoon. How awesome is she!!

So I get to look at this little face for three glorious days.

It's going to be awesome!

Of course, it also means that doing nails will probs be out of the question. Puppies don't care if nails are wet and are also more than happy to knock shit over.  But puppies still trump nails.

Last weekend I thought maybe I'd do some foils. They aren't something I even think of usually, but I was looking through some of my stuff and ran across these.

These went on like a dream on top of a basecoat of China Glaze Agent Lavender. I used a topcoat I bought on Amazon and was going to post a link to it, but it's currently unavailable. I left a question to the seller because I'm hoping she is going to sell it again. It's still the best thing I've found for foil topcoating.

This foil probably would have been fine with regular topcoat. It's really only the shiny foils I ever seem to have an issue with.

I liked this one. It looked better in person, and I wore it for a few days and had no issues with wear at all.

I'm hoping maybe tonight I'll motivate and try to do something Halloweenie. Of course, I say that now while I'm sitting at work; that nail motivation may have died by the time I get home.

And yes, Halloweenie is a word.