Enough! Take off that polish already! TAKE IT OFF!!

Back again? I know, you're dying to figure out just what else I could add to my manicure... It was pretty blingy and over-the-top as it was, could I actually do much more with it?

Silly lovey, of course I could!

I got an incredible package in the mail from KellieGonzo (who writes Also Known As, a rather kick-ass blog). See, we're been Twittering back and forth for a bit now, and she's as sweet as can be. Out of the blue she asks me for my email. Turns out, she says she's got a few Konad plates that she unfortunately hasn't been able to figure out how to use, and she wondered if I was interested in them. She'd noticed that I'm having a ball figuring out all the things you can use a Konad set for.

Well, I get to the mailbox the other day and find her package. Turns out her idea of "a few plates" is 14 plates, a holder, and 3 special Konad polishes! I kid you not, I squeed like a mad person! My husband just laughed at me as I went over and over the various bits, because it was just like Christmas! Honestly, y'all, I wanted to hug her!

Thing is, once I had those plates in hand? I couldn't let them just SIT there... I had to USE them. So I dug through til I found something I thought would be simple enough to go over what was on my fingers, but still fun enough to do, and simple enough I would be able to do it. First time Konading on my own fingers you know? So I picked out a simple dot pattern, and sure enough, 15 minutes later I had cuteness on my nails! I photographed it without topcoat, because I was afraid the Konad would smear and be ruined.

It wasn't, though. It survived just fine under my Sally Hansen topcoat, whose name escapes me at the moment. It's in here somewhere, though...

Problem is, those patterns are awfully small, and my thumbnails are awfully large. First I tried stamping my thumb vertically, but that left 1/3 of my thumbnail blank, which just ... I'm not ready to match up a pattern yet. Getting it on straight was enough excitement for the day! I cleaned off the stamp and started again, this time putting it at the base of my thumb. That left a bit of space at the tip, which I covered with the swirly bit there. It'd be nicer if I hadn't smeared it, but... meh. Bite me. It's my first time, and that's ok!

And there you have it. How I put more layers of polish on than any one person should EVER have on their fingers at one time. And it looked CUTE, too! Of course it finally chipped, and that chip made me crazy, so I had to take it all off, and now my nails are bare as ever. Funny how that happens... but I've got a lot of birthday polish and Konad plates to play with, so I'm sure they won't be bare for long!

Gosh Rainbow over Wet n Wild Eggplant Frost

Hi again! Lots of craziness at Chez Laynie, and I'm having such fun documenting it all. Around the blog, there have been a few changes- I've added a box on the left so you can ask me questions at Formspring! I don't know how well that's going to work, or if I'm going to keep it, but hey, it's a good start, right? Also, I've incorporated Google ads to the blog. Don't worry, there are no big flying graphics or blinky things to annoy you. But if you see something interesting in the text ads, feel free to click. I've already seen a couple of things I'd like to click!

I've also added a counter for my feedburner (holy wow, I had no idea so many people had signed up!!) as well as a cute widget showing off my Etsy listings. Not sure if I'll keep the Etsy one. What do you think? Is it a keeper? Ah well... let's get to the nails, shall we?

Oh my gosh, this has been the HARDEST look to photograph!! Seriously, I have taken more photos of my nails this time than I think I ever have, and that's saying something! Of course, that means you have to look at more pictures, but hey... it could always be worse, right? I could have broken more nails, or...

...oh wait, I did. Meh, no big deal. Worst case scenario, I always have nail tips, right? :D

Ugh, I'm all over the place right now! Let's start at the beginning, shall we? As soon as I picked up Eggplant Frost, I knew it needed a coat of Gosh Rainbow over it. I wanted to see how the deep warm purple affected the Rainbow flakies. (For the record, Gosh Rainbow and Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure are dupes... one has slightly larger flakes, but there's no real reason to own both, other than the fun of it!)

So, after wearing Wet n Wild Eggplant Frost for a day, I put a single coat of Gosh Rainbow over the top, then a layer of topcoat. This stuff was so insanely pretty that I simply couldn't stop looking at my fingers, watching the colors change as the angle of the light did. My husband laughed at me on more than one occasion for being lost in thought, just looking at my nails...

I also need to apologize for these first photos. I was so excited about this combination that I decided I had to take pics for twitter, even though I hadn't even cleaned up and was still oily from my quick-dry topcoat. (Speaking of, that's a post for another day... I'd be LOST without it, and it's cheap!) So the first few pictures are sloppy and embarrassing, but they show the colors so well. Forgive me?

The next day I went outside and sat on my front steps with my cameras, taking photo after photo, trying to get a video to show how this stuff interacts with the light. No go, though... the videos were all blurry, and utterly useless. I haven't given up on video yet, I'm just not at a point I can do it well enough. I'll get there, though, and as soon as I do, you'll see video!

I imagine the neighbors must have thought I was insane, sitting on my steps taking photos of my hands. I often wonder what my neighbors think. Once I'd gone to visit my dad, who lives at the end of a dead end, and there was the cutest turtle just sitting there in the road. I had my husband stop the car, grabbed my camera, and soon was lying in the road, camera on the ground, taking face-to-face photos of the turtle.

Before long, one of the neighbors came out of her house, terrified. She asked if we needed her to call 911, so that an ambulance could come. She must have thought he hit me with the car! We both said no, everything's fine, there's a turtle in the road! She looked at us as if we'd lost our minds...

Maybe she's right. I have more stories like that than the average person should, I think, but it's fun. I wouldn't want to change the way I do things... it's what makes me me!

My poor camera, though... it had the worst time trying to photo this combo. You really do need to enlarge at least a couple of photos, if for no other reason than to see the amount of sheer amazingness. The purple shimmer in the Eggplant Frost seemed to really step up with the Rainbow flakes, so there was an amazing amount of just ... I don't know. Prettiness? Downright crazy understated blingy goodness? Sexiest nail treatment since holographic polishes? I have no idea, I guess... I'm totally at a loss for words, at least coherent ones!

 So yea, I consider this to have been a very successful layering experiment. But do I stop here? Heh... those of you who follow me on twitter will know the answer to that one! Tomorrow, my lovelies... tomorrow you'll get to see what else I did to this!

Wet n Wild, Eggplant Frost

Whew! I finally get to wear some of my birthday polish! Actually, I was wearing it in yesterday's haul entry, but I hadn't talked about it yet. I'm wearing the Wet n Wild Eggplant Frost polish, and I have such mixed feelings about it.

First, there's the color. This didn't photograph anything near what it looks like in person, not that there's anything surprising about that. Interesting (to me, at least) fact- lots of digital cameras have problems capturing purples. It's something to do with the sensors inside the camera, but it's beyond me to explain. Just know that when your purples look blue, it's not your fault!

So, back to the polish... It's a deep, gorgeous blurple. You can see the blue tint in the bottle, but most of that shimmer is hidden, so that just the tinest hint comes out with your topcoat. It's a rich, warm royal purple, incredibly deep, and I just love it to bits.

I'm not sure why they named it Eggplant Frost, though, since this is about as far from a frost as you can get without being a creme. The tiny bit of shimmer it has almost disappears, which is sort of frustrating for a shimmer/glitter junkie like me. That's ok, though... it's so pretty, I could deal with it.

Except for one this. This polish was so incredibly difficult to work with. I don't know if it's just this polish, if it's all Wet n Wild Shine polishes (I have some others to test out, so we'll see, right?), but this one had me cursing. It's like after the first sweep of color onto the nail, it dried and became miserable- clumpy, draggy, uneven, and then it bubbled like mad. I didn't do anything different than I normally do, so I can't imagine what the problem is. It was frustrating enough that I'm tempted not to use it again, though.

The good news is that once I got it on, two coats was totally opaque. Adding my topcoat made the bubbles almost disappear, and within minutes I was in love again, my cursing all but forgotten. It's stayed on well (3 days so far, with extremely minimal tipwear other than 1 small chip I repaired invisibly.) It's a workhorse polish, I just wish it wasn't such a prima donna to work with!

I'm planning on picking up a bottle of thinner this afternoon, maybe that'll help it. As for this manicure, I've got a hint as to what tomorrow's post will be. ;)