MCC Day 2 - Candycanes

Kelly at devilishdesigns is running a Christmas Challenge, and this is Day 2..

Candycanes!

Here is a closer shot for you. I like this, its pretty simple but I keep glancing down and smiling, I don't know.

I did this freehand. I considered taping but thinking about all that time waiting for everything to be 100% dry just made me want to pull out my hair, so I took a walk on the wild side. What can I say, I'm just crazy like that.

Right below this is my right hand, you can see that the lines are a little thicker and slightly more woobly, but good try left hand, good try. You didn't embarrass us or anything at least.

Back to my left hand though.

As for the polish I used, the white is Heaven White by Misa, and the pink/red is Sally Hansen's Hi-Res. The green is Sally Hansen's Hi-Def from the same HD set. Over top of it all I used Claire's glow in the dark nail polish, which is a surprise hit for me. I originally bought it just because, well, it was glow in the dark and that was awesome, but it has some great, subtle glitter in it and every time I see my nails glowing it really just tickles me, so I've grown to adore the stuff.

Shew, so that was a lot of pictures, but I had fun with this and the increasingly rare sun was out and shining when I wanted to take my pictures so I indulged. See you for the next day in this challenge!

Blue Jelly Sandwich

Ooh, look how pretty this is! Glittery lil jelly sandwich, aren't you cute!

To anyone who hasn't done this before, it looks really very neat in real life. The picture shows it in high detail and close up which is one aspect of it, but the one I enjoy the most is spotting your nails randomly during the day and initially seeing a pale pale blue that slowly resolves into this intricate, depth filled manicure.

I used OPI Don't Touch My Tutu! for the bread part of this sandwich. It is a milky, translucent white that applies fabulously. This is my first time using all of the polishes in this design and I adore Don't Touch My Tutu. Amazing. My middle finger also has a coat of China Glaze Techno over the blue glitter. My excuse was an accent nail but mostly I wanted to try a glitter that applies well after using that blue one.

The blue glitter is from Claire's and is called Ice Ice Baby. I love it in the bottle, the name made me smile in embarrassed nostalgia and the hexagonal glitter chunks with the smaller pieces of glitter are really quite pretty, but it also comes with an awful lot of big square flakes of blue glitter which I didn't love and applies like spreading concrete filled with chunks of glitter. I entirely understand what other bloggers mean when they say they find themselves pushing glitter around on the nail cause whoa, that's what I did here trying to get a nice even distribution of glitter without too many of those huge hunks of blue.

It was also incredibly bumpy and sharp edged. The blue squares of glitter all curve slightly and if I couldn't get them to face down then even in the finished design, which had two coats of Don't Touch My Tutu! and two coats of SV over top was still sharp in a couple places. But gosh.. it is so pretty.. 

I think I'll do this again anyways. Removal is happening now.. I'm out of polish remover mid-removal and I'm going to have to pop down to the shoppers near by to buy more while the glitter isn't quite gone and I'm still saying I'll do it again. Maybe I'll start pulling out the squares of glitter as I take out the brush from the bottle and maybe I'll give that PVA Glue thing that is going around a shot for easy glitter removal but I'll definitely do it again.

What do you think? How much better is this with a higher quality glitter?