Seize The Sparkle's "Blog Every Day in May" Challenge - Day 1

I decided to join Seize the Sparkle's "Blog Everyday in May" challenge! Hey, why not? It's fun to mix things up a bit, and I've been doing nail blogging since December.

The first prompt is "Introduction and Recent Photo"

Ok, I can handle that...here goes!

Hi, my name is Amanda, and I am a nail polish addict.

*cue the peanut gallery saying "Hi, Amanda" in mono-toned voices*

Well, I am more than just that. I am a mother of four. My oldest is 17 and my youngest is 9 months. I am currently a stay-at-home-mom.

I am engaged to a handsome Japanese man who is currently living in Japan, while we are in the United States. We are working on a fiance' visa so he can come here and meet his little boy in person for the first time.

I have many passions. I love dancing, blues music, hippy festivals, nature photography (anything photography), collecting tea cups and tea pots, Hello Kitty, organic gardening, farmer's markets, going to the mall with my kids, fashion magazines, jewelry making (especially with semi-precious gemstones), chasing butterflies and bees, sniffing flowers, smiling, giggling (a lot), wine tastings, studying anthropology (cultural studies), natural and alternative medicine, taking rides in the countryside, grocery shopping at natural markets...

I started this nail art journey to help myself combat depression, postpartum depression and to become more connected with other women. So far it has been an amazing journey! I have learned so much about nail art and I have started a Facebook page which acts as a daily creative outlet that I can share with old friends and new friends.

You can check that out by clicking the tab on the right -hand column of this blog. :)

So I guess I have to include a recent photo. I have a couple I can add here.

This is me and my son, Josiah Satoshi. It's just cell phone picture from Instagram, but I love it. This was taken two days ago at one of our local plants nurseries. We LOVE plant nurseries. :)

This is me with my daughter, Willow Crystal Isabelle. It was taken at our favorite local park next to the pond with the tribute to our town's Japanese sister city.

If you would like to join this challenge, you can hop on over to Seize the Sparkle's blog and get the low down.

So that's it for now.

It's May 5th so I have 4 more days of this challenge to make up for.

Bye for now...

Oceanic Water-Spotting Manicure

I had the pleasure of doing another water-potting manicure. I say it was a pleasure because once you get the hang of it, meaning once you find the right body spray to use, it really is fun. This is my contribution to Crumpet's Nail Tarts 52 Week Challenge for April 27-May 3rd.

The base color I used is a beautiful China Glaze color called "Sex in the City." It's a seriously gorgeous blue with a green shimmer to it. I'm in love!

I really loved this manicure. the gold coin sequins turned out perfect on both hands. I have to thank my sweetie in Japan for sending them to me.

After I did the water spotting technique, I added a coat of my Seche Vite fast drying top coat, and then I applied the gold decals. Then I topped it off with one more really thick coat of Seche Vite.

I love the way it looks in the sunlight...

I especially love how my index finger turned out...

I also wanted to share this silly picture of me squeezing my baby's cheeks! It's totally relevant since I have my oceanic manicure going on in the picture. ;)

I am thoroughly enjoying this challenge, even though I am jumping in part way through the prompts. I need to work on doing an "outline"manicure next. No clue how that will turn out!

Cover Girl Lip Lava Review

I was pretty excited to try these. I try a few new lip glosses and lip sticks every month. The colors of these are so beautiful and vibrant. I wanted to love them!

Just to make this short and sweet....they suck. The color stayed on my lips for MAYBE 20 minutes? Possibly 30 minutes. The formula was very thin and just wore off after just taking like one sip of water.

Totally not worth the money in my opinion.

I'm sorry I don't have swatches of them them on my lips, but I'm not willing to show my ugly mug quite yet.

I bought the two middle colors at Walmart for between $6-7.

If you're just wearing them for a photo shoot or something, you could, but don't expect to get ANY wear out of them.

Colorful Water Marble Manicure and New Video Tutorial on YouTube!

Last night I did a really fun and colorful water marble design with some great polishes. I also made another video tutorial for my new YouTube channel (Click the link!)! My videos aren't great or anything, but it's just a start and I love doing it.

I love how fun and cheery this manicure is, and of course I plan on doing many more water marble manicures in the future.

I was going to add rhinestones or gold studs to it to dress it up a bit, but decided to take some pictures of just the result of the technique.

This kinda makes me want to go to a music festival...

I used Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Xtreme Wear polish to do this. The colors spread really well on the water.

The colors I used are:

Fuscha Power
Tan Lime
Mellow Yellow
Pucker Up
Sun Kissed
Blue Me Away

If you like water marbling, you might want to check out this kind of polish. They were about $2.50 per bottle at Walmart.

Silver Glitter Manicure with Holographic Stars

I did this mani a while back, but never wrote up a blog entry on it. I had to cut off my nails because they were in rough shape, so I decided to make them super sparkly to take my mind off of losing my long nails.

This was inspired by a manicure that I found that used various kinds of silver glitter.
I don't know who did this manicure, so if it's yours just let me know and I can give you credit (and a link back) for your work. :)

I didn't have all of those funky silver glitters, so I just used what I had on hand and came up with this...

I used the silver glitter two ways; The first way that I used it was just by dipping my finger into the glitter (in a bottle cap), with wet silver polish on my nails, and I let it dry just how it landed on my nail. I did this on my index and pinkie finger.

The second way I used it was just the same as the first, but I used my fan brush to flatten the glitter, by gently tapping it down to make the flat surface of the glitter parallel to my nail. That made the nice flat look even more shiny than the randomly placed glitter.

I topped everything off with a coat of Seche Vite top coat.

Here's some of the pretty supplies I used. The silver loose glitter is just something I picked up in a pack of craft glitter from Walmart. The stars came from a set that I got at the Dollar Tree. I bought a set of 15 nail art brushes from ebay, which included two fan brushes.

I used Sally Hansen Hard as Nails "Celeb City" as a base color. One of my favorite colors.

So that's it for this one! I just wanted to add this to my collection here on my blog.

I hope you enjoy the sparkles today...

He Picks My Polish- April 2015 "Mint Chocolate Chip" Manicure

I have to admit that I was pretty scared of how this would turn out, just like the rest of the participants. It's certainly NOT one of my favorite manicures! ...but it was a fun challenge. My fiance' sent me a nice package of nail art stuff from Japan. You can see the post about that HERE. :)

Some of the things in the package were picked by him, and some by his mother. I had to ask him to make sure I was using the products he picked out. He did pretty good for a guy!

I had to use pastel blue, a strange pastel green, an opalescent fine glitter polish and a black and white confetti polish. He also sent a pack of decals, so to be fair I also incorporated one of the types of decals in that pack.

~ Base color is pastel green.

~ I added the black and white confetti to my ring and index fingers, being careful to distribute the confetti as evenly as my patience could stand!

~ I added the opalescent glitter to thumb, middle and pinky fingers.

~ I added a pretty rhinestone on each middle finger (that reminds me of beautiful chalcedony stones!)

~ I used a dotting tools to make three pastel blue dots on thumb and pinky finger, four dots on each middle finger.

~ I took one single piece of black confetti glitter and applied them on top of each pastel blue dot.

~ I topped it all off with Seche Vite top coat.

This was a totally weird manicure, and honestly I only wore it for four hours!

I went shopping, got some compliments on it, and then ended up going home with 14 NEW BOTTLES OF POLISH (Wooo-hoooo!)

Check out my nail polish haul HERE!

I took this mani off to do swatches of my new polish for my new YouTube channel! Which is bringing me great happiness, even if it sucks. ;)



Getting Hooked Up on Bloglovin...

No clue if this the right way to do this, but here goes!

Just for fun I added a freaky picture of me with light up, plush snowballs stuffed in my bra. Follow my blog with Bloglovin