Day 4 - Ramblings and Roses

Before I get to the nails, I want to ramble a bit.  Don't want to listen?  Scroll away!  After all, this blog is about the nails, not bloggin.  But that's what I want to blab about, blogging.  

I haven't had a post for a few days, and I feel guilty.  How crazy is that?  When I started this whole adventure, I had no intention of posting every day....just two or three a times a week.  But then I discovered my dashboard.  What is it about that descending visits graph that makes me anxious?  I know, I know, it's my type A popping in, but she is so hard to ignore.  Blogging is a labor of love, especially when it is about something that you create, in my case nail art.  Coming up with the designs, finding color combos, polish...wait for dry time...polish again, photograph, edit the pics, compose and post....Yeah, a lot of labor.  The LOVE is all there in the labor, but I know myself....it is all too easy to get caught up in the stats and numbers and soon the love comes secondary to the labor.

All this is to say that I am still feeling my way around this blogging universe and trying to find what I want and what will make ME happy....and sane!  So this is going to be one of THOSE blogs for awhile till I find my balance.  You know the ones, no posts for a few days, then 2 or 3 on the same day....once a day for awhile and then nothing for 3 days.  If this kind of thing drives you crazy, oh well.  This is my journey and I must follow it the way I need to.  Hopefully I will get it all figured out by my first blogiversary, but who knows, maybe not.  I have to be okay with that if I want to reach that blogiversary and beyond.

You all are welcome to my journey!  But be forewarned....it may be a crazy one!  Now on to what you really want, the nails!

Please forgive the horribly dry skin.  It is winter after all!

The theme for day 4 of February's Love-ly NAC is Roses.  If you are following my blog, you can probably guess that I am not a "flowery" person.  I am art deco.  I am vampish.  I am abstract and "modern".  Flowery.....not so much.  Plus the colors that lend themselves to roses are not really my colors.  I mean, have you ever seen me with a basic red mani (well, except that one during the Christmas challenge, and even that one was a little "out there").  So this one was harder for me.  I did a mani last month with the only rose stamp I really like, and I didn't want to repeat.  I have some freehand rose ideas pinned, but really wanted to go with a stamp for some reason.  So I went through all my numerous plates and came up with this image.

Now, this is Konad M65....sort of.  Can I go on a tangent again?  Of course I can, it is my blog!  I have a couple of Konad plates in my stash and they are of great quality.  They were my first plates and what started this whole crazy trip.  Then I got a Bundle Monster set.....and then another......and another.  Again, great quality, no issues.  Wanting to add to my collection, I got a set of fauxnad from a very popular online vendor who shall remain unnamed.  Don't know what fauxnad is?  They are knockoff plates with the same images as the Konad plates.  The price on the fauxnad is a fraction of what you would pay for Konad plates with the same images, so I went for it.  Don't waste your money.  Do your research (like I didn't).  Google plate reviews before you purchase any fauxnad.  The ones I got are not the quality I have come to expect from stamping plates.  The etching is rough and makes scrapping off the polish tricky and removing the polish with any cotton pad very frustrating.  Oh well, right?  Lesson learned.  But the sad part is that I steered a relative that was interested in trying stamping to this cheaper version.  Visualize me kicking myself in the ass.  I had originally recommended the Bundle Monsters, of course, but she wanted someplace where she could get plates and stampers and said she couldn't find stampers on the BM site.  I will never again recommend something that I have not tried myself, even if I have heard good things from other people.

Now that I have blah, blah, blahed again, let's get back to the nails.

I started with two coats of Sally Hanson Insta-Dri Quick Sand.  Actually, it was one coat right before I walked out the door for work and another when I got home.  Although I think most of the SH Insta-Dris are uninspired and mostly only good for stamping, this one actually has some personality.  Of course, I forgot to get a pic of it on it's own.  It is a peachy nude color with a very sparse and tiny silver glitter which you just cannot see in these pics.  And trust me, if you want a polish that you can apply one coat 5 minutes before you walk out the door and have a decent finish, then the Insta-Dri line is for you.  Great stampers too!

Next I stamped with Orly Synchro.  How to describe Synchro?  I would call it a toasted peach color with a blue to purple shift duo-chrome shimmer.  How's that for a description?  Seriously, you have to see this color for yourself to get a sense of it.  I even Googled to see if I could find a good representation, but didn't find pics that did it justice.  If you are actually reading all this gibberish, I'll give you a little surprise.  You will have a chance to win this polish in my giveaway that will start tomorrow, a little Valentines gift.

The effect of using Sychro for stamping was interesting.  It showed the burned peach color, but at certain angles it looked purple, or even blue, which I tried to capture in the pics with little success.  You can see a little of the purple shift in the pic above.  

When I finished this mani in the wee hours of the morn, I absolutely loved it!  In the morning, as I picked up my coffee cup they startled me.  At first glance I honestly thought that I had broken a nails or something and had little spots of dried blood on my nails.  The rest of the day, they just looked like I had sunburned my nails with a funny pattern (tee hee).  This would actually be a great combo for a Halloween or zombie (think The Walking Dead) mani.  In the end, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it, just hoping that I was the only one who thought it looked a little "off".  What do you think?

Don't forget to go check out all the other rosey tips!