Yup, It's Another Challenge!

Back in January, I talked about some of my goals for the blog this year.  It was a "Confessions and Resolutions" and you haven't read it, hop over HERE and may find out some funny/shocking things about me :)  In that post I talked about limiting my participation in challenges.  January I didn't do ANY challenges.  February was NAGG and AIS.  I have been looking forward to having the freedom to post Whatever I Damn Well Please in March, planning on only participating in AIS, a once a week challenge.  Then my life changed.

I am technically part-time at my job, hired at 9:00 - 2:00 four days a week, but the last 2 years I have been working 9:00 - 5:00 four days a week and 9:00 - 1:00 on Saturdays.  We were always a little short staffed at work and our family has been working on getting out of credit card debt, so the money was great.  They kept offering me a full time position, but I knew once the cards were paid off, I would go back to my part time hours.  It worked for them...It worked for me.  Then last July they warned me that I would need to go back to my part time hours once everyone was trained.  We still had a year to go before the debt was gone, but I wasn't worried....they kept hiring people.  In the last month they hired three more people and two of them just started training.  Usually it takes about two months to get someone fully trained and working on their own, but the end of February, they notified me that I would have to go back to my part time hours the first week of March.  This is good news and bad news.

Bad news first.  There are still five more months until we are out of debt.  This means a serious no-buy for me since my paycheck has been cut almost in half.  It makes me sad.  I know polish is a luxury item (some of you may disagree) and we are not going be eating Ramen so I can buy polish!  But I am going to miss the excitement of waiting for a package to arrive and unwrapping those little glass bottles of liquid beauty.  I have gone on no-buys before, but it was always for a month or two.  Five months is almost half a year!  Now is definitely the time to contact some polish makers and get some PR going!

The good news?  I am going to have an extra three hours in my schedule to play with the polish I do own!  Because of the extra time, I plan on hopping into a couple challenges this month.  They are all once, or at the most, twice a week.  And I am bringing back MY favorite self challenge - Fashion Fridays!  This is still one of my favorite things to do, taking inspiration from fashion, and have been still trolling the internet for ideas and pinning the heck out of my favorite sites, even though it fell off the blog for awhile.  Here are my plans for this month:

• Serious Swatchin' Saturday - This is my own challenge to get the beauties in my stash posted
• Stamping Sunday - Facebook group Adventures in Stamping has a different theme every Sunday that must incorporate stamping.  How could I NOT do this?
• Finger Food Theme Buffet - I am hoping onto the end of this one.  It is a once a week Tuesday post, very doable.
• Llama Nails Technique Challenge - Once a week Wednesday post.
• GOT Polish Challenge - Once a week Thursday post using "Golden Oldie" polish hosted by Crumpets Nail Tarts.
• Fashion Fridays - My own challenge
• Possibly one other challenge, once a week

Yeah, jumping right back into posting every day :).  This is good, because my tendency when I was working part-time was to use those extra hours for napping.  What a waste!  This way I will have something to look forward to when I arrive home early.  I'm sure there are better ways to use my time, and I may delve into those soon, but for March I'm playing with polish!

Wow....that's a lot of words up there!  Lets get to the challenge of the day!  Today's challenge comes from Llama Nails.  It has been forever since I did one of their challenges.  The nice thing about this challenge is that it is a long one (they started in February and it goes until the end of June) but it is only once a week.  The theme is techniques and I know there are several in there that I have never tried.  Very exciting!  The theme today is quilted nails.

I have to say that this is not my favorite quilt mani, but I do love the polish!  I started with two coats of Finger Paints Enchanted Winter.  If you want to see this one on its' own, jump over HERE.

I used DRK-B and Sally Hansen Silver Sweep to create the quilted pattern.  

I could have left it at that...and probably should have....but I wanted to add a little more.  I wanted a sense of those fancy quilted pillows that people put on their bed.  You know the ones?  People who actually care what their bed looks like use these useless pillows to make it look purdy.  I'm lucky if I pull the covers up, much less arrange fancy pillows on my bed!  Trying to get that buttoned quilted pillow look, I added some little half pearls.

The problem was that those little pearls just weren't little enough  They kind of overwhelmed the whole thing.  Plus I didn't have enough to do all my tips, so I tried the accent nail look.  Just felt overall unbalanced to me.

Here you can see it top coated to seal in those pearls.  You can see how pretty Enchanted Winter is with top coat too!  If I was to do this over again, I would use little silver studs...maybe even those little caviar beads....instead of the pearls.

Tell me what you think!  Is this a fail?  Am I crazy to jump into so many challenges again?  Have you ever had to go on a no-buy?  Did you go cold turkey or sneak a few in here and there?  What was your longest?  As always, thanks so much for stopping by!