Pedicure and Summer fun

I spent this morning searching the internet for new blogs. Damn, there are some creative people out there! I can only hope to eventually get that good at this (I'm sure it helps that a lot of them do this professionally, while I just do it for fun). One of the new blogs I decided to follow was Red Hair and Black Nail Polish. The title just sounds so like me, especially in high school. Come July she'll be hosting a summer challenge to do a new manicure (theme provided) every other day. it sounds like a lot of fun, so I'd like to give it a shot. I don't know that I'll be able to do every challenge, but I at least want to hit most of them. It does, however, mean that I'll likely be skipping the last week of the Heroes vs Villians challenge.

I wasn't ready to take off my gradient manicure yet, so I decided to play around with a pedicure. I like pedicures because the big toe gives me a larger canvas, and pedicures seem to last forever--at least for me. I'm not as particular about my feet in terms of how they look, but I do have a preference for super short nails on my toes. It's a pet peeve. Drives me nuts if there's any superfluous length on them. But, that means it's generally pretty quick to paint them.

I used all Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Xtreme wear for this manicure. I skipped the nail growth activator (for obvious reasons) and the clear base coat and dove straight in with two coats of #270 Lacey Lilac. This polish doesn't even pretend to be a one-coater, and I've noticed when using it on my fingers that it can be kind of streaky and sheer even after two coats. For my toes, however, I wasn't overly concerned.

Once that was done, I made dot flowers out of #320 Fuchsia Power with #150 Sun Kissed for the center. I used a bead-ended sewing pin to make the dots and in the process discovered that the solvent in the nail polish removed the pigment from the bead. Next time, I'll be using just a metal pin, or, hopefully, I'll have a dotting tool. The last time I tried to do anything with dots I was just using the brush that came with the polish, which was very messy looking. Much better results. I don't know why it didn't occur to me before to use different tools. Maybe I'm just slow. :)

After the flowers, I finished with a coat of my standard Diamond Strength Nail Hardener. I think it might be time to retire this one, though, because I noticed it's rather yellow in the bottle (it's several years old). It doesn't seem to affect it on the nail too much, but it's likely the cause of that greenish tint I noticed on my manicure. Ah, poor me. I'll have to go polish shopping sometime soon.