So with the weather being amazing lately I felt like I wanted something bright and fun to adorn my nails. I delved in to my nail art supplies and came out with gemstones, glitter and some adorable French Bulldog water decals. Perfect! I then resorted to picking two of my favourite Barry M polishes so favoured that the names have worn off…
So which do you prefer? Pink or green?
So even though I’ve now broken my ‘no buy’ spate I’m still trying to use the unused, which brought me round to using this little tassel. Now why on earth I would buy a tassel to put on my nail beats me, but at the time I clearly was inspired (way back in March 2016), so I just had to go with it. Turns out tassels are now ‘on trend’ so does that technically mean I was ahead of the curve?…
To be fair, it is pretty cute and somewhat of a novelty being able shaking it around however in terms of day to day practicality I’m not sure how it would really fair. The gemstone’s pretty large and could be easily knocked off…
So at work during the weekend, we held a ‘Water Safety’ event to teach children and parents about the dangers of different bodies of water, simple rescue techniques and what to do should they fall in. It’s important to do at any time of the year but especially so with summer coming up; unattended pools on foreign holidays, warmer weather enticing people for a quick dip, days cycling beside the canals and so on.
One of the things that scare me the most however are rubber rings. And I’m not even joking here. Parents place their young children in to them to float about, giving them a free pass to leave their kids unattended safe in the knowledge their children are floating, unable to drown. WRONG! There’s several (reported/filmed) cases of the child flipping them over, ending up upside down, legs in the air, submerged in the water unable to right themselves. It’s an issue that really worries me as a swimming teacher. There is no easy answer to looking after children in a swimming pool, you must be watching over them and get them learning to swim as soon as possible. This is a horrific video, and even though I have no kids myself, it really makes me squirm. I highly recommend watching it as it’s such a horribly, perfect example.
So these parrot nail stickers were sent to me for review back in May’16 and I’ve not used them since. If you didn’t bother to follow the link, the sheet also contains bananas and toucans so it’s not really the kind of item that I’m reaching for all the time.
They turned out way too summery for this time of year, to the point where I was sort of annoyed by them. They were almost taunting me with their summer vibes, whilst outside the weather is blowing a gale and bucketing with rain…
So here’s another item bought way back in April ’16, which were some ‘leaf’ metal studs. However I thought they looked way more like feathers than leaves, so I turned this one in to a dream-catcher.
I used the dry brush technique (which I seem to be a little addicted to right now) to smoosh all the colours together and then used a very fine brush to paint the dream-catcher details. It’s a very spring/summer design for this time of year!
So my weekend was a strange combination of too busy and too lazy, so I didn’t produce any new nail art. I created these nails when I was reviewing the minibeads, but just didn’t include them in the original post. GIF making is fun, I just wish I’d taken a picture of every additional circle, how cool would that have looked!
So there’s nothing better than a fresh new towel! (Apart from maybe the combo of clean bedsheets and jammies) And I couldn’t believe it when I realised I had matching nail varnish colours. It was too fantastic not to do nail art based on it.
So the item that I’m reviewing this week are these cute ‘Candy Colour Mini Beads‘ in option #11 – they were sent to me from BornPrettyStore. If you’re not familiar with BPS, they sell a huge range of nail art supplies as well as household items, fashion accessories and stationary at fantastic prices with free delivery. Out of all the times I’ve placed an order with them, I’ve never had any issues other than having to wait a while for it but this is due to processing and shipping, my parcels have always arrived within the estimated time frame anyway so there’s nothing to complain about.
The little mini beads, and they are mini, come in a re-seal-able bag. They’re definitely a step up in size from microbeads and are described as being 1.5mm in diameter. I picked option #11 due to the variety of colours, as you can see there’s light blue, dark blue, white, light pink, dark pink, purple, green, red, yellow and orange – which is 10 colours in one bag, that’s not bad going!
When they arrived and I saw the colours and just the way they looked in the bag, a design immediately sprang to mind – sprinkles of course! (Anyone else get that upon seeing them?) So I painted my nails like melting ice-creams and then used the cocktail stick and picker gel combo to pick up and place the beads. I really recommend using picker gel, or one of those picker pencils as using tweezers might send the balls pinging all roads!
I did one nail at a time, painting a thick layer of top coat and placing the beads whilst it was still wet to ensure they stuck well. I think they turned out really cute! Ice-cream nails are totally in as well because it’s summer isn’t it?…. I’m looking for confirmation as it’s been pretty rainy where I am lately.
I dared to top-coat them with Seche Vite as it is notorious for smudging/melting the colouring off of things. It was pretty tricky trying to get in between all those gaps and I think I would have been better going for the splodging option rather than the brushing option. The beads actually fared relatively well; there was slight bleeding from the red, and a slight pooling of melted colour from one of the orange beads but the others seemed to survive pretty well! *cringe* Isn’t it horrendous to see your own work up that close…
If you’ve checked out the BornPrettyStore website and fancy ordering the Mini Beads or anything else, if you use my code ‘AZYW10’ you will get 10% off all full priced items in your order. Let me know if you’ve ordered from BPS before and what it was!
So last Tuesday my mum and I went strawberry picking at ‘Craigies Farm‘ and we were super impressed. Not only does it include fields of PYO fruit, but it also has a farm shop, butchers and deli – I picked up some lovely cheese, bramble wine and some buffalo steaks, yum! As it’s a ‘working farm’ there’s also the opportunity to take an empty egg carton and pick your own chicken eggs, at 40p each, which is pretty darn awesome. (Yes that is a chicken butt! And yes those are my London Underground nails.)
The farm uses their own ‘berry scale’ to communicate which fruit is good to pick and how easy it will be to find; out of 5 berries, Strawberries were at 2 and Rasberries were at 3 so we chose to pick them both. Gooseberries were at 1 on the scale, but I have no idea what to do with gooseberries anyway so I left them well alone!
As you can see from the following pictures I came home with loads of strawberries. To ensure I didn’t sicken myself of eating them chopped up with cream, I decided to make some Strawberry Tarts, Strawberry Vodka and Strawberry Nail Art! I shared the Strawberry tarts with my family and they seemed to go down a treat, the ones I ate were certainly tasty. Regarding the vodka, I’ve yet to try it as it’s for a special occasion later this month.
So as promised, here is the nail art to tie in with my new polish collection (‘A Squeeze of Citrus‘).
First up to be featured are some lemons, with lemon nail art painted on the polish named ‘Lemon Juice’ (with OPI ‘Yallapalooza’ as base colour). It’s the first time I’ve ever painted a lemon and I think it turned out kinda cute!
Next up we have some limes (I always have tonnes in the house as I’m a massive Rum lover), helping to show off the polish ‘Lime Twist’ adorned with a little lime wedge. (Base colour, OPI ‘My gecko does tricks’). Again I was sort of proud of it, having never painted a lime before.
Lastly, here’s some (seriously juicy) oranges to highlight the polish ‘Orange Peel’. (Base colour is an old Barry M, it’s label is too worn to make out). I’m not so chuffed with my orange slice, I just couldn’t get it right and then once I sliced one of the oranges in half I realised my version looked nothing like it. I have too much inbetweeny rind and not enough outside rind. Never mind, 2 out of three ain’t bad.
WonderfulWolf 