Llama Lacquers Holiday Collection

Well hello ladies!!  I can't believe it has been over 2 months since I have blogged.  Wow how life has gotten away from me!  But I am back and I have some great news for everyone :-)  Llama Lacquers has a new Holiday collection based on the best Christmas story in the world, A Christmas Story.  It has long been a tradition in my family to watch this movie only a few hundred times on Christmas day.  I love the characters, the simple story line, and the awesomely descriptive and exaggerated voice over of an adult Ralphie. There were so many inspirations for this line I had trouble narrowing it down but in the end I went with some of the most famous parts of the movie.  I have many pictures to show you and even a manicure for each.  I am quite pleased with the outcome of these colors and I think they all look so festive! Take a look and then let me know what you think.

From left to right:
* Deranged Easter Bunny-a gold base with tiny rose hex and gold square glitters
* Triple Dog Dare-a clean base with fine rainbow, large white and bright blue hex glitters
* You'll Shoot Your Eye Out-a clear base with red bar, large white, gun metal grey, and red hex glitters
* Fra-Gee-Lay-a clear base with gold bar, small black hex, and square black glitters
* Daddy's Gonna Kill Ralphie-a clear base with fine white, red bar, and red and green hex glitters
* Fa-Ra-Ra-Ra-Ra-a clear base with white, red, silver, and aqua glitters

Here is a closer look at each

Deranged Easter Bunny

Base-Milani Gold Dust & Milani Black Swift
Glitter-Deranged Easter Bunny
Nail Art-It's So easy Stripers

Triple Dog Dare

Base-Sally Hansen Brilliant Blush
Glitter-Triple Dog Dare
Accent Nail-Spoiled Correction Tape base & stamp m59 using Sally Hansen Co-Bolt Blue

My nails are all all weird so this translucent polish doesn't cover up the yellow good enough.  Alas, there must always be something weird going on :-P

You'll Shoot Your Eye Out

Spoiled Correction Tape & You'll Shoot Your Eye Out

Fra-Gee-Lay

Sinful Colors This Is It & Fra-Gee-Lay

I love this one as it also dupes as a Steelers polish. In fact these are my mom's hands and we are watching the Steelers game today :-)

Daddy's Gonna Kill Ralphie

NYC Tribeca Silver & Daddy's Gonna Kill Ralphie

Fa-Ra-Ra-Ra-Ra

Finger Paints & Fa-Ra-Ra-Ra-Ra

So, which one is your favorite?  These make great stocking stuffers in the minis and starting tonight I will have 15mL available! 

Cyber Monday sale starts tonight and everything will be 20% off.  Also, the holiday collection will have a straight shipping fee of $2.50 no matter how many you buy.  Hope to see you there!!

Llama Lacquers

Everyone loves a Dotticure

Let me begin with another congrats to my giveaway winner Angie at Our Painted World.  She is super talented and I was excited to see that she had won! She chose two awesome Llama Lacquers,  Redrum from the Halloween Collection and Strawberry Susie from The Girls Collection.  I can't wait to send it all out.  Another hearty thank you to all that entered!  I truly appreciate all your support and the wonderful comments you left me.  I hope you stick around while I continue my crazy nail journey.  I'm sure I will have another giveaway in the future :-)

Ok, so on to my ABC challenge post.  This week was the letter D, and once again I knew what I wanted to do from the beginning.  I love a dotticure and there are so many different styles of it that I want to try.  I know it is nothing original, but having polka dots dancing on my fingers puts me in a good mood.  I decided to use some dark colors for this and they didn't show up as well as I would have liked them too, but I like it nonetheless. I am finding that because it is fall I have to use dark fall colors.  No more pastels for a while.  

Base-Finger Paints Bauhaus Burgundy
Dots-Orly Space Cadet and Black

See, nothing too fancy.  Space Cadet is actually a holographic polish that came in a french manicure kit and looks really cool in person. I couldn't get my lighting right and got a lot of glare.  These were the best two pictures I could get.  

Thanks for stopping by.  Make sure you check out the other ladies.  A lot of dotticures today :-P

A is for Autumn

In case you don't know I have recently started a new group on facebook called Llama Nails. We are a group of fun loving nail girls who just want to have fun with nails and keep the drama for the llama :-)  If you haven't seen....here is our adorable little mascot llama.  You know she wants you to do her nails, right?

So we have started a new challenge today called the ABC of Nails.  We will be going through the alphabet one week at a time! Each week we will post a manicure that contains something from the letter of the week.  It can be a polish name, a polish brand, an item on your nails, or even a technique.  These posts will come to you on Wednesdays! 

Obviously to begin with we are starting with A.  I wanted to do something different, but had a hard time coming up with something. The weather here yesterday was so beautiful.....almost fall like, so I decided to do an 'A'utumn manicure.  I love Autumn, don't you?  The smell of pumkin spice, crisp leaves, apple cider.  The sound of rustling leaves and kids playing outside.   Even the gorgeous colors of Autumn.  They have to be some of my favorite color combinations.  Russet oranges, dark reds, golden browns, and coppery colors.  I recently purchased an indie polish from Hit Polish called Autumn Harvest which is a gorgeous combination of sparkly fall colors.  I used this over gold and then did a gradient using some colors found in the polish with a leaf stamp on top.  I really like this gradient and I think it looks just beautiful next to Autumn Harvest and the gold stamp! I am so glad I get to keep this on for a couple of days!! Doesn't it make you want to take a walk in the brisk fall air and step on lots of leaves :-) 

Base-Milani Gold Dust
Glitter-Hit Polish Autumn Harvest
Accent Gradient-Ultra Pro Mossy Britches, Ultra Pro Burnished Bronze, & Finger Paints Picasso's Puce
Stamp-BM04 using Maybelline Bold Gold

Sorry if my cuticles aren't quite up to par :-(  Alas, so many other things going on!!

So, what's your favorite thing about Autumn??  

And hey....I have opened my polish store on Etsy, so please stop by and check out some of my Princess Bride inspired polishes! It's called Llama Lacquers :-)

Thanks for stopping by and I appreciate all of your comments! Please check out the other ladies participating in this fun challenge.  Lots of really cool 'A' manicures!

Days 26-28-Patterns, Art, and Flags

So I fell a little behind :-/ Fortunately I was ahead before I fell behind, so I didn't fall tooo far back. That sounded confusing.  Anyway, it has been busy and then I got sick.  Feeling better today, so you get three manis in one post! Amazing, I know. So, let's get started!

Day 26 was inspired by patterns.  There are so many freakin patterns that I am inspired by that I simply couldn't choose.  So I think I took an easy way out and did a mani using a bunch of geometric patterned stamps I have been wanting to try.  Excuse the messy tips....I didn't have time to photograph them right away and ended up chipping them a little.  Overall, I liked this mani, especially the base color that reminds me of denim.  And it happened to match my dress I was wearing that day :-P

Base-Finger Paints Art You Blue?
Stamps-Bm 203, 322, 319 using Sally Hansen Silver Swift and Spoiled Correction Tape

Day 27 was inspired by art.  I had an idea for what I wanted to do for this for a while, but wasn't sure I could get it right.  I have always loved paintings of birds on a wire.  There are a million of them out there.  All with different backgrounds and different birds.  I especially like the ones where there is a long wire and the two birds are sitting right next to each other <3  I started with a whiteish base coat and then sponged on a pretty purple.  Then I drew the wire across three nails.  I originally wanted to free hand my birds, but I was sure I would screw it up.  So I found a stamp that had a crow sitting in briar bushes.  I simple removed the briar bushes and used the little bird.

Base-Orly Decades of Dysfuntion
Sponging-Sinful Colors Winterberry
Stripe-It's So Easy Black
Stamp-BM 323 using Milani Black Swift

Day 28 was inspired by flags.  Considering the 20 year anniversary of Hurricane Andrew was this past week and hurricane Isaac has reared its head, I thought I would do a mani in honor of all the people affected. I chose the hurricane warning flag.  Nothing real fancy, just simple and to the point. 

Base-Spoiled I Tripped on the Carpet
Box-It's So Easy Black Striper

Thanks for checking out all of the manis today.  I feel like I did them a bit of a disservice by not writing much.  But I figured with three manis no one wanted to hear some long story :-P

Hope everyone is feeling well and don't forget to check out the other ladies manis!  We're almost done!!

Day 25-The Hobbit

Choosing a book to be inspired by is both easy and hard.  It's easy because I love books and have a million that have inspired me.  It is hard because I love books and have a million that have inspired me. I was originally going to do A Tree Grows in Brooklyn but I just couldn't find the right way to do it.  So I finally settled on my favorite book of all times.  The Hobbit.  I read this book for the first time while in high school and I have read it probably about 4 times since then.  It has the best opening line ever...."In a hole in the ground there lives a hobbit.  Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing to sit down on or eat: it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort"  In only a few sentences I was hooked. After being introduced to Gandalf, all the dwarves, Smaug, Gollum, the trolls, Gwairir, and many of the other characters, I knew I was never going to be the same.  Yes, I'm being a bit dramatic, but I truly love this book.  One of my favorite characters is Smaug, the dragon.  He guards his gold in a cave in the Misty Mountains.  I always pictured him with dark red dragon scales laying prone over his mound of gold snoring smoke out of his nostrils with one eye open.  Tolkien really evokes my imagination :-)
So for this mani I chose to use a deep red as my base and used gold for a gradient.  I then painted Smaug's tail on my accent finger and added a few rhinestones for him to guard.  I am absolutely in love with this red polish.  It doesn't look red in the bottle....more like a coppery brown.  I was pleasantly surprised when I first put it on.  It's so deep and dark and yummy.  It took two coats to make it opaque.

Base-Finger Paints Picasso's Puce
Gradient-Loreal Amazon Flash
Dragon Tail-It's So Easy Gold striper

Don't you just love a good book? What is a book that makes your imagination soar?  

Thanks for checking me out today! I appreciate all of your comments :-)

Please stop by the other other ladies' posts to see what books they are inspired by!

Day 5-Blue Mash

I have been eyeing this manicure on pinterest for some time now.  I have no idea who it belongs to as the link takes me to a social networking page that I don't have an account for.  But I have been wanting to do something similar and decided to do it for this mani.  I really like it.  I have so many blues and in so many different shades that I couldn't decide what to do.  I literally sat my blues out in front of me and stared at them until one of them told me which one to use. :-P I kid. No, my polishes don't talk to me, I'm not THAT crazy.  I did sit there for a long time trying to decide though.  Eventually, I decided to go with a metallic Maybeline and a glitter Finger Paints.  The Maybeline was called Blue Blowout, which I have only ever used for stamping.  I was a little disappointed in the application of it as it was very streaky.  I know this happens with metallics, but this was unusually so.  The Glitter was called Art you Wondering and took three coats to cover, which is also pretty typical.  Well, onto the pictures.

Metallic Blue- Maybeline Color Show Blue Blowout
Glitter Base- is Finger Paints Art You Wondering?
Teal Base-Sinful Colors Rise & Shine
Striper-Kiss White
Stamps-BM317 & m59 using Spoiled Correction Tape

This was my inspiration mani....if you want to see it on pinterest  click on the picture

Thanks for stopping by! I appreciate all of your comments :-)

Check out the other ladies that are participating below.  It is a great way to see so many different and fabulous interpretations of one color!