Monday, 16 April 2012

Monkey See, Monkey Do Monday - Week 1

Hi Goddesses   




You'll have heard me rave from time to time about Pinterest, a website where you pin cool photos to electronic "boards".  This is particularly cool for a hobby like nail polish, because you can pin photos of polishes you want, manis you've blogged, and cool designs others have done.





It's the latter category I love it for the most, but for all the hundreds of manis I've pinned, I've never "gotten around" to replicating them.  Doh.  So all that stops this week.  I've teamed up with my Pinterest and stamping buddy Kristen from the Manicured Monkey and from now on, every Monday is Monkey See, Monkey Do Monday.    Hurrah!



Recently I've been seeing a lot of cool pastel gradients which have been SPONGED - like this - 

Pinned Image
(I believe this came from weheartit.com but I don't know who the original blogger is as I repinned it - pls let me know if you know).

Now, I love my gradients, and I love my sponging, but I've never combined them .... until now.




What I Used
* 3 polishes - I don't like lemon on me, so I went with CG Kinetic Candy, Zoya Caitlin and Wet n Wild How I Met Your Magenta
* a piece of sponge.  You want to make sure it's a fairly "solid" sponge.  Usually I prefer to sponge with a holey type of sponge, but as there's no base colour here, you need to ensure maximum coverage
* patience - it took 17 minutes to clean this baby up lol - that's more than a splatter OR a water marble :)






What I Learnt
* if you're using a polish you've never used before ... like say How I Met Your Magenta, just check that it's actually a creme and not a jelly.  Jellies do not work.  
* it's ok to sponge twice on each nail for better coverage and better use of your nail polish.  Just use the middle stripe to line it up.  As it's a sponged gradient, it's not going to matter if you're imprecise
* This uses no more polish than a normal manicure
* if you accidentally use a jelly, just paint on top of it afterwards (like I did), and if that STILL doesn't work, add a darker tone to the white edge (like I did, I used SH Back To The Fuchsia).





As you can imagine, there was a lot of clean up needed, but if I'd been a cleverer Crumpet, I wouldn't have used a phenomenally wide piece of sponge :(







This also has a "tie-dye" style to it, and I personally love that you don't get 100% coverage.  If you look really closely, you can see some "holes" in my mani, or parts where the colour is really thin.  Poshe is great for washing over those and making them look artful - personally, they made me love this mani more.





This is RIDICULOUSLY easy to do, and perfect for summer.  It looks like you've put a lot of effort into it, but wow, this is so easy even I can do it!!





Yay!!  Enjoy xx :)
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