#ManiMonday 01/06/2020

Happy #manimonday everyone! This week not only did I have a horse racing, but I also had a “Fashions Off The Field” outfit to match! So, let’s get into this week’s black and gold lace quote design.

Products used:

Stamping plate: Born Pretty “BP-L020” and Clear Jelly Stamper “CJS LC-40 Horsin’ Around”
Stamping polish: Hit the Bottle “Hello Buttercup”
Base: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat” and Essie “Licorice”
Top coat: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat”

I think this is the first time since I’ve been in isolation that both the colour and design were basically decided for me. It made for an easy design, though there were a few bumps along the way.

With the colour palette this week it was pretty straight forward as my Fashions Off The Field outfit is black and gold. The outfit is mostly black with gold as the feature colour, so that influenced the black base colour. The biggest colour decision was choosing which stamping gold to go with. I have three yellow/gold stamping polish, but this Hit the Bottle was the closest one to my skirt colour. It has more of a yellow gold tone than the old gold tone of my Born Pretty stamping polish. The other yellow from Born Pretty looked good as well but it was a bit too neon for the look I was after.

Deciding on which images to put on my nails was also easy. My skirt is made of a gold flower lace and luckily, I had an image that was pretty similar. It also wasn’t too solid, allowing for the black to still show through, so I went with that one. When I have a horse racing, I also like to feature a reference to horses. This week I opted for a quote so that it didn’t clash too much with my outfit or make my nails look too busy. I originally was going to go with “home is where the horse is” but it didn’t pick up as well. This “gone with the wind” probably matches my outfit better too, as it’s very whimsical.

So, deciding on colours and images was easy but then we got to picking them up. I honestly got so excited to start with because I thought I’d finally worked out the trick to making the Hit the Bottle stamping polishes work. The practice pick ups were pretty good seeing as we were only picking them up to see what they looked like on black (in other words, Mum wasn’t being too particular about her method). We did have some issues with the first quote, but then found a firm pick up was the way to go on the second quote, which ended up working on the first quote. I thought that obviously fast and firm was the way to go. However, sadly as we went on, the images got harder to pick up perfectly. As you can see in the photo below, my left hand looks amazing (which is the hand we did first). The polish is running low so giving it a good shake did seem to help a bit. Other than that, though, I’m not really sure why they picked up so well to start with and not later. Perhaps it could have been because the weather was getting colder or because the bottle had been opened longer. Mum did try then using a lighter pressure, but it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. Perhaps I’ll have to experiment in the coming weeks to see if it was the image or the polish (because this was my first time using this lace image).

Overall, though, this design is elegant and classy with a touch of fun. I love how the gold pops on the black and even shimmers in the light. It’s also going to match my outfit perfectly. If you were recreating this design, a single flower or even a quote about flowers would look super cute on the feature nail with this lace pattern. You could even do it in spring colours of pink and green for example. However, contrasting colours really does make the lace stand out.

Bye for now!