Cat’s Cradle Manicure: November’s NCC #1

Happy November! It feels like it was just summer, and now it’s dangerously close to Christmas – craziness! This month, the Nail Challenge Collaborative theme is “Manicures Inspired by Books.” For my first look, I’ve chosen as inspiration one of my all-time favorite books by my favorite author, Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

If you aren’t familiar with the book or Vonnegut in general, he writes satirical science fiction as a vessel for social and political criticism of the late 1900s. I adore all his books, and Cat’s Cradle is easily in my top three. It’s loosely about a mad scientist’s creation, “ice-nine,” which is capable of freezing the world and ending it all. But it really is so much more than that, so I highly recommend reading it!

But anyways you’re here to see manicures not hear me geek out over my favorite author, so here it is:

My Cat’s Cradle-inspired manicure

My ring finger was inspired by the book cover, and the other nails are modeled after the frozen look of ice-nine.

Here’s what the book cover looks like:

Book cover

How I did this manicure:

• Ring finger:
  • Base color: Polish My Life Pink Sandals… a perfect pastel baby pink creme
  • Taped off the V and used A England Saint George… an amazing almost forest green holo
  • Freehanded the horizontal stripes with Julep Cleopatra… a matte/satin black (PS – it’s difficult using matte polishes in nail art. If it’s not perfect on the first swipe, going over it looks messy!)
• Other nails:
  • Base color: Sephora Formula X White Matter… a decent white polish but far from my favorite. I feel like I need to keep all my white polishes in rotation though, so I used it 🙂
  • Used saran wrap to dab on:
    • Barry M Damson… a goooorgeous cornflower blue creme
    • Barry M Blueberry… a pretty pastel blue creme that’s very similar in color to Essie Bikini So Teeny without the shimmer but with a formula that’s a million times better!
  • A light layer of China Glaze Fairy Dust

So what do you think of this mani? I actually really like the geometric look of my ring finger. Maybe I’ll do that using different colors sometime! Have you read Cat’s Cradle or other Vonnegut books?

Check out more manis inspired by books by the NCC ladies:

Sparkly Nubbins

I can’t keep my nails too long for work – they’ll rip through gloves and hurt the tiny humans I treat. And we can’t have that! So I chopped them off recently, and now my nails are sad little nubbins. What better way to make sad nubbins happy than to sparkle them up?

 

I painted all but my ring finger with A England’s Saint George. It’s such a pretty scattered holographic emerald green. Love it! My ring finger is Formula X for Sephora’s Hyped. I love this polish too! It’s this shimmery electric purple that has blue micro-flakies. My pics don’t do it justice – it’s gorgeous! I also threw some dots of Saint George on that ring finger. I was rushing this part a bit because it was late at night and I was exhausted. So my dots could have been better, but I like the overall look a lot!

A few more pics for you:

 

 

And now in regular lighting (I did adjust the coloring a bit to make the polish look as it does in real life, so the rest of the pic looks kind of odd):

 

I also recently joined Instagram & Facebook as Doctor Crafty, so if you feel so inclined please follow & like me there! I’ve linked those widgets to my page.

An unfortunate foray back into stamping

I’ve been doing either simple one-color manicures or varieties of gradients, so it’s been awhile since I’ve done any nail stamping. After getting some amazing image plates for the holidays, I decided I needed to get back into it.

I got a few plates from Messy Mansion and am obsessed with them! I really wanted to feature the chevron images, so I decided to do a skittlette manicure.

 

Not my best work here. Apparently it takes a little bit to get back into the swing of stamping again! So I only kept this manicure on for a day.

• Base color: Julep Malia (a pretty coral polish from Julep’s recent Resort Collection that I got as an add-on for the January 2014 Maven box). Malia is very nice, but it was pretty thick and gloopy (yes, that’s the technical term for it). Maybe that’s because it was a mini sample size bottle.
• Stamping color: A England Saint George (an absolutely gorgeous emerald green holographic polish). These pics don’t do it justice)
• Image plate: Messy Mansion MM12 – I am in love with the image on my thumb and middle finger (too bad I didn’t stamp the middle finger very well).

I almost didn’t post this, but I figured I should share failed attempts too. Plus Messy Mansion deserves high praise!