Vacation Nails-Part Three!

This post is a whole lot more than vacation nails....its experimenting with layering again, a fantastic swap, vacation pix, matte polish and frustration all bunched into one! Let me explain....

While I was on vacation, there were tons of lilies in bloom along the many lakes we seen. Most of the lily pads weren't visible as they were about 30 feet from shore. On one of my last days of vacation, I finally found a lake that had some close enough to the waters edge to took a few pix of the lilies close up. This was the mani that I came up with inspired by the lily pad pix I took.



I wanted a base colour to represent the darkness of the waters that the lily pads sit on...not too great of an intpretation if I have to spell it out, is it? lol! This was one coat of Bloom Mena topped with one coat of Sinful Nail Junkie.




Here's mani in progress:

One coat of Bloom Mena that I received from Kaz over at Pretty Random. I've been a follower of hers for a while as she has some really interesting posts about hard to finds, etc. When I stumbled upon a polish she was looking for at the supply place time forgot, I fired off an email offering up a swap if she was interested. In exchange, one of my lemmings was attained with Bloom Mena. While I had seen pix of it that showed holographic sparkle, it was barely visible and I had a hard time capturing it with my camera....maybe in the sun, it would be more visible, but when I'm taking my pix in the wee hours of the morning, the moon is out, so not the best pix...maybe another time, I'll be able to capture it. I was also surprised that this dried kinda matte; I'm sure it would be more spectacular with a shiny topcoat, but I knew I was going to be layering and stamping it so just left with no topcoat.



Then added a coat of Sinful Nail Junkie that I picked up on vacation in Haliburton. Taking pix of this mani frustrated me beyond belief! For the life of me, I could not accurately capture the colour/flecks, etc. of the layering in the pix. Then stamped with Konad IP m66, using Konad white special polish. I purposely only stamped the one finger as I wanted to take some pix in the morning to see if I could get more accurate shots so put on a coat of SV and off to bed I went. Unfortunately, when I woke up, discovered I had some shrinkage. Took another pix in the morning; this pix is a little bit more accurate.




Just before I took off the polish, I matted it for fun. The effect of the layering is a little bit more visible when it was matted. This was pretty cool...if not for the shrinkage.



Here's thumb comparison...excuse the hangnails!



And pix of lilies that were the inspiration. I so wanted to get better pix of this area as there were both yellow and white lilies, but couldn't get close enough as the shoreline was all boggy.



These were the pix I got at another area closer to shore....do you see the dragonfly in the pix?



One last pix...



Thx for looking!!