Happy Halloween!

Hey everyone! An early Happy Halloween post, and Blessed Samhain for those of you who celebrate. I've got a busy day ahead of me and sadly, I'm not going to have time to experiment with the nail art I had planned, so instead, I've got a franken I made today combined with some witchy glittery goodness.
So. At the beginning of October, I was on Twitter (big surprise, right?) talking with one of my best girlfriends, Cindy of Nail'd and Polish'd. We were talking about frankening, and funky, fun glitters with jellies that we might could make similar to the idea of the Deborah Lippmann Glitter in the Air, only maybe Halloween themed. Cindy wanted a muted, milky orange jelly as a base, so I went to work on that. The result I posted on Twitter, and I've got it here to show you guys with some glitter toppers.
The recipe for this milky orange jelly is really, really simple. You start with about a half a bottle of clear, and then add approximately equal amounts of Ruby Kisses Tangerine and Wet N Wild Sunny Side Up. That ended up not being quite milky enough, so I added a few drops of random white - I think I used, again, a Wet N Wild. The orange needed to be deepened, so I used a few drops of a blood red jelly - the one I used was Sinful Colors Gogo Girl, but really any bright, blood red jelly would work. I had an empty Orly bottle, so I used that for my mixture, because they're one of the bigger bottles.
I do love making jelly polishes. They're easy and fun for me. My next one, I think, will be an uglyawesome olive green jelly. I've been envisioning it in my head.
This one I've decided to name Orange Crush, after the song by R.E.M. Obviously, I could have come up with a Halloween song to name it after, but I liked it so much, I've kept Orange Crush. Here's the song, via YouTube, in case you're interested.



Anyway, on to photos. I used a random glitter I found in a beauty supply store by a brand I've never heard of for the stars - the brand is LJL and there's no name of the polish, but the number is 27. It's a jelly base, lightly tinted yellow, which adds absolutely NO color on your nail if you use it alone, with glitter and stars. It smells like a Kleancolor, so be warned. I only found one of the elusive Halloween pumpkin glitters this year, but it's the one I wanted most - holographic moons. I added that to my nails as well. The small glitter in that almost looks like pieces of pepper, haha! It's not fine glitter at all, as you can see. The second photo is a better look at the bottle of Orange Crush.

Anyway! I hope you all have a safe, fun and wonderful Halloween tonight. Enjoy your day!

My Nail Graffiti franken: Pumpkin Patch

You guys remember my previous post about the frankens I won from My Nail Graffiti? Well, this is probably my favorite of the four, although they're all awesome. Pumpkin Patch is an orange creme with green hex glitter and smaller pieces of dark bar glitter? They're very small rectangular glitter - I've never seen bar glitter that short, but that's what it looks like! REALLY cool, kind of reminds me of the stem of a pumpkin. You'll see what I'm talking about in the macro! Also, it's pretty neat that the glitter in this doesn't get lost in the creme finish. The name is perfect, and I think the shade of orange is the perfect pumpkin orange. I used two coats here.

See that short little bar glitter? Huh, so interesting! I love it. I'm not a fan of the long bar glitter, but this is cute, and goes along with the theme, I think. Again, the bottle label is completely adorable! If you guys are interested in nabbing yourselves a bottle, you can get them on this page of My Nail Graffiti.

My Nail Graffiti franken: Magic Dust

Taking a momentary break from my marathon of China Glaze Halloween nail polishes, I have a special franken to show you guys tonight! I recently won one of the prizes from a giveaway at My Nail Graffiti. It was a collection of four Halloween frankens! My Nail Graffiti is a blog run by Amber, and her husband made the frankens! If you're interested in purchasing these, you can have a look at this page. They're all awesome, and I will be showing off the other three in the coming week as well!
Okay, so first up is Magic Dust. This is a really pretty glitter polish that could probably be built up to opacity on its own, but I decided to layer it over Essie Marshmallow. I absolutely adore the combination! Essie Marshmallow is a perfect jelly white polish, nice and squishy, so it's nice for a layering combination. Magic Dust has holo glitter and red sparkly glitter in it. I bet this would look great layered over black, too. I used two coats of Essie Marshmallow and one coat of Magic Dust. My nails looked like sparkly candy. YUM.

You can click to enlarge these, if you want a look in better detail at them! Isn't that bottle labeling cute? I love the sparkly pumpkin and that font.

Franken: Into The Mystic

Okay. Ever since I sold Sally Hansen's Mystic Lilac, I've been regretting it. I want it back! Does that sound familiar? I think many of us who do purges end up regretting at least one or two of our beauties being gone.
Since I hadn't been able to find it, I decided to try my hand at frankening it - I did this based on the memory of what it looked like in my head.
I ended up with three very different bottles of purple lacquer. The one I'm posting today is the one I feel is closest to Mystic Lilac - but again, I'm not sure since I haven't seen it in quite a while. This one is more jelly for sure, and the "lilac" may not be quite the right shade. From what I remember about it, it was a smoky, greyed out lilac jelly with a beautiful subtle shimmer. I started off with Lacey Lilac from SH, added some Stormy from Revlon, lots of clear polish, and then I broke into my beloved bottle of Pure Ice Heart Breaker. I ended up using a whole bottle of it. O_o Luckily, I did find another bottle of it, but I don't dare add any more of it, because Heart Breaker is kind of hard to find right now. I don't know if they've discontinued it (like my beloved Purple Reign, sob) or if they're just not stocking it. Anyway, my first bottle was a bit too grey, so I added a few drops of Sinful Colors Verbena to it. Second bottle was too purple, so I added just a tiny bit more Stormy. Now I have a third bottle that I believe to be pretty close - and I love it! It's satisfying a lemming that I may not be able to get my hands on. If only I could franken Purple Gala.
This is VERY jelly. I used four coats here and I took about a million photos to try to get the shimmer to show up on camera, but without much luck. Let's have a look.

Okay, I deliberately kept this second photo absolutely huge, so that you can click to enlarge it and see the shimmer on the nail.

This macro is on the nail.

 And this one is from the bottle shot!

It looks like the shimmer gets completely lost on the nail when blogger resizes photos for the post. So please do click to enlarge the first two photos.
Alright, I named this, as I do all my frankens, after a song - I called it Into the Mystic after the Van Morrison song.
So of course I have to put it up here for your listening pleasure. I do love this man. ♥



I'm never quite satisfied with frankens, because I always feel like I could have done better. But I do love this. What do y'all think??
PS I've got to get some glitters swatched up, but I will have the next Focus On week coming up soon!

Franken: Nicole's Heart

This was made for me by my gorgeous and amazing friend Andrea. (I've linked back to her original post on this, so you can see it on her as well!) She named this Nicole's Heart and she knows how much I love orange, flakies and jellies so what did she make me? A fantastic combo of all three! I'm SO in love with this and got a lot of compliments on it. Thank you Andrea! You're a doll. I have two more frankens to show you that she sent me.

Check out the bottle shot and that macro! *swoon* OH EM GEE isn't it gorgeous? If this doesn't make you fall in love with orange polish, well I don't think you ever will. It's divine! Don't forget to click to enlarge these!

Franken: Riders On The Storm

I love to franken jellies. They're my favorite things to play with and of course, they're my favorite finish. I decided to franken a grey jelly, and this is what I ended up with. I think it could be a hair more jelly, but I used a half a bottle of Wet N Wild clear, so it's pretty light at the tips and on the first coat. This is three coats. For lack of a better name, I call this Riders On The Storm, after the Doors' song.

For anyone interested, I generally don't know my recipes, but this one was simple: half a bottle of WNW clear, as mentioned above, a few drops of WNW black, and the rest is Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Wet Cement.

Also, here's the song:

Riders on the storm...riders on the storm

Into this house we're born

Into this world we're thrown

Like a dog without a bone and actor out on loan

Riders on the storm