Wacky Laki: Feature Blog: Chickettes.com

I'm so excited to be featuring the lovely Andrea from Chickettes.com here today. I have been following her for a while and absolutely love her creative nail art. I've often been inspired by her manicures and even tried her metallic zebra out for myself. In addition to nail art, she posts gorgeous polish and Gelish swatches which actually make me want to run out and buy Gelish. To be honest, I can't even imagine the patience it takes to swatch something that requires setting/curing, then photographing, then taking it off and starting over with the next color. And here I am whining about glitter removal...

So please give a warm welcome to Andrea and enjoy her beautiful creation today...

First, I just want to say how honored I am to be writing this post today. I have been a follower of Anutka's for a while and have been in awe of her gorgeous nail art designs, so I was thrilled when she asked me to write a guest post.

Since it's the month of December I thought I would create a versatile design with some sparkle that I can wear to some holiday parties. Like Anutka, I like to use stamps for many of my nail art designs, but I'm also a huge fan of soak off gel polish. Not only does it last much longer than regular nail lacquer, but I find that gel polish is great for stamping or adding art to. If you mess up you can easily just wipe off the top layer and try again without messing up the base color. Sometimes I will re-do a stamp several times until I get it just the way I want it. In this mani I actually stamped my pinky finger about 15 times because I kept pressing too hard and smudging the floral design!

For this manicure I chose two polishes from the new Gelish Holiday Collection as my base colors. The Naughty List is a black jelly polish with tiny gold sparkles, and Danny's Little Helpers is a metallic gold with holographic glitters. I applied 3 coats of each color, and then applied one thin coat of the Gelish top coat. Next, I used scotch tape to cover up part of each of the black nails and stamped on a floral design using Bundle Monster plate BM306 and China Glaze Passion. I removed the tape and painted a stripe on each nail using a striping brush. On my ring finger, I applied a stripe using OPI Black Onyx and then added six gold microbeads as accents. I then applied one more thin coat of the Gelish top coat and cured it. Viola!

I hope you enjoyed this post! Thank you, Anutka for the honor!

Thank you so much Andrea for taking the time to create this beautiful manicure the feature!

I love the gold stamping and the studded accents. I also had no idea that you can stamp with regular polish and still cure it with a gel top coat! For some reason I was under the impression that the two don't mix. That plus the fact that you can redo stamping 15 times and not ruin the base is really quite intriguing!

As usual for the feature blog, I want to show you a few of my recent favorites by Andrea. Click on any of these to be taken directly to Chickettes.com and see full size photos and descriptions of each manicure!...