While I do a LOT of planning for holiday nail art, this mani actually sort of came out of nowhere when my Clear Jelly Stamper Black Friday order arrived just when I was about to do some nails. As I was looking at the CJS-LC-100 Stamping Plate, the idea for this design just came together and I had to get it onto my nails. I am definitely still getting the hang of layered stamping (and am very much a perfectionist when it comes to trying to get it right) but I'm really, really loving playing with layered designs.

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 THIS POST IS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PUEEN COSMETICS.

When I started plotting out my ideas for this year's marathon of Christmas nail art, a lot of the designs I was drawn to were the more abstract designs that have become so popular in the last couple of years. As much as I love the more on-the-nose Christmas designs, I think there's definitely something to be said for a more blobby abstract design at this time of year as well. For this mani, I decided to grab for the Pueen Accent Fun 01 Stamping Plate a really bold holiday color palette!

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Being that it's the Monday before American Thanksgiving and I've already very much got Christmas nails on the brain, I decided today would be my last distinctly fall mani. And, of course, by fall I mean the pumpkin spice white girl version of fall. When I picked up the Uberchic Sweater Weather Stamping Plate, I knew I wanted to do some version of today's mani but I had actually intended on making it a little more intricate before deciding to keep it pretty simple. Simple, for me, can be pretty difficult to maintain, but I think I managed!

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I'm someone who generally doesn't like to use more than one stamping plate for a mani, but as soon as I saw the new Uberchic Halloween 09 plate, I knew that I wanted to pair this really delicate full cover spiderweb image with another delicate spiderweb image from the KADS Halloween 008 plate. I also decided to pair it with one of the new limited edition Scooby Doo polishes from Wet N Wild, which I absolutely had to pick up because I really, really love Scooby Doo to a degree that I think might surprise some people. Anyway, I put it all together and I'm really happy with how it came out. 

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How is it already the last week of September? Very sincerely, I can't believe we're already almost to Halloween nail art time, but I always resist posting any Halloween themed nails until October hits, so I'm still sticking with a fall theme. For this week's #CBBxManiMonday, I was in the mood for what has sort of become a classic for me - some abstract dry brushing with layered leafy stamping. 

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I feel like the default for holiday nail art tends to go one of two ways. The first is the obvious, on the nose designs that feature traditional Christmas colors and imagery, and the other is what I did with this mani which is just a very, very generally wintery sort of vibe. Honestly, I actually tend to lean more into a general winter vibe than I have this year, but on top of being a break from traditional Christmasiness, today's mani is also a bit of a palette cleanse with a simple, straight forward, almost-minimalist-if-your-measure-is-by-the-usual-level-of-kitchen-sink sort of mani. 

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Obviously gnome nails are very, very much having a moment right now. I mean, based on what I'm seeing in stores right now, I would go so far as to say that it's gnometastic out there this holiday season and everywhere you look - GONKS! I will admit that I really, really wanted to do some last holiday season but I didn't have a stamping plate with gnome images and my hand painting skills are... mid at best. So, of course, for this year's holiday season I made sure I had acquired some stamping plates featuring gnome images and I knew I would be doing at least one. 

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There's just... something about a craggy, spooky tree silhouette that I just absolutely love. Not even just for Halloween, I just love the look of a beautiful sky set off with that dark silhouette of a tree. All of this to say - of course I had to sneak one more creepy tree mani in here before the end of the spooky season. I mean... right? Anyway, I loved this single tree image from the Pueen Halloween Party 01 Stamping Plate so much that I decided to play around with the placement and use it on every nail!

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So I had this idea... I was looking through the stamping plates in my collection that I could pull out to use for the rest of the summer and I grabbed for the Whats Up Nails B056 Coasting To The Sea plate and had the idea of doing something with sea creatures.. Under The Sea, if you will. And then my brain was like... UNDER THE GALAX-SEA, as brains do from time to time, and immediately an idea started to form. There really is sort of something that feels... sort of the same when you think about space and the deep sea, so it kind of made sense in my head to combine the two. And this is what happened!

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For today's post I've partnered up with Pueen Cosmetics and I got to play with some seriously gorgeous stamping products to create today's mani. Recently I've definitely been drawn to really graphic, abstract designs with layered stamping, so it's really no surprise that that's the first place my mind went when I was looking through the products that they sent over for me to try out. 

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Because I've been in a bit of an inspiration funk lately, I've really been trying to figure out why and I think it came to me while I was doing this mani. I've done so many stamping designs over the past few months that I'm just kind of saturated and my brain wants to do something else. A few years ago, when the veil method first hit the internet, I did try something very similar to today's mani, but I think that both my skills and my attention to detail have evolved and this is definitely a step up from that first try. It's also a phenomenal technique if you're just starting out in nail art because technically all you need is a couple of different nail polishes, a cup of water, and some acetone for cleaning up. 

Without further ado, keep reading for more on this mani!

When it comes to the colors that I personally associate with the holiday season, one of my personal favorites is blue, so there was of course going to be a healthy dose of blue popping up in my holiday nails this year. That's actually what inspired me to buy the polish that I used as the base color for this mani. By which I clearly mean... that was the excuse I used to justify the purchase. I mean... can you blame me? Anyway, I decided to keep it simple and snowy with this one. 

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Well... it definitely feels weird to shift away from Halloween themed everything and back into normalish life, especially after 31 straight days of Halloween nails. Admittedly, my inspiration well was a little bit dry after that marathon, so I did need to look for some outside inspiration for this week's Fall Colors themed #CBBxManiMonday. Today's mani was heavily, heavily inspired by a design straight from the KADS Instagram page that I immediately fell in love with and decided to put my own very minute spin on. It's actually a pretty simple design and the color story I went with keeps it quite soft, but I still think it packs some serious impact. 

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Every once in a while, I find that I've let my nails get too long and my dexterity is starting to be impacted, so it's time to give them a good trim (and by trim, I do mean file because I don't cut my finger nails ever anymore) to take off some length. Of course, after having them so long for so long, looking down at them they almost start to feel like shorties (which is clearly not actual, but my brain decides things that are not actual all the time) and I really just needed to do something simple and cute, nail art wise. So this is what I came up with!

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SPRING!!! We had our first bonfire this past weekend and got to see some friends (outside, distanced and masked) that we haven't seen in about 6 months. I am so very much here for spring. I'm also really, really excited for spring nail art - which is our #CBBxManiMonday April theme! Today's mani is pretty much as spring as it gets, as far as I'm concerned... You know, other than the fact that the base polish I used is called Snow Globe (although that's also pretty springy here in Winnipeg as well.)

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