Did I desperately want to do one of those adorably gnome designs that you see from professional nail tech's last year? Absolutely I did. Did I try and fail miserably at hand painting them? 100%. So this year, when I saw the Clear Jelly Stamper CjS-LC-100 Stamping Plate, which also featured some really gorgeous plaid stamping images, I just had to have it. HAD TO HAVE IT. Initially, I had planned on doing this mani in red, but in the end I decided to go with blue and let the gnome shine. 

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Like a great many people of my generation, I watch Scream and generally the entire original trilogy every Halloween season and I always feel inclined to do some Ghostface nails to go along with my mini marathon. I've done some hand painted ones once before (I will be the first to tell you that my hand painting skills are mid at best) but it was only this year that I finally got a stamping plate that featured a Ghostface image, so of course I had to do them. There was literally no choice. 

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The last couple of years, I've really had fun doing mani's with cute little Christmas-y characters on them, so of course this year I was going to lean into the same thing. I was actually super excited about this particular mani as soon as I had the Uberchic It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas plate in my hands because this set of characters is just so adorable and works so well together for a really simple but cohesive design - at least I think so!

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When I sit down to think of inspiration for these types of themed nail art marathons that I do for Halloween and Christmas every year, I definitely look through a lot of different sources to try and spark creativity. One of those sources is my own previous work, where I feel like I can find new ways to use old ideas, if that makes sense at all outside of my head. For today's mani, I took inspiration from this mani I posted a couple of months ago and I did a pretty direct recreation of it, changing up the color scheme and some other details to bring in the holiday vibe and make it it's own thing. 

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It almost seems fitting that right in the middle of doing this mani, I sliced my pointer finger of my right hand opening a polish bottle that I didn't realize had cracked at the corner and was about to fully break with a little bit of pressure. I ended up with a not insignificantly sized shard of glass in my finger, throbbing pain, and (apologies if this is gross) a lot more blood than one would have expected from a little old finger. How I actually managed to finish is absolutely beyond me, but as I type this my finger is still Band-aided and aching a little bit and it all seems sort of fitting - bleeding for my Remembrance Day mani. I, of course, wanted to be sure to do a poppy mani this year because I think this is an important time in history to remember the losses and struggle of the past, to remind ourselves to try and avoid repeating those things. I don't want to soap box, but I do think it's important to look back clearly and remember the cost so that we don't repeat the mistakes of the past. 

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I have to admit that this week's #CBBxManiMonday is really intensely personal for me in a way that generally I don't delve into here on the blog. Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of my brother's passing and I'm having a hard time separating the theme of allyship from that. I don't want to go too much into details about my brother and my family as those things are deeply personal and not suitable for a nail art post, but I will say that he was a member of the LGBTQ+ community and his struggles with his identity undoubtedly contributed to his passing, which is absolutely devastating. This is one of the reasons that, for me, allyship with the LGBTQ+ community is so important and why I believe so wholeheartedly in being a part of creating a safer world for people in all marginalized communities. 

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Last year for our June #CBBxManiMonday theme, we decided to go with allyship in stand in support of both Pride Month and Indigenous History Month, and this year we've decided to go with that theme again. Since this past weekend the Pride parade and celebrations were held here in Winnipeg, I knew I wanted to start with a rainbow mani and after reading some of the comments on a news post about those celebrations it has been made very, very clear how necessary Pride celebrations and support for the LGBTQ+ community still really are.

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I think sometimes I forget that I don't have to make things complicated in order to make them impactful. Sometimes it's those fairly easy to put together mani's that end up being both my and other people's favorites. That being said, I do like to be thoughtful when it comes to putting together nail art designs, especially ones that I'll be posting here on the blog, so for this one I ended up adding some visual interest with some subtle drybrushing over a gorgeous base polish as well as some thoughtful placement of my stamping and... I'm sort of obsessed!

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When I first saw product photos of the new stamping plate releases from Whats Up Nails, immediately I couldn't wait to put together a mani using the stamping image I used to create this design. It almost has the vibe of a children's drawing, in the very best way possible and I knew that I could create a really pretty design with it. This mani actually ended up being really simple and straight forward and came together quite quickly with, I think, a pretty solid ratio of effort to impact. 

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While I know that there are a lot of places that are well on their way towards spring at this point, here on the Canadian prairies it feels like we're living in the winter that will never end. It's a lovely combination platter of bitter "extreme cold weather warning" type of frigid along with record breaking snow fall that is... basically making leaving one's house a wee bit treacherous and, to be quite frank, I'm 'bout done, my friends. Anyway, it seemed like a good excuse to do some good old fashioned leaning in and put together some distinctly wintery nail art for the end (please, please let this be over soon...) of winter.

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Happy Mani Monday, my friends! Admittedly, as I sit here and write this, I am grasping pretty hard for the energy and inspiration to do so - but what else is new as this winter seems to go on forever? Anyone else feeling pretty deep in the seasonal blehs at the moment? Just me? Anyway, for February's #CBBxManiMonday theme, we're doing Pink & Red for, I believe, the third year in a row, and of course I had to lean into Valentine's Day for this first one. 

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The beginning of the year is always a weird one for me when it comes to nail art, because after being so wrapped up in really specific themes I find myself a bit in limbo. There's a part of me that just wants to play and experiment and be entirely free of themes and then there's another part of me that sincerely has no idea where to go from here. That being said, this year I definitely had some new-to-me nail polishes to play with along with some stamping plates that have been hanging out in my collection for a while now, so I decided to just experiment a little, which is where today's nail art design comes from. 

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I will admit that some of the nail art designs I've done and will be doing for this marathon of Christmas nail art are much more laborious than others and sometimes you really can't tell by looking at them which are which. For today's Christmas nail art design, I feel like it might look like one of the ones that took more time and effort, but the truth is that it came together so smoothly and easily that I actually surprised myself in the process. I will say, a huge part of that is the products that I used for this one, which is just a rundown of ride or die favorites for me and you'll probably be familiar with them if you're a regular reader of this blog!

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Honestly, you guys, the fact that we've gotten to the penultimate mani in 31 days of Halloween nail art designs is basically blowing my mind right now - especially since I'm still excited about the different designs I've been able to do. I was actually surprised when I realized that I'd never done bloody handprint nail art, but obviously I needed to remedy that so I kept it really simple and put together this quick and easy mani, perfectly for last minute!

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I have to admit, full coverage dry brushing isn't a technique I go to very often and it's one I tend to really forget the value of until I'm looking for something specific and it pings in my brain. Halloween is one such occasion when I feel like this dry brushing technique can really shine because in the right colors it can really evoke that grungey sort of horror vibe without being too on the nose. For this mani, I kept it super simple with a black, white and red color story and some full coverage spiderweb stamping for good measure. 

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Honestly, I just can't get enough of fruit nails lately and I knew I wanted to do something with strawberries, but I knew that I didn't want to do anything too similar to what I did last year - even though I knew I was going to be using the same stamping image. It wasn't until I was scrolling through my own Instagram feed and was reminded of this mani from a couple of months ago that inspiration struck and I knew exactly what I was going to do. Honestly, I'll take inspiration where I can find it and I love, love, love where this one took me. 

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As soon as my May PPU order arrived and I got my hands on Jen & Berries' He Forced Me To Ruin My Dress, which is clearly inspired by Cher's Alaia dress in Clueless, this mani started percolating. I knew that I wanted to pair it with some reverse stamping and I knew exactly what red shade I wanted to pair with it... but I didn't know what I wanted the vibe to be until I was thumbing through stamping plates looking for inspiration and it hit like a truck.

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