Konad!

While in Sally's the other day, I found China Glaze Lemon Fizz in the clearance bin for $1.99. Even though it's most definitely out of season, I felt I had to grab it at that price.

It's a gorgeous yellow and is going to be awesome come springtime.

I went ahead and decided to experiment with it so I painted two coats of it and then topped it with a teal polish on one of my Monster plates.

This is a great manicure! I love the color combo and the pattern. This manicure actually helped me to start liking the idea of the Konad better.

Teal/black

I absolutely love this color combo. And I find the half one color, half another color manicures easy and still cute.

After I taped the teal and painted the black, I decided I wanted a little more "oomph" so I went with the silver dots. I really liked this manicure when I was finished.

Not so formal French with a checkerboard.

I liked the Orly It's Up to Blue when I used it on the Liquid Vinyl for one of my previous manicures so I wanted to try it out full nail. I really love this teal and it's great coverage.

I started with a base coat, two coats of It's Up to Blue and a coat of Seche Vite. Since I didn't want to leave my manicure plain, I grabbed my OPI Honk If You Love OPI from the Roadies collection.

I wanted to test out the check pattern but didn't want to do all my nails so I opted just for an accent nail and tips on my other nails followed by a top coat.

I thought it turned out cute although I definitely need to work on taping straight. My squares are not even and that bothered me. I ended up taking the polish off and doing another manicure.

Not exactly my first time.

First of all, I have to say, I love black nail polish. Why I waited 36 years to buy my first bottle, I have no idea. I've had dark colors (I did a silver/purple French that I'll post that looks black) but I never bit the bullet on just straight black.

I got a bottle about 10 days ago. Orly Liquid Vinyl. I can't say enough good things about it. I've used it with almost every manicure since then.

I started off with a base coat (also an Orly brand but I'm not sure which one), two coats of the Liquid Vinyl and a coat of quick dry Seche Vite.

Then I taped off the sides of the black to make a V at the bottom of my nails and painted the V Orly It's Up to Blue. Before it completely dried, I removed the tape and painted on another coat of Seche Vite.

Once that dried, I used some nail art stickers I picked up at Sally's and adhered the flowers to my nails followed by, you guessed it, one last coast of Seche Vite.


I wore that to San Diego for the weekend and picked up some more polish from Ulta while we were there. In my haul, I grabbed a silver and a gold Orly skinny bottle of polish and used the silver to highlight just the V on my nails. By that time, it had been three days since I painted my nails and I took everything off when we got back to AZ.

If you're wondering about the title of this post, it's because this was actually my second attempt at using tape to do a manicure. My first attempt was only so-so. If you're a Facebook friend you've already seen it but I don't have the heart to include it on the blog yet. Maybe another day when I want to laugh at myself or see how far I've come.

*I have to point out that I took all my pictures without cleaning up my cuticles until the last one. That truly drives me crazy because my nails look so much better without polish everywhere. Told you I was a novice!