Halloween Bats

Happy (almost) Halloween! I've had a busy day today. After work I came home and baked sugar cookies in the shape of bats, pumpkins, ghosts and witches for my friends to decorate tomorrow. I then carved my pumpkin, which was a lot easier than I thought it would be (I've only carved a pumpkin once before, back when I was about sixteen). I went for a vampire face and it looks really cool.

Anyway, for my final Halloween design I decided to attempt stamping again and settled on bat design from one of the Bundle Monster plates. I love bats. We have pipistrelles in our garden and I love watching them swoop around in the evening - which is where my inspiration for this manicure came from. I started with two coats of Barry M Matt White before using LA Colors Shock (yellow), Barry M Block Orange (um...hopefully self-explanatory) and OPI Strawberry Margarita (pink) to create a sunset gradient. It's only the second time I've done a gradient (the first is here) and I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. Finally, I stamped the bats on using Nails Inc Black Taxi.

The smaller of the two bats didn't transfer very well. The larger one was fine so I think it might be the plate rather than my own ineptitude. I tried to fix it with a brush but ended up making the higher bat on my little finger look really bloated! Oops.

The Hungry Asian Sneeze Breeze Glitter Gradient

Following on from the two The Hungry Asian polishes I showed yesterday, here's another one: Sneeze Breeze. It consists of small matte blue and black glitter in a clear base, although there's more blue glitter than black. Here I've layered it over Essie Borrowed & Blue in a glitter gradient. I like glitter gradients because they're so easy to do - instead of using a sponge you can just use the polish brush to drag the glitter up the nail.

Purple Gradient

I've had a lot of firsts recently: my first jelly sandwich, my first stamped manicure, and now my first gradient. The colours I used were OPI Done Out in Deco and Nails Inc Little Miss Naughty, using this tutorial.

Weirdly, it actually looked better on my right hand than my left, which normally never happens! I attempted to take a couple of photos of it, but be warned - I'm rubbish at photographing my right hand so the angle is weird and makes my fingers look really short and fat!

And just for laughs, here's a photo of what my nails looked like before I cleaned up and put on a top coat:

What a mess!