NailNation 3000 Mysterious

Hello, readers! Remember me? I'm Dana, the mostly absent but still caring other half of the Two Girls :) I've been terribly caught up in real life for the last few weeks, and then I had a blissful 11 days of time off work, which coincided nicely with Christmas. I had all these plans to do a bunch of pretty manicures and get a bunch of things organized and come up with a more workable nail polish making arrangement for DLC (the smell of the lacquer really bothers my husband--gives him migraines, in fact--but it's the dead of winter in the Midwest and I can't exactly fling open all the windows in my sun room without killing all the plants and giving myself pneumonia. How do the rest of you wonderful polish makers handle this, I ask!)

Anyway. Being that this is my (often unlucky) life, I was leaving my brother's house after our family Christmas celebration. As I was loading the back of my car, I smacked my thumb nail into the car door frame and broke it so badly I briefly considered passing out. It tore and lifted about 2/3 of the width of my thumb nail, about a half inch below the visible nail line into the nail bed. I lashed it all together with gauze and tape and let it sit long enough that it wasn't actively painful before I trimmed it as short as I could reasonably go and glued it all together with Orly Nail Rescue. So far, so good, but it still hurts if I bump the end of my thumb. I just hope it lasts until it grows out! (If you're morbidly curious, you can see a picture taken right before I cut and glued the thing together on my Instagram, @dreamylacquerco. Jess has specifically requested to not see it, and I don't blame her a bit!)

Then not four hours later, I was grounded with an unexpected and debilitating case of the flu, Type A, thank you very much. It's been going around where I work, but I thought I'd gotten lucky. Oh, no, this is me, remember? So for my lovely vacation, I spent the vast majority of every day between 12/25 at 8pm and about 4pm on 12/31 in bed. I ventured out of the house for about an hour on the 31st, a trip to Walmart which exhausted me beyond all reason. On January 1st, my husband took us out for a car ride and to eat, and didn't all three of us end up with mild food poisoning? Yes, yes we did. Thank you, Mexican joint which shall remain nameless.

And so it's January 2nd (ok, it's technically the 3rd now), and I have one day left of my lovely vacation before I go back to work Saturday night. Nothing is organized. My nails were undone the entire time. One of the few things I had to entertain myself briefly between naps this week was the Internet. And sometimes that means shopping...which brings me to this post. Hello, haul from NailNation 3000! My package showed up today, thanks for the speedy shipping!

I had to cut all my nails to match my horrible thumb nub, so I'm sadly down to nubbins all around. Sigh. But I put down two gorgeous, easy to use coats of NailNation 3000 Mysterious, and when it was completely dry, I put my recently discovered and hard-fought-for stamping skills to work. (I'm not good at it, exactly, but I'm getting there. At least now when I try to stamp, I get the image on the stamper, and then most of it on my nail. GO ME!) The stamping polish and plate are from a Fing'rs stamping kit I picked up at Walmart several months ago. I chose pretty tropical hibiscus flowers with accent nails of butterflies, and added some sparkly crystal thingies I picked up from Nailite a while back. We had snow last night and I want summer back, so I chose accordingly.

Top photos with flash, bottom without, indoor night time lighting:

And just because you made it this far through my ramblings, you get a very bad picture of one of my first stamping triumphs: music notes from a Vivid Lacquer plate over LynB Designs' Purple Polish of Sex:

I can't wait to get good at this, because I think that music notes design is awesome! What say you?