Remember how I told you about catching up with the Canberra crew the weekend before last.  Tonight's mani is the result of my afternoon with the girls.  We planning to have an afternoon playing with polish and with what we had be calling Reverse Stamping.  But our resident expert Julia from Messy Mansion, who is our oracle when it comes to nail stamping, advised us that reverse stamping is an entirely different technique, and what we were doing was creating stamping decals.

I created my decals slightly differently to the other girls.  They stamped onto their stamper and then coloured their design in on the stamp.  They then top coated the stamper, let it dry, peeled it off and the applied it like a decal.  Cause I'm much too impatient to only do one decal at a time, I stamp my polish onto a piece of plastic.  I then go nuts doing some colouring in using nail polish and trying carefully to stay within the lines.  I then top coat and peel off the decal and apply it to my nails.

The stamp I used is BM203 stamped with black polish and coloured in with Ulta3 honolulu and royal, Picture Polish wisteria and citrus, Kester Black cherry pie and Paws clover green.  The gradient is created using the same colours and topped with Penelope Luz Dark Angel.  

I'm a bit disappointed with my photos because it was very cloudy and my photos look very washed out, not showing the vibrant colours they were.

Today in Australia was the race that stops a nation doing any work during the afternoon.  I'm talking about the Melbourne Cup horse race, in which we Aussies this year were anticipated to spend $140 million in bets.  And 20 of those dollars were mine!

Last night I sat down with my ipad and a google search of "Melbourne Cup Jockey Silks" and I chose my four favourite designs and colours to turn into some nail art.

The designs were a combo of stamping, free hand and tape.  The index finger with the red and blue is a little messy on the edges as I didn't have a plain diamond check stamping plate and had to use an argyle style stamp - and then carefully remove the fine lines between each diamond.  The rest of the designs were mostly stars that I stamped on.

When I got to work today I showed my nails to my team and explained how I had picked the horses purely based on what the jockey was wearing.  One of the team was heading to the TAB, so I gave him $20 and asked him to place a boxed trifecta bet on all five horses I had painted on my nails.  There were certainly a few in the group that thought I was a little crazy placing my bet based on my nail art, but I figured it was no worse than a mystery bet, and I was happy to lose my $20 (like I had in previous years)

See, boxed trifecta.

And now the unbelieveable part of the story.  I won! My $20 bet only got me a 33% share of the Trifecta prize, but I still walked away with more than $1100.  Here is my handful of pineapples.

Whoo hoo.  Did any other Aussie pick a winner today?

I have a gorgeous new shade from Picture Polish to show you tonight. This is Super Styling and it's a stunning, densely packed blue glitter polish.  Super Styling is like the other Picture Polish Mesh shades, which are mostly made up of full coverage glitter polishes containing fine mesh like glitter (think, orbit, dorothy, heavy metal and jealousy).  The glitter lays very flat and only needs one coat of top coat to make it smooth. The base is nicely tinted to provide opacity at just two coats and the dry time is good.

Last weekend I caught up with the Canberra crew of nail polish gals and we had a great time playing with stamping decals (that mani is still to come).  I was lucky to also receive a set of the two new nail stamping plates from Emily de Molly.  This was the first image that jumped out at me so I tried it over the top over Super Styling.  I messed up my pinky a little, but you probably wouldn't have noticed if I didn't say anything.  This image is on plate EDM001.

Products provided for review.

The last three days really have been exhausting and chaotic.  Luckily I was organised earlier in the week and scheduled that last three blog posts to go live, otherwise I would have mysteriously disappeared for three days.  Thursday evening I came down with the worst case of food poisoning, ever! I have never been so sick in my life.  Sadly it was from a takeaway meal from one of my favorite thai restaurants, which means I wont ever be going back there again.  I've never really suffered food poisoning before and I would never wish it on my worst enemy.  

What made it worse was that is was the opening game of my husbands baseball team on Thursday night. I had promised the kids I would take them to the game, they had treats and snacks all packed and we got to the game about 30 minutes before game time. I started feeling queasy on the drive to the ballpark, but once I was there everything came up.  I'll spare you the rest of the details cause no one wants to hear and spewy and poopy pants story, but know that it wasn't pretty and lasted for 12 hours - although thankfully not as public as the scene from The Bridesmaids movie.

Friday was spent recovering and Saturday I made it up to the kids and took them back to the ballpark for a double header.  That was after Mr 5's T-Ball game in the morning and swimming lessons at lunchtime. On Friday night after the kids were in bed, I managed to pull together a mani in the baseball team colours. Not nearly as fancy as previous manis, but it was able all I could manage that night.  I'm not sure if I can keep up this daily blogging over summer!

Anyway, lets look at these quick nails.  Polishes are Picture Polish Citrus and Orly Shine which orange and silver triangular rhinestones from the Born Pretty Store.  The middle finger and thumb both have a PERL brand nail strip, which is clear with embossed silver dots.

Some more photos of manis I feel I wore half a century ago!  These are even photographed using my light box because it was the middle of winter when I wore them and it was dark when I left for work and dark when I got home.  

These are two polishes from Brazillian brand Vermehlo by Marcia Lima.  Both are fine dense holographic glitters that provide full coverage.

Techno Green - a teal green holographic dense full coverage glitter.  This is two coats with Gelous and Seche Vite top coat.

I also added some stamping on top of the glitter, using black polish and Messy Mansion plate MM04.

Dorothy's Shoes - a holographic red full coverage glitter in a red jelly base.  This is two coats with Gelous and Seche Vite top coat. I have simply no idea what plate I stamped with here (too long ago to remember), but I stamped using China Glaze Passion.

When you look a them, these are actually very simple glitter nail polishes. But the saying says that the simple things in life are often the best, and that saying really runs true for these two polishes.

Vermehlo polishes are available from Color4Nails. Looking a the 5 star reviews on both these polishes on the Color4Nails site shows that it's not just me that really likes these two polishes.

Polishes provided for review.

Man, I feel like I did these swatches FOREVER ago! I remember putting my hand to the pool outside to get a quick colour change, and it was so bloody freezing cause it was the middle of winter.  Now here we are in the last month of spring!!

These gorgeous little beauties are the Dance Legend Thermo Shine polishes, which are colour changing temperature sensitive polishes with glitter!  The thermal colour change in all of these polishes does not disappoint!  They all change colour dramatically and easily and the glitter mixes are so much fun.  Lets check each one out.

179 - A thermal colour changer that is a pale pink jelly when warm and a bright red jelly when cold.  It also contains black hexes in two sizes and little black bar glitters. Two coats with Seche Vite top coat.

180 - A thermal colour changer that is a pale taupe grey jelly when warm and a dark blackened brown jelly when cold. It also contains silver hex glitters in three sizes. Two coats with Seche Vite top coat.

181 - A thermal colour changer that is a bring red jelly when warm and a blackened maroon jelly when cold.  It contains red and gold hexes as well as fine gold glitter. Two coats with Seche Vite top coat.

182 - A thermal colour changer that is a bright pink jelly when warm and a deep royal purple jelly when cold.  It also contains gold hexes and fine gold glitter. Two coats with Seche Vite top coat.

With my nail length, I pretty much had a two toned effect all the time, unless my hands were very cold and then my fingers were all the cold shade.  The formula on all these is great and they were all simple two coaters. 

There is now a number of places that you can buy Dance Legend polishes, here is the list from the Dance Legend website - although I don't know if these shades are available at all outlets.