Revlon - Royal Cloak

Revlon Royal Cloak is a medium dusty purple with tiny flakes.  Today has been super overcast, and it's 5:pm and already dark, so you don't get my usual photos.

Basecoat:  Salon Sciences Instant Artificials (1 coat)
Color:  Revlon Royal Cloak (3 coats)
Topcoat:  David (1 coat)

I have stayed away from Revlon polishes for a long time, because I historically have had awful results - it peels off entire sheets.  Which is fun, but not really the look I'm going for.  But, I like Royal Cloak enough that I'm willing to try it again.  Royal Cloak applies really well - it was thick but not goopy, and I didn't have any problems with it running into my cuticles or anything.  Cleanup was super easy, too.  I did find that some of the tiny flakes hung off the free edge of my nail, but it wasn't too big a problem to fix.

Wear will be interesting, because we're hanging our outdoor Christmas lights tomorrow.  This is the first year we've had a house to hang lights on, and usually we put up the tree Thanksgiving weekend.  However, my in-laws are coming to our house next Friday for dinner (we go to my mom's house Thursday) and we both know that my father-in-law will insist on helping my husband put up the lights, and he doesn't need to be doing that kind of stuff.  So, they go up tomorrow.

Pardon my short break.  I'm going to try something different this winter.  Last year I basically quit blogging when the baseball season ended - I work at home full time and in winter I pretty much only leave the house a couple of times a week.  So I stopped polishing as well, and it just didn't seem worth the effort to put up a post when I wasn't even bothering to polish every week, either.

This year, I'm going to put up some swatches, instead of full NOTDs.  I have already swatched a bunch of polishes I keep either putting off wearing for one reason or another, or that I just don't see myself wearing.  I'm going to spend time this weekend writing posts for them, and hopefully I'll have enough stockpiled that I won't need to worry about lack of posts later this winter.  These won't be the most awesome things ever - you're gonna see some indifferent cleanup, and some lack of topcoat altogether.  I'm going to tag those as swatches, too, which should help.  It might take me a few days to get it going, though, so bear with me.

Wet N Wild - Blue Moon

I hunted for this polish for a while, actually - I saw this ah-mazing swatch of Blue Moon and knew I needed it in my stash.

Basecoat:  Gelous (1 coat)
Color:  Wet N Wild Blue Moon (3 coats)
Topcoat:  Seche Vite (1 coat)

I couldn't quite capture the green shimmer, but trust me, it's there.

This is a stunner of a polish.  Application was very nice, too.  I don't know what to say about staining, though.  I didn't have any staining of my skin on my left hand, but my right hand looked awful after I was done cleaning up.  Weird.

A small housekeeping note:  I'm gradually trying to follow all the blogs via GFC.  The problem is, I don't actually read them that way - I subscribe to zillions of nail blogs via Google Reader, which doesn't make me a follower via GFC.  I'm also going to try to get my Blogs sidebar up and running at some point, which may mean changing the layout of this one.  We'll see.

A return, of sorts

So it's been a while, huh?

To be honest, the fun kind of went out of this for a while.  Too much work, not enough payoff.   And then, in the middle of it, we bought our first house.  So I've been pretty busy.

I've always felt really far "behind the curve" as far as nail blogs go - I follow a lot of blogs (not just nails), but I tend to leave my "Nails" folder for last in my Google Reader.  As a consequence, I almost always have that little (1000+) staring at me, and when it isn't over 1000 (right now I'd guess it's closer to 3000 - it's been that long since I had time to read nail blogs), it's still over 800.  

Anyway, I decided that this is for me, and if I'm always behind on swatching new collections.... I don't care.  I buy everything I show here, and to be honest, my spending priorities have changed a little.  Not that I've stopped hauling,  of course - but there is a lot of furniture to buy when your entire house is furnished in Late Rental (ie, Ikea).

But what would a post be without photos?  In the house we have three bedrooms, plus an office.  Since all my work stuff is in the office, I get to have a craft/polish room!  It's still a work in progress, but here is what I have so far.

The big shelf unit (EXPEDIT from Ikea, of course) holds the majority of my craft supplies.  I have larger blank canvases in the closet, and there's a red Helmer you can't see that holds all my paints, brushes, and palettes.  I'm planning to buy the 9-drawer Alex to replace it, and I hope to be able to fit all my pastels, pencils, and markers in it, too.  This room is pretty much the only exception to the "No new Ikea in the house" rule, too.

This is where the magic happens, heh.  The Melmer on top of the desk holds my basecoats, topcoats, buffers, fake nails, nail glue, files, nail art stuff, etc.  I thought they made it into this photo, but they didn't  - my three polish Helmers are below the desktop.  The lazy Susan on top holds my cotton balls, the used cotton ball trash can, acetone, remover, cuticle stuff, cleanup brush, etc.  That little pile of polish?  That's the stuff I've worn in the past couple of weeks that I haven't updated on my spreadsheet and filed away yet.  Bad blogger!

Anyway, that's what I've been up to since the last time I posted here.  I have a NOTD post coming up right after this.

Housekeeping

First of all, I am way, way behind on posts.  I went on a road trip Labor Day weekend, and while I took photos, I didn't actually post anything.

I've also deleted my Twitter account for this blog.  It wasn't my primary Twitter account, and lately there has been a lot of drama in nail blog land.  I didn't feel I had anything to add to the discussion, and all I was doing was posting new blog entries.  I did go back and follow with my primary Twitter account, though.

I'm about to post four (?) blog entries from the time I wasn't doing anything.  Enjoy.