Graceful Glamour UK

The postman knocked on my door VERY early over the weekend, 7:10am on a Saturday no less! But when I saw him holding two packages I didn't mind too much. What was in the packages? One of them had my order from Fragrance Direct in and the other had my 2012 Bundle Monster plates, wahoo! There have been allot of photographs circulating the blogger world before I received mine, so I already sort of knew what to expect. You get 25 circular metal stamping plates packaged in  with six images each, so that is a fantastic 150 images to play around and make some beautiful mani's with. So far I've only used the one plate (307) so this is really just a first impressions post to show you the designs. What I can tell you about that plate is, the design I used was very precise, having allot of detail and transfered very well from plate to stamp and then from stamp to nail. The one thing that was a little annoying was getting the blue protective film off. It was soooooo much more...

With flash. I didn't really know where I was going to go with this mani, I just sort of made it up as i went along. To start with I applied a layer of Orly Top 2 Bottom as my base coat. I've been really enjoying this and would highly recommend it. Next I added three coats of Borghese Castello Blue. If you haven't seen my review of this with swatches, you can see it here .  Now for a little stamping, so I used the crazy paving style design on my Bundle Monster BM215 with Sally Hansen Raspberry Race ( swatches here ).  Without flash, natural light.  Next was to add some french tips using the rounded Wet N Wild guides and Sally Hansen White On.  I've really been getting in to flowers recently, due to Maria from Maria's Nail Art and Polish Blog  so I decided to add some lovely purple flower fimo. I added them to each nail and then finished off with LA Girl's top coat.  That's all from me for now, I hope you are well. Take care all, b...

No flash.  Hi all, I hope you are are having a fab weekend. I'm really enjoying spending some time with my daughter and not having to worry about unpacking boxes as it is all done! My little girl (15 months) and niece ( 3 years old) were playing in the paddling pool yesterday when my niece suddenly got up and got out of the pool. She was standing with a strange look on her face when I looked down and realised she was having a wee! A couple of minutes later I asked her 'Who did a wee on the floor Elizabeth?' and she said 'It wasn't me, it was Gracie!' I had to laugh... Let's get on to the nail art shall we? The base colour is Essie Smooth Sailing (click here for review), I added two coats of her and then a layer of Sally Hansen Super Shine Top Coat. With flash.  Next I took the gorgeous S ally Hansen Metallic Momentum and used her with my Bundle Monster BM225 stamping plate to get his beautiful flower mani. I have to say, as with the ot...

With Flash  Hi all and welcome back to my ever more nail orientated blog. I didn't actually think about the fact I'd only been posting about nails, it just sort of happened. I suppose it's because I'm really only just getting 'polish obsessed' and the things I'm most excited about at the moment are nail polish and nail art. For the base colour I used Sally Hansen White On from their Xtreme Wear line. I didn't really think about swatching her on her own as she's just a basic shiny white. If you do want me to swatch her, just let me know. To be honest, I wouldn't wear her alone, she's just a base for nail art. I used two coats for a nice opaque finish. Without Flash  For the tiger stripes I used Sally Hansen Insta Dri in Presto Pink with my Bundle Monster BM223 plate. This is an amazing polish and if you haven't seen my review on her, you can go take a look here . This mani took me a long time to do, I'm not sure if...

With flash  So here we are again with some stamping goodness. I must admit I've been really having to push myself to take the time and do stamping mani's as I've got to have all of my things cleared out of my old house and make it all shiny and lovely by Saturday (I'm writing this on Thursday). But on top of that I still have to look after a lively one year old who is in to EVERYTHING, and teething!  So to start off I applied three coats of the Borghese Milano Taupe (click here for that post) and a layer of my trusty Orly Top 2 Bottom, then waited around thirty minutes. I had a little flip through my Bundle Monster stamping plates and decided on the 'swirly whirly' design on BM222. I applied this design with the Konad White special polish then added another layer of the Orly to lock in the design.  No flash  Well there you go, what do you think? I know it didn't come out perfect, but I didn't think I did too badly. I found this d...

With flash  Evening all, sorry it's been a few days since my last post but my laptop had a slight blowing up situation. I suddenly heard a loud bang and smelt burning, then I looked down and there was smoke and a little flame! I couldn't believe it, I only recently got a new screen and charger for it. PANTS! I've ordered a refurbished Mac Book Pro, but that wont be here until at least the end of the week so I'll only be able to post when I can borrow a friends laptop.  So it's that time of the week for the We Love Nails post and this time it is a mani based on a film. I was just itching to do a mani using my Bundle Monster stamping plate with shoes on, so I thought I would have a go at doing Cinderella. Now if you read my posts regularly you will know that I'm fairly new to nail art so don't judge me too harshly! First of all I started with my normal Orly Top 2 Bottom Base Coat, two coats of Jessie's Girl Stilleto and a layer of Sally Hansen Max...

Orly Top 2 Bottom, 3 Coats OPI Pedal Faster Suzi, Konad White BM205, Orly Top 2 Bottom, with flash.  Evening all, I have to apologise for my lack of posting and replying to messages, but I had to give myself the weekend off. As you may know from my For Audrey Post ( click here to see it ) my Nan is very ill and there has been allot going on so I just didn't have time to post. This is a mani that I did last week, but as it was a bit of a fail I didn't post it until now.  For the base I started with a layer of Orly Top 2 Bottom, then three coats of OPI Pedal Faster Suzi . This polish was a little sheerer and patchy that I thought it would be, but it's still very pretty. I will be doing a review on it in the future.  I then decided to stamp with the butterfly design on my Bundle Monster BM205 plate using Konad Special White. I was inspired to use this by another blogger using it recently (I'm sorry I can't remember who) as her mani came out so beautifull...

Remember that beautiful Essie polish French Affair that I showed you? (If you haven't seen it you can click here) Didn't she look lovely all pretty, pink and shiny there on my nails? Well I wish it had stayed that way, but  oh no, there was major trouble ahead so I wrote this little post to share my fail with you. I'm so sad because in my head this was meant to be so pretty! But that's the way life goes sometimes, it doesn't always turn out how you planned it.   Now I had some massive issues but they were through no fault of the Essie polish, but more my Sally Hansen Maximum Growth Top and Base coat. Now as you may have seen from my haul ( click here to see it if you haven't ) I got two of these and one of them was a slightly different colour. I have been using one of them since that haul arrived and I hadn't really had much of a problem with it. It's now half way used and when I applied it over the Essie, it dried to a very thick bubbly ickyne...

Orly Top 2 Bottom, 2 coats Ciate Bon Bon,,  Stamping White Konad, Orly in a Snap Top Coat , with flash.  Puja from Cute Nails has set up a new group called We Love Nails . I will be doing a nail challenge every week on a Tuesday. If you'd like to know more,  click here   to check out the post on Puja's blog, This weeks challenge was to do a french or reverse mani, so I got my stamping plates out! I decided to use one of my new freebie polishes as the base colour and I chose Ciate Bon Bon . She is a beautiful purpleish taupe and sooo pretty! I wont go too much in to detail about this polish now, as I have a review of her coming soon!  As above, no flash. For the stamping I used this absolutely gorgeous design from my Bundle Monster plate BM217 with Konad White. The design is actually flowers, but I think it gives a beautiful lacey effect, don't you? I have to admit, I found it a little difficult lining up the design on t...

Hiya everyone, I'm going to start off by warning you that I'm in a fairly bad mood due to more problems with my house situation. After losing out on the house I really wanted, I then found another smaller house but was big enough for me and my little girl. Well you'd think that would be sorted then wouldn't you? Oh no! Due to a couple of reasons I now can't have that one either... There's nothing else on the market that is suitable for us, so I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed something else comes up before the 1st of July. Okay, rant over and I think I have it out of my system... I was really taken with the lovely Essie Lilacism so I decided to give it a bit of stamping action. Up until now I'd only stamped with the Konad special white polish because it was easier to apply. But as you can see from my pictures, it didn't go very well at all so I had to go back to white. The black just seems to be a much thinner texture and wont p...

Hiya, happy first day of June! Can you believe we are half way through the year already? No, me neither. It's scary how much quicker time goes when you get older! Today I have my second attempt at using my Bundle Monster stamping plates. As you can see I also added some rhinestones to the mix which is very exciting as I've never used them before either. I know, I know, sad huh? So to start with I Painted my nails with two coats of Essie's Sand Tropez . I'm an idiot and forgot to take pictures of the Sand Tropez before I stamped, whoopsy daisy, sorry. I really like it so I'm sure I'll be wearing it again soon. But anyways, I then added a generous layer of my usual Sally Hansen Maximum Growth Plus. I'd heard from various people on Youtube that if you add a good amount of topcoat between your colour and stamping, if you make a mistake you can just remove the stamping polish without disturbing the colour underneath. So I began to stamp, and to my j...

I was really eager to get stamping away when my new plates arrived so I waited until my little girl Gracie was in bed and got all my nail things out. I have to say that I did think I was going to get it straight away and I got very frustrated that it wasn't coming out perfect straight away until some other people told me that you just need to practice a few times. I wasn't sure whether I should post the pics as it was a massive fail, but actually it's good for other newbie stampers such as myself to see what my experience has been like. So to start off with I had a little lap tray with all the equipment I needed and covered it with some kitchen roll as I'd heard this can get quite messy. Then I picked out a stamping plate, the one I chose was BM210. Next was to decide which polish I wanted to stamp with, well that wasn't too much of a choice as I wanted to use one of my new Konad Special Polishes and I only had them in black or white, so I chose white. ...

I was sooooo excited to get my nail mail this morning, tee hee hee!! For the past couple of months I've been really getting back in to nails, and  been admiring other bloggers nail art. So there was nothing else for it, I wanted some stamping plates and I wanted them now. I asked a couple of people which ones were good and a few people recommended Bundle Monster plates. But of course I can never just stop at buying one thing so here is my small nail art haul. Konad White and Black Special Polish Now I know that the special polishes aren't essential for stamping, but as a newbie stamper I wanted something that would make things easier so I opted to buy the black and white. I got these for £6.30 each for 11ml of product. Konad Stamper and Scraper The Bundle Monster plates do not come with a stamper or scraper so you have to buy them seperately, and in fact they don't even make them! So I took the same option and bought the Konad ones. For both the stamper and scrap...