pinterest attempt: german manicure

Yesterday was Germanfest, the best of fests! For those that don't know, Milwaukee is the home of many ethnic festivals, most of them the largest of their kind in the US. Germanfest has always been special to my family; we are of German heritage, for one thing, and for another, my parents actually got engaged at Germanfest. We go every year, enjoy delicious food, great music, and just generally have a fine time.

This time, I had an idea for a thematically appropriate manicure inspired by something I pinned, so here is my very first attempt at bringing Pinterest into the real world:


Doesn't look too hard, right? So I picked up some red & yellow nail polish (I already had black because of course) and some stickers and set to work!

Okay, not quite as beautiful as Pinterest promised. But all in all, a fairly successful experiment! If you couldn't tell, I am not actually that good at painting my nails. I have shaky hands, and I haven't actually done them that often...back when I was living at home, my mom would paint them for me (I know, I know). But overall, I'm pretty proud for my first attempt at level 2 nail art. I love that it's such a flexible technique. The middle one with two colors would be great for any kind of sports team-themed manicure (or, perhaps, Gryffindor nails?), and well, it just looks cool.

My biggest problem was with the nail colors smudging (even after I waited until they seemed completely dry), but I think that's mostly due to the quality of my polish (the $3 Sally Hansen X-treme from Target). I also had some issues with the stickers leaving residue on the nails (which then were difficult to remove due to the aforementioned smudging problems). I'm not sure entirely how to fix that...decreasing the stickiness by handling them more would help, but I don't know if that would diminish how effective they are blocking the polish. It'll take some experimenting to get right, but I'm pretty confident! It was a lot of fun to have some German pride on my fingernails while I was enjoying spanferkel and Bavarian chocolate torte to the sweet sounds of polkas and German guys singing Gangnam Style. Yup, that happened. Ich liebe Germanfest!