Berry Sweet

Wow, life sure got busy for a bit there! BUT, I am back and ready for some more posting! I have also realized something that makes me very excited: the OPI Nail Envy I have been using has really been working! What used to be nubbins on my index and middle fingers have now finally grown past my fingertips and beyond! I now promise to do my best to keep all my nails to the same length unless a) I break a nail - I refuse to sacrifice hard won length for an accident, and b) with the exception of my pinky nail which I have always preferred to keep longer than my other nails anyway.

So, now that we have that established on to something a bit more fun for the rest of you: nail art! A couple weeks ago BerryPolished had a nail art contest over on her facebook page with a theme of, what else, berries. I had a couple ideas that ended up not working out due to malfunctioning stamping plates but I really like the idea I ended up going with (that I totally cam up with on the fly the day before the end of the contest).

I started with two coats of L'Oreal How Romantic:

I then stamped over that with Zoya Kate using Cheeky plate CH3. And yes, the unfinished look is deliberate . . . mostly.

Then I used L'Oreal Haute Couture Red and Cheeky plate CH13 to add strawberries, and Zoya Yara with CH26 to add a bit of contrast while keeping with the country garden look.

And that is what I was GOING to submit to the contest until the second day of wearing the design. You should know me well enough by now, if you've been following along for a bit, that I can't leave anything alone. Almost any design can be improved upon and this was no exception. Well I went and added a coat of Wet n Wild Hallucinate over top of it all and loved it so much that I just had to submit that version instead.

Isn't it just so cute! I absolutely love how this turned out and I also love that my nails are now long enough to really show off cute designs like this <3

A bit of Gardening

So, I think it's about time to break up all these polish posts. What better way to do that than with a bit of gardening news? Especially since we finally have plants sprouting in our garden! We started planting just before Easter and have been waiting and waiting and finally there are results!

Starting from the left of the photo below there are chives (this is the third year they've come back); an empty space for the rosemary, parsley and three types of basil we're trying to sprout in separate pots; two rows of green onions; and six rows of carrots in the first bed. The second bed has four rows of beets and three rows of lima beans. The four large blue pots behind that are for the tomato plants that we are starting inside.


The veggies that we have sprouting so far are the carrots and beets, the tomatoes and rosemary that we started inside, and one of the pumpkin seeds that we planted in a different bed behind where I took this pic from.

I'm really looking forward to doing all sorts of canning this year. We also have tons of raspberry and blackberry canes located all over our property and the rest of the neighborhood. We picked about 74 cups of blackberries last year, made oodles of jam, gave more oodles away and STILL have a whole bunch left!