Hammy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving, Canadian friends!  As has become my holiday tradition, here is a festive manicure featuring my favourite – and most successful – homemade polish, Hawaiian Ham (so named after those alarming, 1950s-style ham casseroles topped with pineapple rings and maraschino cherries.)  I made up a bottle for some American friends recently, substituting the yellow, pineapple-y glitter for a red-tinged bronze, and renamed this shade Canadian Bacon. 😉

But speaking of rings on the Thanksgiving dinner table, here’s a fun, older mani of mine in which I honoured that most Canadian of festive foodstuffs, the uncut – very important, that – ringed log of cranberry sauce.  Just shoot it straight out of the can and onto a fussy little garnish dish!  The polish I used here was KB Shimmer’s Leaf of Faith; I think it looks like extra chunky cranberry jelly.  Hope you all have a delicious one!

Cranberry Jelly

The canned kind, with rings! For these fun nails in honour of Canadian Thanksgiving, or more specifically, Canadian Thanksgiving dinner, I modified the mischievous piggy design I did some weeks back to create horizontal “can” ridges in my cranberry-hued jelly, KB Shimmer’s Leaf of Faith. It’s a subtle look, but one with a lot of good foodie memories for a lot of people – for some folks, it just ain’t cranberry sauce without those rings! Me, I’m all about the roast potatoes and gravy, but I can’t imagine that would make very attractive nail art, do you? Best to stick with the pretty jellies instead. 😉 Happy Thanksgiving!

I Be-Leaf!

In a few days time it will be Fall proper, and what better way to usher in that gorgeous, fiery season than with this absolutely beautiful and beautifully festive glitter? This little stunner is KB Shimmer’s Leaf of Faith, a polish from last year’s Fall collection that somehow managed to escape my notice. Or, more accurately, I noticed it, decided I didn’t need it, then decided I did need it, at which point it promptly went out of stock until THIS Fall (“need” being a totally relative term, of course.) I picked up this leafy beauty from Harlow & Co., along with a couple of other selections from this year’s Halloween collection.

But back to Leaf of Faith. Oh my gosh, this polish is GORGEOUS! Like two of my other favourite KB polishes, punch-hued Belle of the Mall and kelly green Get Clover It, Leaf of Faith is a jelly-based glitter. I love these kinds of lacquers, because they give the look of a jelly sandwich manicure straight out of the bottle, with tons of depth, shine and much-desired “squishiness.” The formula on these polishes is likewise awesome, applying smoothly in three light coats, with no weird glitter bunch. Gosh, that sounds like a horrible affliction, doesn’t it – glitter bunch? 🙂

Speaking of, the glitter in Leaf of Faith – red, gold and orange in an assortment of holographic hexes – is suspended in a lush, merlot-hued jelly that deepens it to a gorgeous, perfectly burnished smattering of crunchy leaves. A truly stunning polish – be-leaf that.