Springin’ Sprinkles

If I have learned anything over the last year and a bit of pandemic life – and that is highly debatable; in most respects, I actually feel like I’m regressing – it’s that our existence is fragile, and we could all use a hell of a lot more sprinkles. I’m talking here about metaphorical sprinkles – those sparkly, too-fleeting moments of hope and joy and love and understanding – but also the real kind, the ones composed of corn syrup and cellulose gum and palm oil, and a certain childlike glee in having your foodstuffs adorned with the same.

It was with that thought in mind – “Want pretty sprinkles for sweet foods!” – that I placed an order for a beautiful mess of items from Sprinkle Pop, a candy maker I found through the always dangerous platform of Instagram (dangerous in that I can always find some completely random new area of interest to occupy my time and money. Bespoke sprinkles – *snort* – is just the latest.)

Sprinkle Pop’s surprisingly tasty adornments – flavoured jimmies, metallic spheres, glittery dragees, and colourful mixes loaded with tiny, hand-piped extras – come in three sizes, eight ounce jars, four ounce jars, and two ounce sample packs. The sample packs give you about a quarter cup of sprinkles, which in my (newly acquired) experience will decorate about three dozen cupcakes, or two sprinkled-spackled cakes. Here’s the Robin’s Egg sprinkle mix (perhaps my favourite) sitting prettily atop some cupcakes I recently made (chocolate with salted caramel buttercream icing, in case you feel like driving yourself mad with desire, and yes, they were totally delicious!)

I chose six sample packs, three perfect for the just-passed Easter season (from left to right, Hangin’ With My Peeps, a mix of pastel jimmies and tiny royal icing Peeps; Egg Hunt, another springy rainbow mix studded with hand-piped bunnies and carrots; and Robin’s Egg, with its sweet, speckled eggs) and three just-because-they’re-pretties (from left to right, Royal Plume, a fun mix of bright, peacock-inspired hues; Love You a Latte, a soft, Valentine’s Day-appropriate blend of coffee-flavoured jimmies; and Leprechaun Loot, which is clearly going to have to wait until next year to properly exercise its lucky charms.)

Then because I have plans for them, I bought two mixes in the slightly larger four ounce size, Dark Unicorn, a sugar’corn-studded blend of blacks and brights and neons, and Strawberry Shortcake, which is delightfully self-explanatory.

I even managed to derive some nail art inspiration from Egg Hunt!

Neat! Important, necessary, critical to my existence? Definitely not. But a sweet diversion in a world that could use a lot more sprinkles, and a fun thing in my life.

Sprinkle Pop Tie Dye

I’d love to say these cool, tie dye-patterned nails were an intentional thing, but like all delightful creations, they began in a very different place from which they wound up. I was going for another fluid art look, this time in a bouquet of spring pastels, so inspired by some springin’ sprinkles I recently purchased from Sprinkle Pop (more on the fab world of bespoke sprinkles next post.)

But I jumped the gun and didn’t let my little self-made nail decals dry thoroughly, so when I topped my finished mani with a requisite coat of Seche Vite, it smudged up into this still-pretty tie dye concoction that reminds me of Hypercolor shirts from the ’90s (a type of tie dye, I suppose, if watery pastels mixed with sweat is your bag. Yikes, the ’90s were a rough time, sartorially speaking!)

Llama Love

When I was a kid, I lived in a small, rural town.  Actually, “town” is too grand a word for North Gower, Ontario in the 1980s.  Today, with its subdivisions and farmers markets and actual, sit-down restaurants, North Gower is a bona fide village, but in the ’80s when I was a kid, it was a main street with a few shops and a pizza joint, perched on the steps of which you could always find these two old dudes who were collectively known as The Delmers.  I loved growing up there, but bustling metropolis, it was – and still is – not.

Anyhow, the next small, rural town over – a slightly bigger place that had a longer main street, more shops and fewer Delmers – there was a family with a gigantic pet llama that actually lived right on Main Street, and they’d let him out in the front yard to just wander about and scare the crap out of anyone passing on the sidewalk, because suddenly, you know, LLAMA!!!  Small town country life – it’s weird, don’t know what to tell you. 😉

These are fuzzy pink sprinkled llama nails.  Why sprinkles?  Why not sprinkles?!  Isn’t everything better with sprinkles?  A sentiment that’s also a bit weird, and hey look, I still don’t know what to tell you!  Sometimes you’re just in the mood to sport a candy pink llama mani, I guess.

Happy Un-Birthday!

Sprinkled birthday cake nails!  Just because.

Or to slightly mangle a Jimmy Buffett song, somewhere it’s Birthday O’Clock. 😉

Kaleidoscope Candy

Cheery sprinkled nails (using Cirque’s gold glitter standard, Kaleidoscope) for this cheery Saturday morning.  Hope your weekends are kicking off most delightfully, friends! 🙂

Ombre Ice Cream

From chocolate to vanilla, and always with sprinkles. 🙂

Sprinkle Pops

Because every so often I just have to paint my nails like something frosted and sprinkled, preferably both! Donuts are the ideal, but here I used a sweet lollipop nail charm from Daily Charme – I’m indiscriminate about the foodstuffs I’ll top with sprinkles, mostly in nail art, but occasionally sometimes also in life (I CANNOT make a chocolate box cake with tub icing without coating it in about half a cup of rainbow jimmies. Crunchy sugar goodness.) 🙂

Foot Candy

No, I have not changed the focus of this blog to foot fetishism…yet.  Rather, I received a rather awesome pair of ice cream-style ballet flats for Christmas (generous gift-giver: me!) that were just begging for a sweet matching mani, and who am I to deny my shoes when they’re calling out for love?

This manicure is your basic drippy waffle cone design, but the shoes are a different matter altogether. Available solely (heh) through Shoe Bakery, these flats, and their many gorgeous high-heeled cousins, are handmade, custom made and beautifully unique – edible-looking, wearable works of art that are now inspiring this edible-looking, wearable work of nail art.  I can’t wait to give these guys a proper workout come the spring and summer – just in time for ice cream season.

Guacamonut!

Mmm, avocado and donuts – together at last!

About five years ago I loved a short-lived television show by the name of The Good Guys. Starring Bradley Whitford and Colin Hanks, it was an hour-long buddy cop comedy about two totally mismatched detectives, Hanks’ Jack Bailey, a young, eager, idealistic go-getter, and Whitford’s Dan Stark, an elaborately mustachioed 1980s throwback still riding high on the glory (and job security) of having once foiled a plot to kidnap the governor’s son. Dan’s so retro, he has virtually no regard for modern day annoyances such as paperwork, “smarty phones” or proper police procedure, and so despite actually being a great detective, he’s relegated to the minor cases (stolen humidifiers, dine-n-dashes) where he can’t screw things up too badly. Except he always does, and somehow, his simple little cases always devolve into major incidents, incidents that require the intervention of his more level-headed partner, his partner who in turn gets sucked into Dan’s craziness and wanton disregard for the very laws he’s sworn to uphold (in keeping with the retro vibe of the show, reckless, destructive car chases feature prominently.)

Dan’s also the kind of guy who swears by old school, in-the-car cop chow – the messier and more grease-soaked, the better. The man’s clearly got an odd relationship to food (when he’s sick, he eats nothing but Cool Ranch Doritos, because the “dust” cleans out his blocked nasal passages, and he was once suspended after opening a mayonnaise jar with his service revolver), although I think my favourite foodie invention of his has to be the guacamonut, which is exactly what you think it is – a cinnamon-dusted donut dunked in spicy guacamole. And while I can’t speak to how a guacamonut might actually taste (horrible, I’m assuming – not everything should be spread on a donut), I can definitely comment on how cute these guacamonut-inspired nails are! Although it’s taking every ounce of my willpower not to slap some sweet, sweet ‘stashes on those little avocados. Dan would so approve.

Sadly, The Good Guys has never been made available for (legal) download or purchase, which is a shame. It’s cute and clever, and Colin Hanks and Bradley Whitford have phenomenal buddy cop chemistry. I was disappointed when it was cancelled after just one incomplete season, but obviously its inspiration lives on.

Frosted Circus Animal Cookies! (31DC2015)

Although I still have two more prompts to tackle in the 31 Day Nail Art Challenge, I thought I’d jump ahead to the final day’s theme of honouring nails you love. Well, actually, it’s honOring nails you *heart*, but I’m Canadian, so it’s O-U, and also, I don’t speak emoticon.

The manicure that I love and chose to honour is a simple, but adorable and delicious-looking, sprinkled animal cracker design by Sarah Waite of Chalkboard Nails. It was one of those manicures that when I saw it, I just about whacked myself in the forehead in annoyance – “Oh cripes, why didn’t I think of that?!” I mean, I have painted foodstuffs on my nails hundreds of times now – how did I miss super cute frosted animal crackers? And Sarah did such a fabulous job on them, too – while they may *just* be random dots in a clutch of rainbow brights over a base of frosty pink and white, the dotting work is excellent; very random and natural-looking. I have the aggravating habit in my nail art of wanting things to be perfectly symmetrical, which is just not how things like sprinkles work! So I really admire her “little bit of this, little bit of that” approach to an otherwise pretty basic dotticure – let the sprinkles lie where they may and all that. 🙂

I admire her approach so much, in fact, that eagle-eyed readers may notice that my interpretation of her manicure is no such thing – it’s actually a dot-by-dot recreation of her animal cracker design! I wanted to get a feel for a more randomized approach to dotting work, and the only way to do that was to “trace” her design, a practice I used to employ quite frequently in the early days of my nail art obsession, but less and less over the past two years as I’ve developed my own eye for design.

A quick word about that “tracing”, however. It’s fine to draw major inspiration from another nail artist, or even to just flat out copy somebody else’s design, right down to the colours used – sometimes that’s how people learn how to do something, like me! When I first started nail arting, I’d often find a design I liked on Pinterest or, yes, Chalkboard Nails, call it up on my tablet and then get down to work, copying it brushstroke for brushstroke to the best of my ability. Simply DOING it was the only way I was going to learn, and I wasn’t yet confident enough in my skills to just strike out on my own all willy nilly.

But! I never, ever published those early, copycat manicures in any form, and if I was ever asked, all due credit for the design went to the nail artist in question. It’s just good form. And if you’re going to publish inspired-by or copycat manis to your blog or vlog or Instagram, like these circus cookie nails, it’s best form to link back to the original post and creation. Okay, class, lecture on proper attribution done. 😉