Between last night and today...

Between last night and today I swatched all of my burnishing powders that are used with gel polish. I swatched them over both black and white polish because they look dramatically different depending on the base over which you put them. I have ~50 powders, so x 2 colors, that's ~100 swatches. 😳

This wasn't a huge "need to get it done" type of task, but I rarely use my powders because I didn't have an easy way to see what they would look like. The powders usually come in little pots with an eye-shadow type brush to apply them, and those two things usually come in a small bag so they stay together. At one point I'd starting swatching them on an old nail wheel and snapping off the nails to go in the bag, but the bags weren't always clear and the nails would sometimes be turned around where you couldn't see them. And if I ever wanted to take the nails out to compare one powder to another, there was always the risk of getting things mixed up. It just wasn't effective.

You would think that in the years I've been messing with nail polish that somewhere along the way I'd have finally started using swatch sticks with labels, and you'd be wrong. That is a thing I started doing literally YESTERDAY. But it makes so much sense and it's so much easier to compare colors without worrying about getting things mixed up. I'd love to eventually swatch my whole nail polish collection, but that's not a task I'll be starting anytime soon. 😅

Anyway, this is my drawer of powders, and my swatches over both black and white, with and without flash. Now that that's all organized and lovely and satisfying I have no reason not to use my powders and I'm pretty excited about that.

This is the state of my nail stuff currently:

This is the state of my nail stuff currently:

The stack of drawers to the left contains things like files, gel tools, fake nails for swatching, magnets for the polish, different kinds of tape for nail art, brushes, etc.

The 12 helmers in the middle contain my polish. I have 3 empty drawers at the moment, and that is with all of my polish in there. My polish is a mess; it's sorted into drawers by color, with things like magnetic and multichrome and topper polishes (mostly) separated. The drawers are just in there every which way at the moment. I do plan to re-sort by color and arrange the drawers better, but it's a process since I have the physical storage of my polish to contend with as well as the digital storage for my database (swatches, color descriptions, collection, event, release date, which drawer it's in, etc). According to my database, I have a little over 4,200 polishes.

On the right, those drawers contain things like my gel lamp, my chemicals, my stones, studs, and other small embellishments, as well as powders (the kind you buff into gel), my hard gels, and my stamping polish.

Not pictured:  My binders of stamping plates and my binder of decals, vinyls, and stickers.

If you have nothing more fun or interesting to do...

If you have nothing more fun or interesting to do this fine Friday evening, feel free to browse through my nail polish swatch folder. According to my spreadsheet I have around 4000 nail polishes, so this is far from all of them. I'm hoping to finish gathering swatches, descriptions, and collection names over the next few months, so the folders and photos found at this link will be updating while that happens.

The folders that are most complete are Bee's Knees and Tonic. Sadly, they are both on hiatus for now, but they make up some of the largest numbers in my collection and if you look at them you'll definitely see why. They made some beauties.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-1FdO7iQBsyidgnZNggHySOs4xIOsCyG

I don't know how many of you have a bunch of small things to sort through, but with my nail art collection I have a good bit of stuff. A couple of years ago I thought I'd make an app for storing nail stamping plates, but then I found the "Color My Life" app and changed my mind. "Color My Life is a mobile cataloging app designed exclusively for Paper Crafters." It's not meant for me, but it actually works quite well.

I have all of my stamping plates stored in there, as well as stickers, vinyls, nail wraps, water slide decals, etc. It has space for photos and brands and barcodes, as well as a field for listing where you stored your items. You can tag things by color and search by pretty much anything. I should probably give in and use this for my nail polish, but I've been too invested in making my own database to give that up. 😂 I'm nothing if not stubborn.

I thought I'd share this piece of my nail art organization for any of you who might be interested. I've got more Helmers on the way so it'll be a bit yet before I get my actual polish straightened out. That is a much bigger job. 😂😂😂

Today Shaun and I built 7 Helmers from Ikea.

Today Shaun and I built 7 Helmers from Ikea. Then we moved 58 small totes of nail polish downstairs. I got 36 of those totes put away into the Helmers. The rest of the polish is sorted by brand (easier to put into my database) rather than color (how the rest of my polish is sorted), so it's slower going putting those other 22 totes away. And I think I'm going to need a few more Helmers, anyway.

I sure wish I had Janet here to help me sort the colors! 😂❤️

I've done a bunch of miscellaneous...

I've done a bunch of miscellaneous "getting myself in order" over the last few weeks. This is a fun part of that - swatching my gel polishes. All of them came in black bottles that look exactly the same with little information on the outside. I decided to swatch the polishes on an old crappy nail wheel that I don't care about so I could remove the nail forms and glue them to the bottles.

The first photo is magnetic colors. If I get good with a magnet I'll be able to make designs other than a line, but that will suffice for swatch purposes.

The second photo is neons, obviously. You can tell that I legit used a crappy nail wheel to swatch on because the nails were thin and you can see through them. (I didn't want to waste multiple coats of polish on doing this - I just needed to be able to see what was in the bottle).

The third photo is my boyfriend being a great helper. 😂 He's seriously been into everything with me lately. Me and Kira were going through polish the other day and he wanted to look at them, too. He bit some of them. I don't know if that means he liked them or not, but that's always a positive sign coming from me. 😂😂😂

I've only got about 20 gels to go. I'm hoping that I get them finished up tonight. But for now we've gotta run some errands so I'm off to do that. Later, friends! ❤️

I SUPER hate being disorganized.

I SUPER hate being disorganized. It messes with my brain in a bad way. So recently I did some research to find a good app to help me get my nail stamping plates in order. I found one called "Color My Life" that's meant for paper crafters, but it's working out surprisingly well for my purposes.

The app lets you tag your items so that you can find them easily. Some stamping plates have themes (like holidays), but others have random images or patterns so there was no easy way for me to organize those and later be able to find what I was looking for. The app also lets you add a location of where the items are stored for easy retrieval. Yesss. My brain is happy. 😁

I put a solid 7 days of effort into cleaning, organizing, tagging, and cataloging my nail stamping plates (I'm closing in on having 600 😬). Now I can search my plates in a variety of different ways and see where they are stored. I'm SO pumped about this because I haven't done nail art in so long. Part of it was because of college and then moving, but another big part of it was because I was overwhelmed every time I looked through my plate binders, which was the only way I had to see my plates or get ideas. 

Now if I'm feeling a dog mani I can just type "dog" in the app and see all of my plates with dog-related images. I can decide what works best for my idea and immediately know which binder it's stored in. I 👏 am 👏 so 👏 EX 👏 CI 👏 TED. 😂😂😂 Y'all really don't even know how stupid giddy I am right now. 😂

Since the app lets you have different categories of items I'm seriously considering adding my water-slide decals, nail wraps, stickers, and foils to the mix. I don't yet know if I'm going to do all of that, but I did add a few of my decals in and I think it makes sense. Anyway, we'll see. For now this is a great start. 😁