Tutorial: Painted Glitter Heels

Glitter shoes became immensely popular quite fast, but they seemed like such a pain with the layers upon layers of mod podge, glitter, mod podge, glitter, mod podge.. Not to mention when you walk it would crease the fabric and you would lose your glitter..

These shoes are much more subtle, and guaranteed to not lose glitter on me! Plus it's the perfect way to spruce up a pair of nude pumps and give them some more 'oomph!'. 

I chose my base colour as a frosty mint, and added two coats to the back of the shoes. I also painted the back of the heel itself, but stopped at the area that touches the ground. No point in painting that part, I say.

I let those two coats dry overnight to ensure that they were, in fact, dry. After that I started on the glitter coats. The first coat does a light splattering of glitter. The second coat really pumps it up because the first coat gives it a rough feel so the glitter really has something to stick to. And, if any spots were missed, your base coat will take care of that and no one will notice!

I smoothed out the glitter and made sure it was all laying flat, and now they're ready to go!

Easy peasy, now go rock your new glam kicks!!!

Note: You should clean the area before painting, and tape off the parts of the shoe you don't want painted just in case. I had no tape so I made sure to be extra careful. 

The two brands of nail polish I used are ones I found here in China. They're soooooo nice, I want to buy every colour the store has!

Dry Splatter Mani

I had a lot of fun with this one, also made a grand mess.

Instead of using nail polish and a straw with a normal splatter mani, I used a makeup brush loaded with loose pigment and tapped off the excess onto the nails. 

My colour choices. Next time I'll use much brighter colours, and maybe a base colour instead of clear.

How to:
Apply your base coat to a couple of nails, and start picking colours to put on your brush and tap over the nail so the pigment falls off. Once you figure the polish is probably dry, blow away the excess and add a top coat.

Sonnetarium Polish

I don't care that it's after Christmas. I finally got my hands on this polish, so I'm gonna put this polish on my hands!

Sonnetarium's Peppermint Kiss. You might remember it from this post about my favourite holiday polishes. Well after it being sold out for a while, me checking their website repeatedly paid off! It didn't take long to arrive despite it being the holidays, and it got here bubble wrapped, in packing peanuts, in a little box, with a hand signed business card.

It's everything I hoped it would be, looks like you could eat it, and I got a compliment at work today about my nails when I just painted them this morning ;) awe yeah!

(Please forgive my crappy pictures...)

Sonnetarium polishes are big 3 free (no formaldehyde or the other icky harmful things). You can check out their polishes on their website, and their facebook to see when things are getting restocked.

Holiday Nail Polishes

Thanks to the wonderful creative minds of people, you can get 'big 3 free' nail polishes that suit any theme your heart desires through etsy, facebook and the like. Handmade with care! With the holidays coming up I wanted to share some of the best festive polishes that I've seen out there.

(To note, I've pulled the pictures off of etsy, but the majority of them come from Chalkboard Nails, a great nail art blog that does a lot of indie polish reviews. She's great, and you should check her out.)

Hurry Down the Chimney Tonight A cute white and red shard and bar glitter topcoat.

I'll Wait Up For You Dear A super fine red and green glitter. Cute!

Peppermint Kiss Ugh! How amazing is this?! I've never seen a nail polish that I've called 'delicious' before, but seriously, it looks good enough to eat. If this was available on their website right now I would already have bought it.

Candy Cane Crush I love hex glitters, this topcoat is definitely great!

Think of All the Fellas That I Haven't Kissed blues, purples, glitter.. A great combination.

Something About Merry I think my favourite part of this one is the light green semi transparent pieces.

Christmas In Bordeaux Square glitter and gold thrown in the mix to keep things interesting. I think it looks best on the right, over gold.

 Very Merry Holly Berry Just red! Looks similar to a polish I ordered in the mail (still waiting on.. It's a brand thats only avail online in the US so I had to go to ebay for it) but this one is a clear base. I really like it.

Up To Snow Good Beautiful! I'm such a fan of teal though, why are we even surprised this makes the list ;P.

I hope this gets you ready to festivfy.. Festivify.. Get those nails festive! I've been looking into making my own polishes (sadly I missed out on the last run of base that was available, and I'm kicking myself for not ordering it even though I was told not to because of the holidays) but I'm sure it'll be available again someday. Until then I'm mixing all my ideas up in topcoat bottles. Works okay, but I need to shake the bottle pretty hard after everything settles. Still! I've gotten quite a few compliments on my last few colors and a woman at work told me to sell her a bottle so eventually when I can make these the way I want to, who knows.. Maybe I'll see some fancy nail polish blogs doing reviews of my work ;P. I'll have to get some pictures to share with you. Sometime. Before the holidays are over...