I have a confession to make. Actually, two confessions:

1. I am a horrible nail biter. As in, reduce-fingers-to-bloody-stumps nail biter. That is not an attractive picture, but it’s something I have been working on for ages and haven’t quite found a good solution for. Regular polish, gross tasting polish, rubber bands to snap on my wrist, my husband poking me every time I do it… it all works for a while, but not permanently. So I am now trying the ‘nails as art’ angle, assuming I won’t want to ruin something I spent a stupid amount of time attempting. And as I am now learning just how LONG it takes to properly do nails, I’m thinking this one might have some purchase, because if there is anything I hate it’s three hours of work (combined with three hours of waiting) going down the drain.

2. I am shit at nail polish. Relating to Point 1, I don’t tend to do a lot with my nails, so I have no skill in this particular area and am orders of magnitude away from the amazing things I see on the internet. BUT I am working under the assumption that one can learn how to do almost anything, so we persevere!

So this is Line Item 1 in my Diabolical Agenda To Learn To Stop Biting my Nails!

Here was my inspiration:

What I used is pictured below. What is not pictured are the tears of the damned I shed over the past two days trying to figure out the technicalities of nail painting (“Oh shit, THAT’S what they mean by too much polish”, “Surely 5 minutes is long enough for this to dry”, “Ohhhh, old nail polish dries more slowly”). Chevrons were attempted and ruined, stripes were almost completed but taken out by some clumsiness, but this morning was my morning!

I used the Valentine/Chevron/Ombre Nails tutorial from Jenna Beth’s blog to guide my attempts. I clearly did not listen to her advice to use quick-dry nail polish for the middle and top coats, thus the seemingly endless amounts of time it took to be able to put the reinforcement labels on the polish. I can’t say it turned out perfect (the perfectionist-in-a-box inside of my brain is gnashing her teeth), but it’s officially the first attempt at ‘nail art’ I have done that at least semi succeeded!

Lessons I learned:

• Think your nails are dry? They aren’t.
• Put something sticky on almost-but-not-really-dry nails? You’ll peel off half a finger of polish.
• Apply a coat, go to something else while doing the Excited Girl Hand Shake, like this:

Or this (but no hand curling):

Or even better, this:

• Forgot you put on nail polish? Good, you MIGHT be able to go back and apply another layer.
• Top coats make everything look better.

Onto not biting nails!

(In the event the cupcake picture made you as hungry as it made me, if you want to see the recipe for it, it can be found here at the Peace, Love and French Fries blog).