nail art FAIL

i'd been intrigued by the idea of water marbling manicures for a few weeks.  basically, you take some room-temperature water, drop in different colors of nail polish, swirl it around with a toothpick, dip your nail in, and when you pull it out you end up with a pretty cool-looking tie-dye effect.

so when the cupcake nails had run their course (a whole week - not too bad, right?), i waited for the bean to take her nap before pulling out the stuff.

following the directions i'd read in countless tutorials like this one, i taped up my fingertips in an effort to keep the clean-up to a minimum.

i started dropping the bits of nail polish into the dixie cup i'd filled with tap water.  the teen and i watched it spread out, just like in the tutorials.

when i dip, you dip, we dip.

um, massive fail.  after i took the tape off, i had this hot ass mess.

after i perused the tutorials again, i see where i possibly went wrong.  if i'd painted my nails with a light base color, they probably would've turned out a lot better.  or included some white polish in the water.  oh, well.  so i removed that polish and went with another design i'd found on pinterest:

pretty deep post, huh?