Exciting to probably no one but me...

Exciting to probably no one but me...

Out of 72 drawers I'm down to swatching the last 3 drawers of nail polish that are in my database. The 4 drawers of polish remaining after that are newbies that I need to put in my database as well as swatch.

So I didn't hit my December timeline on getting everything that's already catalogued swatched (and I knew I probably wouldn't), but this is still pretty great.

I'm doing a drawer of magnetics tonight, and a drawer of magnetics tomorrow. Those will take extra time to make sure the magnetic effect shows up on my swatch sticks. Then I'll do my duos, which will also take extra time because I need to swatch them separately and then together. After that, onto my new stuff!

I think I'm gonna have around 5000 nail polishes by the time it's all said and done... And that's a lot. (Please don't judge me too harshly - I've been collecting for many years. I still have polish I wore in high school.) I guess I will either need to stop buying or start destashing after this because I am running out of drawers to put them in. We shall see.

I'm finished swatching...

I'm finished swatching 8/12 of my helmers, or 48/72 of my helmer drawers. Or I'm just 2/3 of the way finished, if you prefer that. 😂

I'm taking the rest of the week off. I do have 2 small paint shakers, but I've been hand-shaking each bottle after the machines as well. Since I've been working on this basically every day since I started (in August? September?) my hands and wrists are hurting and I don't want to damage myself. And I'm tired. And since I'm about to be away from home for a couple of weeks I want to spend my time with Shaun.

I'm so excited to be closing in on a "maintenance phase" for this project. I'm having a great time playing with my polish, but it's gonna feel so good to my brain to have it all organized. Plus, it'll be so much easier to plan out nail art and jewelry. 😊

As of last night...

As of last night I finished swatching half of my polish drawers. I don't know if it's *quite* half of my collection, but it's probably close! 😁

As of this morning...

For math purposes:  I started swatching on August 27th. It's taken me 7 weeks to do 1/3 of my collection. I don't think I'll be finished by December, especially since I'll be away for 2 weeks. But that's ok. I think I'll have the bulk of my colors done and will be down to toppers, magnetics, thermals, gels, etc.

I did not plan / stage this, but...

I did not plan / stage this, but when I saw it I had to get a photo. 😂😂😂

If I'm not super social or responsive...

First 50 done!

First 50 done! Now <100 more days of this and I'll be done. 😂😂😂

It was actually really fun once I got started and got over my nerves. I miss my polishes and I love them. ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🖤🤍 They are so beautiful and bring me joy.

So all of these were in one of my "red" drawers. As you can (most likely) see, they are not all what is usually considered to be red. So when I do the big sort with my friend, we are sorting them by the color that the swatch ring says. That makes a lot more sense to me for ease of finding what I'm looking for.

My helper in all things: Scar.

My helper in all things:  Scar. Even when he's not thrilled with what I'm doing. 😂😂😂

Shaun ordered...

Shaun ordered 5000 swatch sticks for me and I printed 4500-ish labels last night... Meaning that I can start swatching my nail polish collection.

I am thinking I'll do 3 coats of polish on each stick + topcoat. It's the way I'd normally wear it.

I don't know why, but it feels like a big deal and I'm nervous to get started. It's definitely a large undertaking, but I have until the end of the year to do it before a friend comes to help me re-organize the whole collection by color. (We both enjoy that kind of task. 😂) I think I have time, so that's not the reason for the feelings.

I guess I'm just being weird. Nothing new there. 😜

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.

I've been trying for almost 2 weeks...

I've been trying for almost 2 weeks to get good pictures / videos of my proposal polishes.  I have been failing, but I did finally get a wheel to swatch them on and since Shaun has a better camera and bigger hands for wheel-spinning I tasked him with making the video.  This is how the polishes look in outdoor lighting.  I'm going to try to get one more of them this week in indoor lighting because they are beautiful both ways.

Shaun worked with Lindsey, the magic-maker behind Tonic Nail Polish to come up with this.  His goal was to make a custom color for me that was a brown / olive green shifter.  "Marry Me Blu" was THE ONE, but the other prototypes turned out so beautiful that he asked to name them and buy them as a collection so that is what this is.

So without further delay - here is the Delta X Collection, given to me on 3.14.  The names of the polishes are math puns since I really dig math (despite my struggles this semester).

1:  Marry Me Blu 

2:  Trapezoidal Pool (Trapezoidal Rule)

3:  Convergent Seabreeze (Convergent Series)

4:  Functional Ambivalence (Functional Equivalence)

5:  Divinely Integral (Definite Integral)

6:  No Name (free prototype)

7:  Partial to Derivatives (Partial Derivative)

8:  Tangent Pine (Tangent Line)

9:  Differential Elation (Differential Equation)