Thread nail art with Essie St Lucia Lilac polish

This is a beauty blog. Not a glossy magazine. And I am not a model, but a snub-nosed, wonky-toothed, oily- and acne-skinned former tomboy who is only learning my way through makeup. So there are bound to be fails.
But the courage to show a makeup fail has not been easy to find. You want to show the world your best efforts, not the ones that went awry. At the same time, fails show both of us where I went wrong, what not to do and how to improve on my attempt.
This is a nail art experiment I did with stranded embroidery yarn. I had seen string or thread manicures using sewing thread and wanted to try them out but ended up with stranded embroidery yarn instead of thin sewing thread! Thankfully, no freehand work was involved.

Here is how I did a thread manicure over Essie St Lucia Lilac nail polish.

For the base colour, I used St Lucia Lilac, which you have seen me swatch here. This is a lovely Essie creme for Spring, although the formula is slightly streaky. I applied two coats of S.L.L. and then it was time for the thread-work.

Having spent my schooldays wriggling out of sewing class (I went to an all-girls' convent, so you can imagine) and smuggling my work-cloth/pillowcase/dress beneath my uniform so my aunt could hurriedly stitch it for me a day before the examination, it is no wonder that I ended up with stranded yarn in place of sewing thread. Ah well. This is much thicker and gives the nails a bit of texture, but if I can live with flocking powder and concrete polish, then why not good old stranded cotton thread?

Anyway, here are the steps for this manicure:
Pick your colour. Next time, I am going to brush out the strands and get thinner thread.
Cut off roughly 1cm and shorter bits with the scissors. This really depends on the length of your nails but you don't want the thread to stretch from bed to edge.

Make sure you pick fast-colour thread. You are going to slather on the top coat and the last thing you need is for the colours to run.
The other important thing is to use really sharp scissors. I picked a somewhat blunt pair at first, which is why some of the threads have frayed edges.

Apply top coat on your nails. Do not wait for it to dry
Get a pair of tweezers and pick up one edge of the thread gently. Do not press too hard.

Place the thread on the nails to form the pattern of your choice.
You can either apply topcoat on the whole nail, or you can apply topcoat on just the ends of the thread.
Here, I have applied topcoat all over the nails on the index and ring fingers and only on the ends of the thread on the middle finger and pinkie. Without topcoat, you cannot get the nails wet.
The sources of string nail art inspiration are Galactic Lacquer and Spellbound Nails. My mani looks nothing like the delicate efforts of the two polish bloggers; they have picked thin sewing thread.

Two of my nails broke when I removed this mani so next week, it is back to nubs. Do you like seeing fails or do you want me to show you just the glossy bits?
This is my submission to the GOT Polish Challenge with "lilac" as the theme. Do check out the other entries.

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