Ikat? I can.

Nail art is really just grown up arts and crafts.
It's for those of us who miss that part of our lives (along with a designated nap time).

I know I rant and rave about it sometimes (catch me on the wrong end of a nail art experiment, late Saturday night, and you'll hear all the negatives about it-no problem).

This one, however, really had me curious, especially after it turned out better while I was in the process of trying to remove it.

I thought I'd give this Ikat pattern technique a whirl last night.

The Ikat pattern is everywhere right now. And while I've yet to like it enough to spend money on it, I will do a test run of my love by putting it on my nails. Just two of them though, I'm not yet that gun ho.

It's a pretty interesting technique, and I was very curious to see whether or not it would work.

Here's what I did...

I picked out my colors: white, pink, black, and Tiffany blue (aka: Maybelline's "Green with Envy")

Then I painted them alternately on my ring fingers. So first a full nail of white...let it dry...then a full nail of pink, then so on and so forth.

Ok, here's where it got interesting...after your nail is completely dry, you take a Q-tip and dip it in nail polish remover and you drag it in spots across your nail.

Now first, I went very slow and had only very little remover on the Q-tip, that did ok. It ended up leaving more cotton mess on my nail than anything else. It actually wan't until I had heavily dipped a Q-tip in nail polish remover and was trying to get the whole thing off my nail that it started to look cool.

What ends up happening is the remover burns through all your layers and leaves a smearing of each color. Don't worry if you burn all the way through and can see your nail, I just touched that part up with a sharpie a little bit.

And you definitely don't want it to look perfect, because that's the beauty of the whole Ikat pattern. It's smeary and blurry by nature so if you've imperfectly smeared, you've got it!

I don't think I'd try to attempt this on all of my nails, but it certainly adds a bit of personality as an accent.