So this manicure looks pretty simple, right? Well this took me THREE HOURS. Let me explain. Grab your popcorn. 

I had a lot of inspiration pictures of lemon nails, but didn't really know what I wanted to do exactly. So I decided to just wing it. I knew I wanted to use my new lemon decals on a couple fingers, and I decided to do some sort of yellow French tip on the other nails because that's easy to do. 

I thought this would be a great time to use my French tip tape (you know, the kind that's a guide), so I mixed up some yellow and white to make a pale yellow. The guides didn't work out at all. The gel was too runny, it was a disaster. So I thought, okay. Let's just make it a half nail and add some black dots. After I cured the gel, I realized I hated the pale color because it didn't match the lemons. I decided to continue on with polka dots because there was nothing I could do about it at this point, aside from starting all over again on those nails. Well I hated the dots. I couldn't get them the right size, I tried about four times. By the time I got to my thumb I said, screw it. This is just going to be yellow. What could go wrong?

Well half the nail refused to cure! I have no idea why it wouldn't. It was so wet I could just wipe it off. So I had to file it down, reapply the gel, and stuck it under the lamp for a long time just for good measure. After that debacle, I gave up and moved to the other hand, which ended up in design you see above. I had to file down the other hand to get rid of the black polka dots and cover it with the more vibrant yellow. It was just a disaster. 

So the moral of the story is, take some time to prepare your design. Flying by the seat of your pants doesn't always workout, and sometimes you can't do anything about Murphy's Law.