Theme Weekend!

This weekend I had a couple of events I wanted to do theme manicures for, my baby brother's 30th (how old does typing that make me feel?!!) and a baby shower.  Due to time constraints neither manicures were quite what I had planned but I think they turned out ok.

Firstly, Saturday night's 30th birthday manicure, my brother is a keen musician and a big lover of Vegas and the casinos, he also likes the odd cocktail, so here's what I did in a nod to his favourite things...

And then for the baby shower on Sunday, I did these nails, which I am pretty pleased with.  It's not exactly what I had planned but I really like how it turned out, I think it's a look which I might do again at some point as I like the sweet, sugary mixed up effect that's been created...

Sorry about the hideous lack of clean up on the baby shower manicure, I had half an hour before going out the door and no time to clean up, thankfully they looked slightly less sloppy in person than they do under the macro lens!

Unsuccesful Stamping

It's not really the stamping which is unsuccessful, I just don't really think any of this manicure works particularly well. 

I wanted to use Models Own Indian Ocean and previously I had layered it over a light blue which turned out beautifully, so I decided to do something similar and use another Kiko polish, this time 340.  However the end result was a very bright, in your face sort of colour which seemed very 80s to me somehow and not half as pretty as the last attempt.

I decided to try stamping over the top and chose QA28, which is a plate featuring lips and moustaches.  I thought the lips might look good as an all over pattern and used Barry M Chameleon polish, in pink, to stamp with.  As an aside, the Chameleon polishes are amazing to stamp with, some of the best I have used, they go on so opaque!

Unfortunately the result of the stamping wasn't really what I hoped for either, it's hard to tell what the stamp is and the shimmer from the base colour shines through a bit too much making it seem even more blurry.

So, overall, I'm not really happy with this manicure at all.  It'll be coming off tonight hopefully to be replaced by my new bottle of OPI Black Spotted which just arrived in the post today!

Animal Print

I did a quite animal print stamp (QA8) over Friday's manicure to freshen it up for today:

I actually preferred this without the stamp, the silver was lovely on it's own and with the stamp on it's not as sparkly and bling as it was.  I'm also not 100% happy with how the stamp went on, not sure if that's down to my technique or the new stamper I used.

Barry M Black Multi Glitter & Pirates!

This is Barry M's new Black Multi Glitter, it's an opaque black polish with holographic glitter through it, unfortunately although it applies well and looks quite pretty on the nail it's not very exciting or very glittery:

It's a little better under strong lighting but still not as glittery as I'd hoped:

I decided to use it as a base for stamping and added a pirate theme with my new QA stamps, 5 and 8.

 

Which fitted in nicely with Adventures in Stampings theme for his week which was 'Favourite New Stamp'.

My Stamping Set Up.

Just a quick post to show how I set myself up to get ready for stamping. 

I find it easiest to have everything set out in front of me; polish, top coat, image plate, stamper, scraper, cotton wool and cotton bud (both soaked in remover).  I also like to have a piece of kitchen roll down so I don't need to worry about any of the polish coming off the plate and getting on other things.

A lot of people like to work at a table but I prefer to lean on a large hardback book and cushion while sitting back on the couch.  As much becasue of laziness as a lack of space for a table. ;)



Stamping Plate Storage - Bundle Monster, Cheeky etc.

I have three full sets of Bundle Monster plates and I'm hoping to add the new Cheeky collection to them as soon as it's released so I have quite a few plates to store.  Initially I kept them in a little pot but now that the collection is mounting that was getting quite awkward and didn't give me a good view of all the plates and images I had.  So I started to look into solutions and that led me to order this little book from Amazon.

There was quite a bit of talk about using a business card holder to store plates and in the end I chose this one because of it's pocket size, 9cm by 6cm, which was slightly larger than some other card holders.  I'd measured my BM plates and they were around 5.5cm across which seemed to be the standard size of a pocket in most holders, this one's 6cm width meant that there would be a little bit of wiggle room for the plates, hopefully making them easier to get in and out.

On to the holder.  The cover is a little dull so I think I might personalise it somehow, ideally I would stamp on it so that it showed some of the images that were on the plates it was storing but I think that might be tricky as any polish would rub off pretty fast.

Inside the book has 60 little pockets, 3 to a page.  If you put the plates in back to back so one shows out each side you can store 120 plates.  The plastic sheets seem pretty tough and should stand up to having the metal plates stored inside them.

As you can see three plates fit neatly into each section.

And once both sides are filled up it's easy to flip through your whole collection, page by page.

There is plenty of room in the book and even now I have 3 full collections (71 plates) in there it doesn't make looking through the selection any more difficult.

The pockets are deep enough that the plates are well secured in them and although they move around a little they haven't yet fallen out when I have been using the holder.

The plates slide in and out easily whenever you want to take them out for a closer look or use them.

The one downside is that my (slightly larger, differently shaped) QA plates don't fit into the business card holder so I am still looking for a way to store them, if you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them.

However for Bundle Monster, and similarly sized, plates this is definitely a great, cost effective solution and makes flipping through your collection so much simpler.

My First QA Image Plates for Stamping!

While browsing various sites online I came across QA Image Plates, I really liked some of the designs so I decided to make an early birthday purchase for myself and try some out.  I ordered mine through Bunny Nails e-crater store after seeing pictures of the plates on her blog.  I've since discovered that you can also buy them on eBay, through different sellers, but I am very happy with how the transaction went so if I was ordering more I think I would go back to Bunny Nails.

The plates arrived in a padded envelope, inside of which was this adorable Hello Kitty bag with my plates in, I do love it when people make that little bit of extra effort with wrapping it makes things so much more exciting to open:

Inside the Hello Kitty bag were the plates, each in their own little bag, complete with blue sticker to protect them:

Then, minus their protective layers:

I'm really pleased with my choices and can't wait to try them out, here are some close ups of what I selected:

I can't wait to try stamping with these so hopefully I'll be posting some new stamping manicures using them very soon.

UPDATE (10th October 2012):

 

I thought I should do a little update on this post now that I have used most of the plates at least once.  They have all stamped beautifully so far, the images are crisp and even and have transferred well onto the nail.  They work equally well with my Konad stamper and my XL Stamper (also a Bunny Nails purchase but from eBay this time) and there doesn't seem to be any issue with what sort of polish I use on them.

 

Any issues I've had have been with my stamping technique rather than the plates, you can see some of the manicures I've done using them if you click on the QA and QA Stamping Plate tags under this post.  I love the designs I've chosen as they were all a little different from the plates that are normally on offer. My favourite so far is probably QA18 because I love the full nail designs and find them very flexible with regards to the types of looks you can create but the moustache plate (QA28) also has a special place in my heart as it's so super cute, I can't wait to use it for my Movember manicure next month!

 

So, in short, great plates and no problems at all when ordering, so definitely a seller and plate brand I'll be happy to use again in the future.