I wanted to do a fun patriotic nail design for the Memorial Day festivities (we've got a packed weekend!) and with Justin home I even had time to take photos & put together a tutorial along the way! For this design you will need:

Red, white, and blue nail polish

Fast Drying Topcoat

Scotch Tape & scissors

Clean up supplies (nail polish remover, q-tips, etc.)

Optional: silver polish

First, apply a base coat (if you have one) and then paint your nails white. (I would definitely not recommend the white polish I used, but that's all I had!)



Clean up around the edges of the nail as needed and add a coat of your fast drying topcoat. The topcoat dries the nails in minutes so you move on to the next step without waiting all day! (I use INM Out the Door but there are a lot of good options like Seche Vite, CND Air Dry, etc.)

Cut down a piece of Scotch tape to about 1/3 the height of your nail. For my thumb I needed about 1/2 the tape width, with smaller strips for smaller nails. I worked one nail at a time, but cut two strips so I would have the same size for the opposite nail (like the same size for both thumbs). Lay the strip across the center of your nail, pressing it down well to get rid of any air bubbles or folds. Make sure to press it down into the crease on each side of the nail as well.



Use your blue polish below the tape and red above, adding another coat or two as needed. (I used an ancient Wet N Wild for the blue and China Glaze Ruby Pumps for the red) Carefully peel off the tape, hopefully revealing nice straight lines!



I did have a few spots where the polish leaked under the tape a little but was able to clean this up pretty easily with polish remover and a metal tool with a small point (you could use something like the point on a metal nail file). This will give you much more control than trying to fix it with a q-tip! Dip the tip of your tool into the polish remover and then gently scrape off the mistake. If you end up with a bead of polish remover sitting on your nail you just dab it with the corner of a paper towel to remove it.

Clean around your nails again (I had a lot of blue to clean up!) and then use your top coat again. Try not to brush over the same area twice to help avoid one color streaking into another - one stroke down each side of the nail & one in the center with a well-loaded brush should be enough. (Unfortunately my blue streaked an abnormal amount, so I touched up my center stripe with some more white)

Optional: add some silver stars!



You could follow this tutorial to create some nail stickers with your tape & scissors or a star shaped hole punch, free-hand some stars by dipping a toothpick or nail dotter into silver polish, or stamp some on. If you make a mistake you should be able to easily wipe it off with some polish remover (because of the topcoat) and try again!

I stamped the thumb & middle finger with the star on BM05 and used the star from BM206 for the rest. And of course, top it off with another coat of your topcoat! I love that stuff.

I have actually not done any stamping for about a month now. I realized that I had a few new bottles of polish that I had not used yet, so I've been trying to make sure I test out each one (most are too packed with glitter for a design to show up too well on them). I was also terribly sick for about two weeks and could not convince myself to do much of anything!

But I've got a couple of old pictures for you!

The first one was done over a purple called "Daddy's Girl" by Sinful Colors. It looked almost black in the bottle with a lovely purple shimmer (and touches of gold?) but on the nail it was a very sheer jelly purple. Remind me never to trust a $2 polish again. I think after 6 coats the nail line was still quite visible, so I ended up laying down a coat of pink first (to give it more of a red tint) and topped that with a couple of coats. It was still pretty bland so I added a coat of Pure Ice "Cheatin" on top for some sparkle.



The stamping on this was quite fun though! I had seen someone alternate her nails with the full nail stars print on BM21 and the large star on BM05. How did I not notice how similar they were before? I decided to create a different pattern on each nail using those two along with a couple of the tiny stars from BM14 as filler. It was crazy jumping around between 3 plates! I was attempting to have nothing overlap, but I am not that good at aligning the stamps yet. So it ended up slightly busier than I was hoping for, but still very nice!

In this picture I've also added a matte coat on top, Essie "Matte About You". I love this stuff! It will turn any color into a matte polish & is great for photos too, since you don't have to worry about the glare covering up your stamped design (like in the image below). I didn't add that for a few days though, so you can see I've got some pretty bad wear on my tips.

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Just before my hiatus, I actually bought the newer 25 pc. Bundle Monster plate set. I added the pictures of all of the plates from that set that I am keeping for now on this Flickr set, if you want to check them out. At least I tried out one new plate before my break...

Actually my first attempt was with the top design on BM214, but after many tries I could not get it to run straight down my nail. Grr! I gave up & switched to the top design on BM206, running it down the side of the nail so I could hide any slight crookedness.



The base is a very pretty polish from Kleancolor called "Metallic Green" (how original). It's made up a mix of tiny grass green and spring green particles that kind of blends into a lovely shade in between. I actually stamped this with Pure Ice "Silver Mercedes", but somehow the green changed the silver to a golden color!

A friend was telling me about this blog, where the writer posts her weekly menu with recipe links (along with a lot of other posts). I love that idea! We do a lot of cooking but I don't get many chances to talk about it on here. In the past I've mostly posted meals that I've tweaked several times & written up an official recipe page for, which does not happen very often. And then, after all of that work, it's never seen again. Such a shame!

I'd like to start posting which dinners we are planning on making for the week whether they are old favorites, brand new, or something I am working on (with any links or other info). Then, the next week I can also give an update on how any new recipes turned out! I think it will be a fun series, and thankfully will give me something to break up the nail polish posts as well. ;)



This post is a short one - we just grabbed enough at the grocery store for a few days and will be heading back mid-week. Normally we choose enough meals to get us to the weekend (but don't plan which day we are actually going to cook it).

► Baked Spaghetti Casserole - (pictured above, makes 2 dinners) Spaghetti with cream cheese and French onions? Insanely good. The only change we make is omitting the peppers, but I'd like to re-write this one sometime soon because I find the wording a little confusing.

► Chicken Taquitos - Made these for a get-together with salsa, cheese dip, and chips on the side. These are easier to make than you would think, and *way* tastier than the frozen kind. I'm linking to my Pinterest page where you can find the recipe link and my notes on what we changed. If I ever remember to take a picture of this one I'll probably write it up officially with our changes.

*Sorry for the repeat! Since there was little interest in doing a giveaway I took down the previous post but wanted to share my review by itself.

I was fortunate enough to be given one of the newest Konad nail stamping plates to review by NailPolishCanada.com!

The three new plates are all French tip designs, but this time they give you five different sizes of the same design so you can can get the perfect curve on each finger (there's also a bonus lace design in the center of each plate). I chose M86, which features a deep curve, while M87 and M88 have a normal curve and are patterned with animal prints.

I thought this plate would work great not only for French tips, but also for the crescent moon manicures I've been seeing a lot of lately. I haven't seen anyone use them that way so I was excited to try both!



Without any practice stamping French tips, alignment was a bit of a challenge, but that is something that just gets better with practice. I also had not tried a plate with such a large area of solid color. At first I was ending up with a bald patch in the center again & again, but then I tried scraping from the outside-in and that solved the problem.

Aligning the stamper for the crescent moon manicure was a lot easier. I know that there is usually a small gap between the stamp and your cuticle, so for these I dabbed a little polish right at the base of the cuticle before stamping & it seemed to work well.

You can see NailPolishCanada's full range of Konad supplies here. It looks like they have a huge selection! I only wish the plates were a little clearer in the photos.

Here are the two nail photos I skipped over the for the Easter pics ~

First I used a silver base, Wet n Wild Fast Dry in "Silvivor". You may remember me posting about buying a few WNW colors before - well I hated the other two so much I sold them off on eBay. I didn't end up liking the colors very much and the brushes are *terrible*. "Silvivor" is a nice shimmery polish though, and I didn't have as much trouble with the brush on this one.

I had read that my new China Glaze "Ruby Pumps" was good for stamping, so I thought I would try doing a nice flower & leaf design in two colors. ORLY's "Halley's Comet" was the closest thing I had to a green at the time, so I used that with the fern leaves from Bundle Monster plate BM03 and "Ruby Pumps" with plate BM06. Both stamped very light & slightly translucent with the red showing more as a red-violet than the bright red in the bottle.



I thought the color combination was pretty terrible. I eventually added a coat of Pure Ice "Cheatin" over the top of it, and the purple & blue glitter mix did bring the colors together a little better but made the stamping hard to see.



Next I wanted to try the "Ruby Pumps" for real. The first coat does show up red-violet like the stamps, but after that the glitter covers enough to give it the deep red shade. It's a really lovely polish! I stamped with my trusty Pure Ice "Silver Mercedes" and plate BM04. This was one of my favorite combinations yet!



But a pretty bad picture! I'm still figuring out how to get the best pictures of my nails, but I think I'm a bit limited by the fact that I only have a portrait lens. While it makes most things look wonderful, it can not focus very close up, so I have to hold my hand about as far away as possible. Not a very natural pose! Then you've got to try to tilt the nails to just the right angle to get rid of the glare... and I often don't check the pics until after I've taken off the polish, so I can't re-take a new set. As with photographing *anything*, it's a learning process!

I'm skipping over a few other nail pictures for now to show you what I did for Easter. I would have liked to use some kind of bunny but had nothing that fit the Easter theme other than one small cross, so I decided to just go with something pastel with Spring colors.

I used a pale mint green Bon Bons polish for the base (do they even sell Bon Bons anymore?) and that tiny bottle was a pain in the butt to use. Never again! I found some cute daisies on the Bundle Monster BM12 plate and stamped those in white.



I think the flowers might have looked better running up the side of the nail a little bit, because having the small flowers in the center did not look great. I added some yellow dots to the center of flowers & a few around the small flowers to try to balance things a little better, but the whole thing just got a little too busy for my taste. I wanted something really pretty to show off!

I had only stamped the left hand when I started disliking the design, so I just left it that way for a while to decide if I wanted to do the other hand or not. After a couple of days I was still not loving it & luckily was able to wipe off the designs without removing much of the base color (I did not want to try to paint the whole hand again with that tiny bottle!).

For the second attempt I used my Konad M51 plate, running the non-spotted edge diagonally across my nail. It turned out really pretty & delicate*.



*Maybe too delicate. My mom said she could see dots but couldn't tell they were flowers. She probably also needs to put her glasses on.

I wanted to make something fun for Easter so I finally pulled out the Garden Bunnies recipe that's been sitting in my recipe binder for years and years. (It originally had a picture of the rolls, not sure why it's missing from the site)

Reading over the recipe, I wasn't really sure how 6 cups of flour & 2+ cups of milk and more were going to turn into "8 small bunnies". I certainly did not want to try to double that hunk of dough. The directions for forming the bunnies were a little confusing, having you form a circle & cut it into wedges just for the sake of evenly diving the dough, but it basically ended up being that you needed 1/3 for the head, 2/3 for the body, minus a hunk for the tail...

So I decided to ditch the recipe & see if we could get away with shaping some crescent roll dough. They ended up being cute and easy to make!



First you need to separate the dough along the perforations to create 8 triangles. Following the picture, cut about 1/3 off the top for the head and chunk for the tail (about 1/3 of the way across the bottom).



Roll the tail into a ball with a pinch at one end. For the body I rolled in from each side to the center and then folded the top & bottom over to also meet in the center (that part is not pictured). Place the body seam down on a cookie sheet and push in the four corners a little bit to round them. Tuck the pinch of the tail underneath one end.



For the head, snip about 2/3 down from the narrow point of the triangle with some kitchen scissors. Fold the bottom two corners in to meet at the center. Push in the three corners a little to round the face.



Lay the head over the body (with the nose touching the tray and the ears running down the back). Give the ears one twist outward, so the cut edge is now pointing up. Bake according to the directions on the tube.



Once you've folded one bunny they go together pretty quickly. I was able to form two tubes worth of rolls (16) in about 10 minutes, but I was rushing!



I think these are going to be a new Easter tradition and will try to remember to pull this post up again for you next year. Maybe even re-do it with some better pictures of shaping the bunnies if I'm really on a 'roll'!

I ordered the Bundle Monster set of 21 nail stamping plates & am pretty pleased with them. You'll definitely run across a few problems with the quality, but for $18 I can deal with a few duds.

Before ordering I had decided to sell any plates I didn't want on eBay, and as soon as I opened the package I could see that I would have more plates to sell than expected. I knew that the 'new' BM set had larger full nail designs (because of complaints), but wasn't sure which set was 'old' or 'new'. The 21pc. set is the old set, and the full designs are *tiny*. Most also do not match up from side to side so there is no hope of repeating the pattern to stamp your nail twice. Useless! (It looks like they re-made the first set & fixed a few other complaints. Mine came with the paper backing and 'cleaner' images)



I also had some bad luck with my initial design choices & was getting angry. First I tried the bottom center flourish on BM01 and could barely get any of the lines to show up. I gave up & switched to the top center design on BM12 & still ended up with spotty results. So I grabbed some Konad black polish & started doing some samples on paper.



On the left side are designs from BM01 and BM12 on the right. You can see that none of the designs I tried from BM01 were coming out, so it looks like that plate was printed too shallow. (That doesn't mean all BM01 plates are messed up, but mine is) The results from BM12 were better, but you still miss a few details. This can even happen with the best plates, so sometimes I have to suppress perfectionism and tell myself it's just a nice antiqued look.





I was thinking of layering some leaves & flowers so I tried some from BM03 and one from BM06. Not terrible. It's sad that you loose the stem on the 2nd leaf, but who's going to notice other than me? I also liked the leaves from BM04, but my plate actually has a scratch running right up the design and the print does pick it up (that is the only scratch on any of the plates). I tried the kitty from that plate to console myself and another from BM06 at the bottom.



And here is the only full nail plate that I kept, BM21. These three designs seemed like they could be repeated pretty easily, though I really hate trying to line up the 2nd stamp for a complex design. You'll also notice on the center design, there is another mistake on the plate - a gap along the bottom row. This is noticeable on the plate even, but I think it could easily be ignored or filled in with a small brush.

So, does the low price make up for the misprints?

I ended up tossing the BM01 plate, keeping 9 plates, and selling the other 11 on eBay. So far I've sold all but two, and am still waiting on payment for another two, but I've already more than paid for the set. It is a lot of work though - if you are not already familiar with selling on eBay & willing to make lots of trips to the post office I would not recommend it! (My husband would argue that it is not worth the work but I'd like to do it again with the next set)

I forgot to mention this last time, but this goes along with the teal spiral nails from that post...

Before stamping the nails I tried a sample stamp on paper to see how the design would look in black. It did not turn out, tons of breaks and gaps in the print. I tried again and again using different techniques - plastic & metal scrapers, pressing lighter or harder, scraping the polish from different directions - and I still could not get a good print. You can see all of the failures across the top row & the paper in the back ~



I started getting pretty frustrated and worried, so I searched around online and a few sites recommended filing down the surface of the stamper a bit with a nail file, I suppose to give it a little more grip. I did a little filing, wiped the stamper clean (nail polish remover), and the next prints turned out lovely & crisp! You can see the two black stamps on the bottom row (ignore the dark gray, I was trying out a polish that ended up being too thin) and the last stamp was done in the silver polish I used on the nails. Such a big difference!!

I've had a few more chances to play around with my Konad stamping plates since my previous post. I do one design a week - usually painting the base color Friday night, stamping on Saturday, and then the designs last until the next weekend.

For my 2nd experiment I used Sally Hansen Hard as Nails (Xtreme Wear) in "Marine Scene" for the base color and stamped in Pure Ice "Silver Mercedes" with the spiraling pattern from the m51 plate. I had seen a picture using that pattern where each nail picked up a different part of the design. I really liked the look, so I turned the stamp in different directions for each nail - my nails were short enough to use the stamp sideways so I could use the right or left end, go horizontal or vertical, and even did a few diagonally to get a lot of variety.



The thumbnails are always a pain. The stamps are too narrow & a fraction too short, so instead of trying to do four stamps to cover it, I like to turn the design sideways & only have to stamp twice (working from the top down. I figure the seam is better hidden at the base of the nail). Lining up the stamps in a nightmare, but I was pretty pleased with the results.



For my next stamping I wanted to use the houndstooth print on the m63 plate in black & white. I tried to use a cheap white NYC polish (a few years old) for the base and it ended up being a battle that went on for days! It took forever to dry and needed about 4 coats, so of course the semi-dry nails kept getting bumped & had to be re-done... an endless cycle.

I got really fed up & started researching the fast drying drops I kept hearing mentions of on tutorial videos & nail blogs. They let you layer a few coats of polish quickly, without waiting for them to fully dry, then you put on a few drops at the end and it helps the polish speedily dry all the way through. I visited our local Sally's Beauty Supply (which had a pitiful selection) and picked up INM Out the Door fast dry topcoat and Orly Flash Dry drops.



I also realized at this point that it would be easier to put on a black base coat & stamp with white, since black covers easily. I used Sally Hansen Diamond Strength in "Black Diamond" (black with a faith silver sparkle), topped that with the INM topcoat and Orly drops and went to bed. The drops are actually an oil, so you are not supposed to stamp over it, but the next day I tried my luck and just washed my nails off well with soap. I stamped with Konad special white, applied more topcoat, and it worked well!



*Really* well, actually. I'm not sure if it was the new topcoat, drops, or just the combination of polishes, but this was one of the most durable manicures I've done! The next weekend I finally just removed it myself & didn't have any major chips all week.

Once again, the thumbnail was a struggle. Lining up such a detailed print was no fun & took a few tries for both nails. Since I ran the print sideways for the thumbs I had to do it for all of the nails, but that might not be possible when the rest grow a tiny bit longer (to their normal length).



I love the print - it's so pretty when you see only a few nails, but I did find it to be a little too much running across the whole hand. I think from now on I may just stamp it on the pointer & pinky as accent nails and leave the rest black (which will let me happily avoid the thumbs as well!)