*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!)

Made these chocolate chip mint cookies for St. Patrick's Day (inspired by this post) & I think it will be a yearly thing. I'd love to add a few fun traditions like this to the small holidays.



I just followed the recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag (technically I made a half batch because we were low on butter) ~ just add 1 tsp. peppermint extract & a whole lot of green food coloring and they taste like soft Thin Mints! Next time I might use a sugar cookie recipe like in the link since these got so browned around the edges.

I came across an old project I forgot to post before ~ a stuffed rocketship that I made for little baby Orson.



I drew up the pattern & used some of the leftover fabric from his curtains, along with some soft red fleece. There are a few windows appliqued on the sides & the fins are lined with a metallic wrapping paper for a nice crinkly noise. I would like to come back to the pattern one day, tweak it a bit & then share it, but I know that will not realistically happen any time soon.

Orson liked his curtains so much that I used the last of the fabric to make a small blanket for him, around the time that I made the rocketship. For once I had not bothered to wash the fabric beforehand and paid the price - it got quite wonky after the first wash & I never went back & ripped out the seams to fix it.

Of course Orson is not much of a baby anymore. He's running full steam ahead and nearing 2 years old!

After looking through my Caboodle of polish, I realized that most of the bottles I have are left over from high school & pretty ugly. I decided it was time to stock up a little with some cheap polishes.

First I found some Wet N Wild Fast Dry polishes buy 2 get one free on eBay (3 for $8). Although that actually didn't end up going so well...



I read that WNW "Teal of Fortune" was a good substitute for this gorgeous OPI polish. When it arrived it was much darker than I had imagined & pretty dull on the nail (not much sparkle), though adding a topcoat of green glitter did really help. To make up for it I ordered ORLY's "Halley's Comet", which is supposed to be identical to the OPI color, so I'll probably gift this to my sister-in-law who's a fan of the show.

I picked up the dark metallic gray at Walmart for $2, NYC's "Bowery Black". Half of my wardrobe is dark gray now ~ it's the new cat-hair-friendly-black ~ so I figured that was a good shade to get!



The WNW purple is almost worth buying just for the name, "Buffy the Violet Slayer". I know purple can be a hard color to photo sometimes, it likes to turn up as a dark blue, and so I thought that was the reason for the large range of shades that show up in a google search. Turns out they released two different versions with the same name, and this one is not as red as I would like.

Though it is a great match for the purple & blue glitter topcoat I also picked up at Walmart for $2 - Pure Ice "Cheatin". I'll probably keep the WNW, but I've got my eye on this redder purple.



The third bottle of WNW is called "Silvivor" (the TV show names crack me up!), and it is a keeper. I was hoping to use it for stamping too but read it was too thin for that so I went back to Walmart (yikes) for a $2 bottle of Pure Ice "Silver Mercedes", which was highly recommended. (I've already used it for stamping & it works great!) "Silvivor" has a lovely shimmer to it, so it looks like it will be the prettier base color.



And this was my splurge bottle - a $5 bottle of China Glaze "Ruby Pumps". It's so rich & sparkly, definitely worth the extra couple of bucks. (And I hear it's good for stamping too!) I can never get cherry red to show up on the computer right ~ no matter how I edit it, it's always too orange ~ so you'll just have to imagine this as a gorgeous, deep cherry red.

So, 7 polishes for under $20? Not too bad! Now that I have a few colors I have a feeling future bottles will be a little on the spendy side ~ I have a weakness for duochromes and glitters.

What's your favorite polish color right now?