#ManiMonday 16/03/2020

Happy #manimonday everyone! With nothing on this week (haha which looks to be the case every week going forward with the coronavirus) I thought I’d try one of my new plates that I got a few months ago. So, let’s get into this week’s cute cat design!

Products used:

Stamping plate: Born Pretty “Animal L-003”
Stamping polish: Born Pretty “BP-WN03 Throne” and “BP-WT06 Cherry Blossoms”
Base: Essie base coat and Sinful Colors “300 Easy Going”
Top coat: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat”
Cat: Essie “Sand Tropez”

Despite this design looking quite complicated, it was actually the quickest design I’ve done for a while, taking about an hour and a half. Things that helped reduce time was the fact that the pink base didn’t need a white coat underneath it and having two stampers on the go.

Seeing as I wanted the cats to stand out, I went with a nude pink base. The paleness of the pink means it’s not competing with anything, compared to if I went with a nude brown for example. The colour of the cat was also decided for me, as I didn’t have any “cat orange”, white wouldn’t have shown up on the pink and my other “cat brown” was too dark (especially given the black outline). I was originally going to go with a red heart but thought that might be a bit too harsh. Therefore, I opted for a light pink, as it tied in with the base colour and overall colour tone of this design.   

I’m pleased to say that my support worker had an 85% pickup rate this week, with the new stampers! If you read last week’s post (which you can read here), you’ll know that my old stamper has been retired but that my new stampers were useless. However, I’m happy to report that after putting the Born Pretty stamper head on a paper towel for about 72 hours to draw out the oils (as suggested by the nail stamping group on Facebook) it now picks up perfectly. For some reason, my Beauty Big Bang cube stamper also picked up pretty well. Given the success of the paper towel trick, I’ve placed both stampers on a paper towel for 48 hours this week.

I also read on the Facebook group that having oil on the plates may also not be helping. As I use acetone that has added oils, my support worker used a dry cotton pad to wipe the plate of any oils after cleaning it. I’m not sure whether it made a difference but seeing as we had a good pickup week, I’ll take it.

However, no week is without its challenges, though they were small this week. This was our first time using the plate and it does seem to be more deeply etched than others. Because of this more polish was needed to cover the whole design (mostly the cat looking through the blinds). With the reverse stamping, the brown polish did blob on the pawprint, so when stamped onto the nail, it did cause the paw pad to distort. To avoid this, just make sure that when you colour in the design that the polish isn’t too think. Lastly, for the first time, the stamped design smudged when the top coat was stamped on. To be honest, I’m not sure why that is; it could have been because we were trying to avoid the split in the old stamper or because the top coat was too thick.

Overall, I think this design is super cute and I’m loving the artistic look of having something different on each nail. If you’re a cat lover and do nail stamping, then this is definitely a plate you need to get!

Bye for now!