#ManiMonday 25/11/2019

Happy #manimonday everyone!

Products used:

Stamping plate: Born Pretty “BP-L013” and Clear Jelly Stamper “Horsin’ Around”
Stamping polish: Born Pretty “BP-WN05 Dark Armor”
Base: Essie base coat, “Blanc” and Chi Chi “Social Climber”
Top coat: Opi Australia “Rapid Dry Top Coat”

This Saturday was the biggest race in my racing journey so far, with The Velvet King racing in the group 1 Railway Stakes. Of course, this meant that I had to do horse themed nails and I’m pretty happy with how they turned out.

I had to trim my nails this week, which meant that the usual horse silhouette design I normally use wouldn’t fit on my nails, therefore, I opted for one of the quotes from the plate (with all the quotes fitting on shorter nails as long as you angle the words correctly). If you hadn’t guessed by now, I absolutely love horse racing and The Velvet King, hence the quote of “home is where the horse is” was perfect. To accompany the quote, I opted for the hearts. I did this for a few reasons. The first was that the hearts matched the quote quite well and allowed the quote to stand out. On the “BP-L013” plate there are two heart designs, but the other design is more of a sketchy look, so I went with this one as it’s a little bit classier and matched my dress better. Lastly, normally I would have gone a red lace to match my red lace dress, but I felt that this wouldn’t have matched the quote as well and could have also been a bit heavy for the look I was after.

Overall, this was a pretty easy look to create, with perfect pickups 98% of the time. The biggest issue was probably placing the quote onto my nail as I wanted it to go in a particular direction, so my support worker and I had to play around with the placement. The design is also mirrored on my left hand compared to my right, so that took some time to get our head around too. My small nails also proved a slight problem, as there wasn’t much room for error in getting the quote in the right place. With a bit of luck and lots of skill, my support worker got it in the perfect spot. There was also slight smudging with the heart design, once when we stamped the hearts and once when we stamped the top coat on. We’ve never had this issue before but it’s something to look at with future designs, as perhaps we had too much polish on the stamping plate.

Another thing to note that I discovered when doing a sample design on paper, was that this red stamping polish doesn’t show up on a black base. I think you would need a more metallic red for this to work, as I have the Born Pretty stamping polish in silver, and it has no troubles showing up on a black base.

Bye for now!