Decals made from MoYou London Explorer 03 (again!)

The third plate in the MoYou London explorer collection practically screams to be made into decals.... it's pretty much a colouring in book for your nails! If you haven't seen my 'how to make your own nail decals' tutorial please click the link! Basically the technique allows you to neatly colour in sections of a nail stamp. I have previously made deals with the plate (here) and couldn't wait to try it again!

 Now I was a little bit lazy and only did 4 nails, but I quite liked the look, it allowed the Pastel purple polish (China Glaze Sweet Hook) to be shown off :)

The polishes used in the decal were:
Konad stamping black
OPI: Uh oh roll down the window (green)
Essie Raspberry (self explanatory colour there!)
Silver: Essie No Place Like Chrome. I actually used a dotting tool to dot the inside of the petals. It's subtle in the picture but really added another dimension! 

I hope you have enoyed this post and these nails! I sure did like them =D

Chanfie
xx

Stained Glass Homemade Nail Decals With MoYou London Explorer Collection Plate 03

Hi Everyone :)

I'm incredibly happy right now for so many reasons!

-I'm on a weekend trip in the Margaret River wine region.

-We just found a lovely family to rent our house that I have worked so hard to clean and garden the last few weeks.

-My friend and I just got nail mail from MoYou London!!!

-I have used a plate that I had been frothing over for a month!!!

-I love my nails right now!

Now in the interest of eating food and tasting delicious wine this will be a quick post! I have only 2 pictures of this mani currently as I had to take them down here (we are south of home, so I keep saying down) without my usual set up and I don't even have a mouse on the laptop!

So I didn't plan them as stained glass. I just painted my nails with a new polish of mine- Picture Polish Citrus and decided these colours might go well together. The other polishes are:
-Turquoise: Sally Hansen Xtreme wear in The Real Teal
-Lime Green: Essie the more the merrier
-Yellow: China Glaze Lemon Fizz
-Stamped Dark Blue: Konad stamping polish in dark blue.

I made the decals using this technique. 

I will have to post a few more photos when I get home as I really like these!




Thanks very much for visiting and have a great weekend!!!

Home Made Floral Nail Decals With MoYou You Stamping plates

 My good friend from uni let me know about this competition the other day which is held by MoYou London. You just had to do a mani using one of their plates and submit a picture to there facebook account. This is the fourth one, and they seem to be regular- so if you have some MoYou stamping plates make sure to keep an eye on their facebook page for the next competition! The prizes are always more stamping plates from MoYou London. 

 For these nails I used the "make you own decal" technique  using a flower design from the MoYou Pro collection XL plate 6.

Polishes Used:
The base colour is China Glaze Lemon Fizz
The green is OPI Fly
The Darker Pink is Sally Hansen Fruity Petutie (from the complete salon manicure range)
The Lighter pink/orange is Essie Tart Deco
The black is Konad stamping black polish. 

I think these are by far the best decals I've ever made. I'm pretty proud of them :)

Here is the tutorial I made a while back for the make your own decal technique. I recently revamped it! The full tutorial post is here.

Thanks for reading

Chanfie xx

Another Bridal Nail Art idea: Something blue....

This will just be a quick post because I'm not really into these nails, I'm short of time and have a massive back-log of other nail art that I haven't posted (Uh oh!!).

Anyway, I had an idea to do 'something blue' nails as a wedding nail art idea. I am getting married in like.... a year and a half, so naturally I am already trying stuff out. (Here's a link to all my other bridal nail posts.)

I recently purchased 5 new stamping plates from Mo You London and they arrived about a week ago. I will do a review of them soon! Anyway one of them, the Kitty collection 02, has lots of really pretty single flowers, so I decided to use one of them- I think it's a poppy.

I made a blue flower decal with the flower from the stamping plate using this technique  (with China glaze kinetic candy and sally hansen pacific blue). I left the others plain to keep the look simple. The base polish is OPI Barre my soul for which I had to do about 4 coats to cover the green stains that were on my nails from wearing turquoise polish =( 

As I said I'm not a big fan....but I really like how the blue flower turned out. I will have to do it again with a coloured background I think (maybe a pastel purple?)

Thanks for reading :)

How to make your own nail decals part 2!

How to make your own nail decals part 2! Paper Punch Butterflies

Whilst I was very lost at Spotlight (a craft, home-wear, fabric and party supply store) last weekend I stumbled across some of those paper punches with the little shapes. I used to want one soooo bad when I was a girl, and I finally got to indulge! I had a choice of a butterfly or a dragonfly and chose the butterfly. The dragonfly was really cool, but the wings were so small and I had special plans!

This isn't the actual one I used but I'm away for the weekend and didn't have a picture!

I have recently been stumbling across lots of pictures of a manicure with patterned giraffe shapes on each nail like this. I think they are stickers, but I thought it would be cool to make my own nail stickers/decals with different stamps and nail polish. And the shape paper punch was perfect for this.

Oh and by the way there is a tutorial if you scroll down the page!

Here is the right hand. I think they kind of look like bows (especially from a distance) . I'm calling them butterfly bows! 

 I saved all my favorite stickers for this hand as my other hand is a mess at the moment. I'm getting a home made- tattoo I made in high school removed and it's a bit unsightly. Can you tell I like home-made stuff? I think nail polish is a much healthier way to indulge myself. 

 Here they are right way up- looking more like butterflies. 

 And here is the left hand

The polishes used were:
Background red: OPI My Chihuahua Bites
Blue is a konad dark blue stamping polish
And the white is OPI alpine snow.

I used Seche Vite to make the decals coated with alpine snow and it worked well. Alpine snow alone was too flexible and it was hard to manoeuvre into the punch. 

And as promised- a tutorial. For more info on making nail decals please visit 'part 1' here

Anyway, I ordered a heart shaped punch and also an elephant from ebay to try out. I' super excited about the elephant!!

Eiffel Tower Tablecloth Patterned Nails

Just before I went away, the new Cheeky European romance plate that I had ordered about 2 months earlier arrived in the nail. Fewf! Just in time- because I was dying to use the Eiffel tower stamp.... so that I could, of course, take a picture of them with the Eiffel tower in the background. (I had planned this for months!)

Now the Eiffel tower print was particularly chunky so I decided to only use it only for a feature nail and do something fancy in the background and other nails (but not too loud as to distract from the Eiffel tower!).

I'm annoyed with myself for not realizing there was about 3 other Paris monument designs on the European Romance plate that I could have also used- but oh well-guess I’ll have to go back ;)

For some reason I thought pastel tablecloth patterned nails might be sort of French (no idea why), so I decided to use a trick I came up with about a year ago to double stamp with lines/stripes to create a tablecloth pattern of two colours (I'm not sure if there is a better name for this sort of pattern?). The lined stamp design was from XL-N. Here is a quick little diagram of what I did:

For the Eiffel tower I first tried stamping directly onto the nail and couldn't get it centered. So I then made a decal with the stamp and used that instead. If you don't know how to do this please visit my tutorial on how to make your own decal here.  

And without further adieu- The nails with bonus Eiffel tower!!!

And because the lighting was awful! Some others without the Eiffel tower.

And a bonus blurry picture with the Mona Lisa! 

Polishes used were:

 OPI my boyfriend scales walls (background grey)

Konad pastel pink

Konad purple

Konad black

For some reason my konads don't have colours written on them... So I have to make up boring names.. 

Great Gatsby Inspired Baroque Nails

I went to see The Great Gatsby a few nights ago and absolutely adored the fashion, colours and style of the movie. Anyway I was inspired to do my nails in a black and gold baroque-ish style :)

..Well I think the stamps I used are a baroque pattern. I may be wrong though!

I ended up doing the feature nails twice. The first time I stamped directly onto the nails, but I didnt get it very centred so covered them in black rhinestones. It was ok..... but the off-centred-ness was annoying me too much.

I then used the 'make your own nail decal" technique  to make black baroque decals and then put them on over gold polish. This way I could centre the design  :)

Polishes used were :

Sally Hansen Xtreme wear in Black out

Sally Hansen Xtreme wear in Golden-i

Essie: Good as gold (stamped)

and Konad Special Polish: back 

The rhinestones are from ebay.

The stamps were BM12 (the smaller ones on my thumb and non feature nails)

and the feature was from Big SDP-I 

Here are the original rhinestone encrusted feature nails: 

 And the re-done more centred feature nails :)

Which do you prefer?

How To Make Your Own Nail Decals Tutorial

Tonight I tried a new technique I recently came across on nailnerd.com and then also on messymansion.com.au and beaching nails. - How to create your own nail decals!
This is where you pre-prepare a design for your nails on a plastic sheet or baking/wax paper, and then transfer it to your nails.

There's so many pros about this technique I'll have to make a list!

• I find it much easier painting onto a sandwich bag or baking paper than it is painting onto my nails...
• Probably because you don't have to paint with your non-dominant hand!
• If you make a mistake/don't like the colour you used/decide on something better- its ok! - just try again.... you don't have to remove all your polish and start from the beginning.
• Can pre-paint/prepare nail art for use when you don't have much time.
• I've actually never used a nail decal.... but these seem to work well, being made completely of nail polish, as they kind of dissolve onto your nails when you add top coat.

This technique is also awesome for stamping nail art (I used it for this).
Pros:

• All of the above...

• You can colour in the stamping designs!!!! I'd always wanted to do this but colouring them in  on the nail just covers the lines up unless your a super-human. (see the tutorial to see how this works.... when you flip the decal over even if you make a huge colouring-in fail mess it turns out perfect on the other side!)
• You can cut out a specific part of a stamp design if you don't want to use the whole thing. Yes you can also do this by quickly removing parts of the design on the stamper with acetone on a q-tip, but I'm never fast enough and the polish dries. 
• If you are using a stamp design that needs to be centered on the nail, or in a specific spot on the nail (ie so all the nails are the same) this technique makes it easy :) 
• This also applies for non full nail stamps, where you want the design to be on the same place of each nail.

The only disadvantage I found was that sometimes the design won't sit flat and requires extra top coat meaning it can be a little thick.

Anyway, here is the tutorial I made for making your own stamping nail decal. You would do the same for hand painted designs minus the stamping (obviously :P  ):



Since making this tutorial I have also tried using baking paper instead of a sandwich bag. The decals slide off the wax paper much easier than they did off the plastic so if you are having trouble removing your decals from the plastic try baking paper instead. The only downside is that they actually slide off too easily.... and if part of the decal is still drying (ie a part you have coloured in) the wet part sticks to the wax paper and the rest detaches, ruining the decal.
I have also experimented with stamping directly onto the plastic/baking paper, and then adding the top coat over the top (thinking this would mean I didn't have to line up the stamp over my clear polish), but it smeared really easily. I think that without body warmth it takes much longer to dry completely, or just gets smeared easily without a base... not sure why, but working over a pre-painted clear base seems to be the best way to go for me.

Something I have found to hep in the application to your nail is to wait for your top coat to partially dry and become tacky (only 20 seconds approx with seche vite) before applying the decal. This way it will stick rather than slide around :)


As I said above you can pre-prepare these decals for later use. Here are some I have stockpiled:

And here are some more pictures of my home made feather nail decal mani!

The polishes used in the sponge gradient are

• China Glaze Sunset Sail (lightest)
• Revitanail Barely There (Middle shade nude)
• Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Mocha Mix (reddy purply browny colour)

The feathers are stamped from GA38 (gals fairy series) with konad dark brown special polish

The feathers were painted with Mocha Mix and Barely There. 

Update!!!
I noticed I'm getting a lot of traffic to this page, so clearly people are interested in this technique!... So I thought I'd post other manis I have done using home made decals :)

For this manicure, the ring finger feature nail was done with a decal. I tried stamping directly onto the nail a few times but couldn't get it centered (which I can't stand!). So I stamped it onto plastic (over seche) and then applied it exactly where I wanted it :) 

More pictures and details on polishes used here

Once again.... tried about 3 times to stamp that darn Eiffel Tower in the centre of the nail, failed, ruined the base colours with polish remover .....and then made a decal. Much easier!

More details on this manicure and a picture of it in front of the Eiffel Tower can be found here. 

For these butterflies I used a paper punch on the decals. Tutorial and more info here

And here is the pièce de résistance! Floral decals make using MoYou London pro plate 06. More details here. These are by far my best decals that I have made so far!

 

These were made with MoYou explorer plate 03 whuch has great designs for this technique! See the full post here .

Thanks for stopping by!!!