Stripes and Checks

Personally, I love bright colors and silver. I also love repeating patterns such as stripes and checker board. How can you not? After testing out my 10 new polishes, I picked one that I thought would be the best for stamping practice. The winner: Catrice Aretha's R-E-S-P-I-N-K with some Sally Hansen Chrome in Chrome (what a clever name!)

I have been struggling with my stamping efforts since I first started trying shortly after Christmas. For some reason, nothing I tried to stamp was coming out clear and it was a real crap shoot if the nail looked good when I was done with it.

I have I think 8 knock off plates that I ordered from Born Pretty online and my stamper/scraper came in a starter kit with 1 plate from Essence. The Essence plate seemed to work the best, so I mostly used it. Some girls from Adventures in Stamping, a Facebook group for nail art stamping enthusiasts, suggested that I needed to learn to stamp on some proper plates before using the knock offs because they are more difficult to work with. I used this advice to justify purchasing 3 more Essence plates!

I was amazed with how well my new plates we working on this stamping practice! Even the full nail images were transferring well. The only reason they messed up is my technique at placing the stamp on my nail, but that still needs practice.

 

I must have gotten all of my craptasticness out while doing my left hand because somehow my right hand turned out better! You'll notice that my ring finger above is red, not pink. I messed up the stamp on that finger so badly on my first attempt that I decided to remove it completely and do a sort of accent nail with Essence Red-y to Go (sort of a Valentine's motif). I royally messed up the stamp on that finger the 2nd time as well, but you can hardly tell in this picture. The silver dots were my attempt at covering my mismatched seams from trying to line up the stamp when it didn't cover the whole nail. I did a ring of dots around my pinky nail because it didn't quite extend to my cuticle, but it just looked worse with the dots. lol. Oh well. Live and learn!

As much as I love stripes, I was a little tired of messing them up on my left hand, so I switched to checkered! :) And I adored them. I did an accent with the stripes on the pointer to tie the two hands together. The thumb needed something different because I knew the checkered stamp wouldn't be wide enough to cover my whole nail. I ended up using a double stripe french tip, a butterfly, and a flower that you can't really see. 

It wasn't perfect, but it was better and that was all I was really going for. 

What do you think? How did I do? Any tips for lining up designs or suggestions to improve my technique?