Nail Stamping Crazy

If you find yourself with badly broken or split nail, order silk nail wraps or builder gel on Amazon.  Save it. Don't cut it off! Silk Nail Wraps Because I try to avoid suffocating my nail beds for discomfort reasons, I don't plan to use traditional nail dips but the silk wraps use a somewhat similar method. An adhesive is used to hold a small piece of silk fabric onto the nail bed to protect it from further breakage, strengthening what you have left. (With dipped nails, a popular trend, a gel-based glue holds acrylic particles to your nail.) NEVER use super glue. You'll either apply an adhesive to the nail first, or use a peel-and-stick wrap. (Note that fiberglass fabric is different from the silk.) You can get a water-soluble sealant so it's easier to remove later, and safer to your nails. So to reiterate: apply adhesive, then apply wrap. When dry, you can polish a base coat over it for stamping like normal. Or, you could apply just a top coat if you weren't paint

There are lots of people out there who are far better at this than I am, and who have done it lots longer, but this is my journey and the information as I know it. We always get better by practicing. Here is a chronology of my progress. Also, everyone also apologizes about how bad their cuticles or clean-up looks. I'll just add a blanket statement here saying that I rarely do the cleanup work before I take the pictures, LOL! So there really is no excuse offered. Nov 13, 2022: Very basic. First time.    Nov 26, 2022 I was so upset that I couldn't use my new Fall plates and thought they were just cheap. Turns out I had the wrong stamper to work with them! So I tried other fall-ish things to tide me over.  Tried a decal. Did some double stamping.    Dec 2, 2022 - A winter look  A little work with multicolor base coat   Dec 18, 2022 - Christmas nails for our trip to NYC! Tried stamping with some gel, hated it. Stamped over it and it actually looked kinda cool.    Jan 23, 2023 Anoth

Another way to get awesome designs with multiple layers of color, more easily, onto your nails is to use stamping plates that have layers. LAYERS! :D  Also described as overlapping designs. I'm so excited about this, because it opens up new options with less time, because I don't always have HOURS to spend. Check this out, for an example: from Lantern & Wren Paint your nails as normal. As always if they're too dry, you can apply a layer of the sticky base coat over your base color to hold onto your stamps. Or, you can apply a fresh coat of paint and wait for it to mostly dry. Then, you'd first stamp once with the underlying color from your layered stamping plate...the first stamp layer. (On the plate above, the solid design is the base layer.) Then you'd stamp again with a second layer of color... the plate's next layer of details. (For example, the next part has the face outlines in the above example.) Finally, if it has another layer, the small accent mark

There are some amazingly wild color combinations people use and some of them can't be done without alcohol based dyes, gel paint, etc. However there is still a lot you can do with regular old nail polish! Ombre nails are super interesting. You just need to have a bit of patience and some makeup sponges. (Alternately, you can try the "smoosh" method; will explain, below.) First, paint your nails with a base color. This makes for a lot less work. Second, using a barrier is a big help when doing this style of color. It protects your skin from the polish, and thus, the cleanup afterwards. The less you have to clean up, the less likely you are to wreck your new paint job afterwards! ;) Next, paint a strip of color onto the sponge. Sheer colors don't work too well here. If you're doing a two-color ombre, paint a strip of the second color next to that. Don't overload the sponge with color as it won't go on well. In some cases you're going to be doing several