First Stamping (and a lot of rambling)

Both of my nail supply packages arrived yesterday, a day before the earliest delivery estimate. Totally surprised and thrilled! Of course it had to be tested that night, and the results were a little wobbly but good ~



The middle nail on each hand is the worst. One had a gap of white missing, so I tried to see if I could just do a small stamp over that area to fill it in. This resulted in an area with double lines, but it's actually not that noticeable. The other middle nail got bumped when wet, so I wiped everything off and started again. And bumped it again! At that point I smoothed it down (leaving a black gap in the center of the flower) and said 'good enough'.



Watching the tutorials I noticed a lot of talk of using a clear base coat under your colored polish to keep your polish from chipping as much. How have I gone my entire nail-painting life without this knowledge? Meanwhile I've been doing minor touch-ups constantly to keep my polish in check, sometimes even the first day I painted them. (And had been worried about how I would be able to do this with a stamped pattern on the nail!)

I checked the Amazon reviews & ordered OPI Natural base coat, but knew it would be coming later than my other supplies. Of course I painted my nails anyway and it arrived the next day, 2 days earlier than it's shipping estimate! (turns out it was coming from my state)


Anyway, some things that surprised me...

1) All of the supplies are super tiny. For some reason I thought the disks would be around 3.5" and they are 2.25"! The double stamper is about 3.25", also shorter than I had imagined.

2) It was a little harder to judge how to line up the stamp than I had hoped. Not that any of mine prints were way off, but I'm pretty good at eyeballing! I'm assuming this will improve with practice.

3) A lot of the little lines at the base of the nail would break and stay on the stamper rather than stamping my skin. This often left either a gap or a little line of polish sticking up that needed to be pressed down.

4) A lot of the lines around the edges of the nails got wobbly. Some of that was from the line breaks mentioned above, which also happened at the tips of the nails. I also wonder if maybe I'm not rocking the stamper straight across my nail and am curving it perhaps?


Sadly I could keep on babbling for a while about every minor detail, but I will leave it at that. I am pretty pleased with how the first trial turned out & won't be too upset if it start chipping tomorrow so I can re-do them with something new! ;)