Konad!!

I just ordered some Konad nail stamping supplies & am so excited! They should be getting here next week, but meanwhile I thought I would share what I learned about the supplies & show you what I ordered.

First off, here are the two plates I picked to start with ~



I had to have the houndstooth print you can see on the bottom left (M63) and thought the other plate had a nice mix of full nail designs (the rectangles) and little accents to play around with (M51).

Basically you fill the design in with polish, scrape off the excess, then you can stamp the design on your nails! There are a *ton* of plates with several designs on each & they run about $5 each. (There are also a lot of off brands that are cheaper, more on that later) I got these on Amazon from Venus.Online (free shipping!).


I also got a double sided stamper, with scraper, and the Konad Special White & Special Black polish (from loveotc on Amazon, also free shipping) ~



Now, you do *not* have to buy Konad polish, most thick or metallic polishes will give you a good print. But I heard a lot of good things about their white & black and know those colors can run pretty thin & I will be using them a lot. I found this really great tutorial that talks about a good substitute white & black and shows a side-by-side comparison, starting at the 3:30 mark ~



In the first part of the video she basically just says you may want to stamp with your hand flat on the table or up in the air, whatever works best for you, and to practice. (She also names the base color she's wearing and the # of the disk, but that is about it) The rest of the video is great & you get to see lots of examples of the stamping & tips, but it is pretty long!

I also checked out the Part 1 video and about 1:00 in she does a nice comparison of the Konad plates with the main off brand, Bundle Monster (a "Faux-nad", haha), which are a little cheaper & lower quality but pretty comparable. It does not look like she made Part 3 yet.

So ~ everything ran about $5 each so I ended up spending around $25 (yay, Amazon gift cards!), but you could definitely ditch the polish and start off with a stamper & one plate for $10. Are you excited yet? Unfortunately my nails are have been peeling really bad lately & so I had to cut them down pretty short ~ this is not the best time for me to order nail supplies, but I'm sure I'll have fun playing with them anyway!