So I swear I'm going to go to Michael's soon and start doing some Pinterest stuff that ISN'T just nails and food! But, for now, you get my "I wish it were summer so I could actually be at the beach seeing these colors" nail job as inspired by the Candy Cane Stripes I found via Pinterest from Chloe's Nails! I took Chloe's advice and tried Scotch tape to do the edging, and I have a few thoughts on that I'll share at the end-- for now, enjoy the process!
1. Scotch Tape rips up half the base polish on my thumb... it also leaves wavy lines. Perhaps I should cut it with scissors instead?
2. OK, put all the tape on at once so I don't have to fuss with doing each nail while another is wet
3. I cut all the tape with scissors and decided to use different kinds of stripes on each nail to see if I could get the barber pole effect-- make them look like the stripes were moving from nail to nail!
4. Oh, hey, look. I pulled off more...
5. But this time I tried pulling it off with tweezers and it worked a little better! The base coat was pulled but not all the way off and I was able to smooth it back down.
6. I did have a lot of problems with the tape stripping off itself and leaving small chunks behind; the tweezers came in handy here as well.
7. Here's what the first round looked like before fixes
8. A little bit sad, but not too shabby for a first go, right?
Here's the first hand finished product including a clear coat
Here's the second hand, finished product including top coat.
As noted above, I think tweezers are a definite must have for this type of project-- the amount of fixing I had to do was insane! I did the bottom coat (Sally Hansen Capri Blue) on Sunday afternoon and had to do several layers-- probably four --to get the depth of color I wanted and I noticed a lot of that coming off on the scotch tape. The stripes coat was a Sally Hansen InstaDry type and I will be interested to see how "regular" polish behaves.
For next time, I think I will probably put a clear coat on over the base to keep that layer of color (no matter how small) from coming up and potentially protecting me from fixes. I'll also have fine tipped tweezers for those pesky left behind bits of tape.
All that being said, people were still blown away-- I actually held up the line at my hair salon because everyone wanted to see! Needless to add, the 5th grade girls at my after school program were ALSO impressed and stomped off pouting about how their mothers never let them do anything cool like that. I highly doubt that they have ever asked their mothers for scotch tape and nail polish!
I'm also considering doing something like this with those same girls at work, and to do so it would be much easier to have a stencil, so I'm going to work on making one out of index cards and I'll let you know how that goes!
Products Used: Sally Hansen Capri Blue, Sally Hansen InstaDry in Mint Sprint
Time: About a day all told-- I spent about four hours on the base coat to make sure I had the color I wanted and waited overnight to make sure it was dry enough, then cut up all the Scotch tape, painted them all again, then did the fixes, then did the clear coat... you get the point. BUT, I think in the future it will take less time!
Cost: Under $10 for both of them on sale. I'm all over the cheap polish, and I think I paid $4/ea or less. Plus, I'm definitely using them again!
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