Adventures in Konading IV: Four Leaf Clover & For Audrey M63 Plate

It's official. I HATE Konad. It's horrible to work with, never comes out right and take so much time. I HATE it. HATE HATE. I envy those of you with the ability to create flawless Konadicures but I am not one of you.

Today I tried China Glaze's "For Audrey" for my stamping polish. Before you tell me the reason I hate Konad is because I don't use their special polishes I assure you I have tried numerous times to use their special polishes with horrible results. To be honest, these came out better than those. I used plate M63 to stamp the design and as polishes go I think "For Audrey" worked pretty well. My bottle is a bit thick though as I have had it a long time, so perhaps that helped.

I topped the design with Matte Magic, which is wonderful.

I thought I'd share this photo with you. I took the polish off minutes after photographing. Even though this hand looks decent the other hand was a disaster. I seriously give up on this stupid stamping system and I am sick about wasting my money on it. Off to paint my nails...



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Adventures in Konad-ing 3: M51 using Orly

After seeing many bloggers have great success using metallics with their Konad Stamping System I thought I'd try my hand at a design using Orly's "Silver Mine". I am not sure the polish is meant to be an actual metallic but to me it has a pretty metallic finish. I am pretty sure polishes marketed as true metalliacs might work a bit better because this polish seems to have been a bit too thin to work all that well for stamping. I decided to only stamp my ring fingers because I could tell the consistency was not ideal. I think it came out pretty nice though.

I would not suggest using this polish because as I mentioned it's way too thin to actually stamp the design easily. I do like the final outcome in these photos but it was messy and I knew going for the whole hand would be INSANE.

I think I am going to check out the China Glaze metalliacs when I order polish next time. The color 2030 seems like it'd be an excellent gold to work with.






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Adventures in Konad-ing 2: The first (third?) design

I received my package from Wow So Cool and was so excited to get to stamping. Here's my first (third?) design to share with you. But first, let's talk about it.

Konad is NOT fool proof. It's incredibly frustrating to use. This attempt is DECENT but by no means is it perfect. This is my third try with the system, I should have taken pictures of the first failed attempts but I was so annoyed and throwing a FIT at that point that I decided to spare myself the agony of sharing my fail nails. What sucks the most is that basically if you mess one up you need to pretty much start over because it's polish!!

I found this incredibly helpful video on YouTube that has some great tips that I used to get the images below. Like I said, they are not perfect but this is much better than my first disastorous tries.


Tips from the video I found particularly helpful:

Holding the scraper at a 90 degree angle. Seems contrary to what you'd think (angling it a bit) but it worked wonders.

Cleaning off the plate and scraper AND stamper EACH time with acetone. Tedious but 100% necessary.

That's all I can think of for now. I have to say this is a difficult product to use. I am going to have to practice a lot more to get better images.

Below is my third or so attempt, excuse the mess on my fingers I didn't feel like cleaning it off before taking pics. I am lazy.







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Adventures in Konad-ing: The Initial Purchase

So I decided that it's time to take the leap into more impressive nail art and try my hand at Konad stamping. If you're not familiar with the process it's simply stamping designs on to the nail using their special polish (which is thicker in consistency than standard nail polish) or any other polish (though there seems to be some debate on how successful the design is with normal polish). Now I am no expert but I have watched some youtube videos on it (check out Sayanythingbr00ke) and I think I can do it.

I purchased a few items to get started from Wow So Cool. I won't receive them until the new year (they will ship on the 31st because of a holiday break) but I thought I'd show you what I am getting and what you can look forward to in the new year.

I purchased the Double Sided Stamper and Scraper Set for $6.99:


Two bottles of their Special Polish, one in Black and one in White (basic for now)both $6.99 each.




Two Image Plates, one in M51 and one in M63:





I used the coupon code "nailphile" for 30% off my order so all of that came to just $24.46 and orders over $20.00 ship free so I think that was a major score!!!

Now I am sure at first I will not be good at this so bare with me, but I cannot wait to get these and try them out. Wow So Cool has a page showing the designs you can make with the plates, here are the examples of the advanced designs I might someday be able to make with the two plates I ordered:





Wow so cool indeed! I hope that this can be a fun series for the blog and I hope you join me on my adventures in Konad-ing!

Have you tried Konad products? Please share any thoughts you might have with me!Pin It Now!

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