Show and Tell: Red Angel Stamping Plates

You guys know how in love with stamping I am so when I heard about these new image plates from Red Angel, I hopped on over to Amazon to order them. They were $11.99 with $3.99 for shipping so less than $16 for 21 new plates! Yay! I haven't used these yet, so I wouldn't call this a formal review, but more a 'show and tell'

They come with a blue plastic protective film, but no paper backing--so the edges are pretty sharp. (I recommend adding some card stock to the back with some double sided tape. I haven't gotten around to that yet, but I soon will.) Also the set doesn't included a scraper or stamper so make sure you order those if you don't already have them.

On to the pics!

Overall, most of the image plates feature full nail designs. They are about the same size as the second generation of the Bundle Monster set so they should cover most nails--even thumbs! There are two plates designed for french tip or half-moon manis and the others have a variety of medium and larger images. I'd say it's a good value.

Anyone out there have these already? What do you think of them? I'm really excited that there are so many different images that I haven't see in other sets. I'm super excited about plate RA-117. I've already got a mani in mind for that one!

Can a Leopard Change Its Spots?

Sure, if you use an awesome duochrome nail polish to create them. Enter Models Own Aqua Violet from their Beetlejuice collection.

I started this mani with two coats of L'Oreal Mystery from their Color of Hope Fall 2011 collection.

It's such a gorgeous darkened teal and it has this wonderful "secret shimmer" running through it.

I stamped on the leopard print using Konad plate M57.

My only wish is that I could have captured the violet shift better. 

It really is a lot stronger than my picture shows.

Are you guys loving duochromes as much as I am? I'm totally in love.

Halloween Candy Mani

I've seen a lot of candy corn Halloween manicures but I wanted to pay homage to its lesser celebrated brethren, candy pumpkin! 

 Here's what I came up with.

The ingredients:

L-R: China Glaze Papaya Punch, Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Silver Sweep, Orly Here Comes Trouble.

Over my base coat I did one coat of Sally Hansen Silver Sweep. I love how you get full coverage at one coat with this baby! At first I tried free handing the candy shape but that was an epic FAIL, so I turned to my trusty friends over at Bundle Monster.

Enter plate BM-223.

The images on this plate are so random, a holiday bell, a ghost, a full zebra and full geometric print and two other swirly patterns.

The top of the bell image turned out to be perfect for the base of the candy shape. I stamped it a bunch of times on each nail using China Glaze Papaya Punch and dotted Orly's Here Comes Trouble for the top with a nail art brush and voila!

Not too shabby eh?

I'm diggin' it.

Queen of Paisley

It's "Classics Week" on the nail board on MakeupAlley so I started this week out with Butter London's All Hail The Queen.

It's a really nice nude on me, but it's really hard to get its holographic shimmer to come out and play. Since the sun is playing peek-a-boo in my neck of the woods I decided to amp up this manicure with some stamping.

I used Orly's Rococo A Go-Go, from the Mineral FX collection and the paisley-esque image plate M64 (the Mash dupe for the Konad plate).

I love the way this turned out, considering when I was a little girl I couldn't stand paisley print anything. My mother however loved it and would sew me all these church dresses in the pattern.

To this day I have no idea how she managed to find all those different colored prints. I had enough paisley print dresses to rotate to church for two months straight--no repeats. I'm sure she would love this manicure.

So here's to my childhood. Eh, perhaps paisley isn't so bad after all. What do you guys think?