Hearts-A-Plenty

This past week, I've been wearing a pink manicure with red hearts as my first Valentine design of 2012.  It was more or less done on the fly.  I had a Valentine idea I wanted to do but I wanted to save it for Valentine's Day itself, which left me feeling unsure of what I should to do for the week before Valentine's Day.  So it kind of evolved as I was painting my nails, without a real clear picture in my mind of what I would end up with.

Since I planned to focus on red for the week of Valentine's Day, I decided to go with a bunch of pink shades for the week before.  I started with a few coats of OPI Mod About You.  Then I taped off part of my nails at an angle and used a coat of OPI Sparrow Me the Drama, taped them off again and made a third stripe with Milani Digital.  Even though I read a ton of blogs, I'm not used to doing my nails with the intent of posting it online, so I completely forgot to consider taking pictures of my striped nails prior to stamping.  I'll have to remember from now on to take pictures in between steps.

While everything was drying, I sifted through my stamping plates trying to decide what I was going to use on top.  I finally settled on a tiled hearts pattern from Red Angel plate 114 and used Konad Special Polish in red.  I just recently bought the Red Angel plates off of Amazon after seeing them on Enamel Girl's blog, so I was looking for a chance to use them again.  It wasn't my best attempt at stamping though.  I usually don't have issues with the full nail patterns but this time I think that I end up pushing too hard when I was rolling the stamper.  I didn't even realize there was a pretty badly blurred spot, right on the tip of my left hand middle finger, until I was browsing through my pictures.  I also think that this design ending up looking better from a distance rather than close up.

Overall though, I was pretty happy with the way it turned out.  I'll be working my my next Valentine manicure this weekend, so I hope to have that up sometime during the week.  I also received my February Birchbox a few days ago, so I might take some pictures of what samples I received this month and do a post on that sometime this week as well.