Again with the giving away of things? Already?

I'm in the strangest of moods today, so bear with me while I try and get out the fabbo news I have. This post is HUGE, so I'm going to put a jump in it,just to spare your brain, and my looking at it on my front page. But please, keep reading- I've made a heck of a discovery on how to make Konad & Essence stamps come out more nicely, more consistently, and darker than before! All that's after the jump, though.

First off, the uber-wonderful KellieGonzo of Also Known As is having a giveaway! Whee!! She's giving away a sweet little collection of goodies that I think anyone would love to receive. Just look!

Seriously, just look how cute this stuff is! Honestly, I can't imagine people not wanting to get this stuff. It's not like you have to go out to the mall, find a parking place out by the road and then schlep all the way inside the mall where now it's too cold, what with the air conditioning, then have to walk all the way down to the Sephora store just to pick up the items you see here, that is if they're even still in stock!

No, Kellie has saved you the effort of all of this. Instead, all you have to do is fill out her cute pink little form. (And yes, it really is pink, with really cute little paler pink flowers all over the background.) She asks three little questions, and then gives you extra chances to win!!

Now really, could it be any easier than that? I mean, sure, she could just decide out of the blue to send things to your house, hire a private investigator to get your address and then send it to you, so that you answer the door one morning to find your mail delivery person standing there with a package for you!

But that's not going to happen. This giveaway is, though, so go on, go enter! I can wait til you get back to share my news.

*waits patiently for you to return, organizing her polish box. Man, it's messy, I needed this!!*
*ponders organizing by color or by brand. Then again, my collection is so small, I can just organize by polish. "This is a polish. This is not a polish. Ohhh, this goes with the polishes... those don't, those go with the paints..."*

Oh, you're back! That was FAST! I told you! Ok, are you sitting down? This could be exciting for you.


My husband splurged and bought me a present, a wonderful one. I am now a proud owner of the Essence Stampy kit. (Woo! This baby is MINE!!) I immediately had to start practicing with it, and decided to use a sheet of paper to test on first, just to get the idea of things. I learned a lot of things in that first half hour.

1)  Speed truly is of the utmost importance. Move too slowly, say by misplacing your stamper and having to look all around you, then in your lap, down the little hole because you're sitting indian style, and then you find it and go to stamp... yea, by that time, you won't be able to pick up the stamp because the polish will have dried inside the image plate. It's much better to put your stamper near your image plate.

2)  An old rewards card from the grocery store I shopped at once 5 hours from home during a road trip and got their rewards card so that I could buy something I needed on super sale works really well, except the little divots in the edge where it was attached to the big template thing. Those leave little streaks of polish on the image plate. They don't seem to transfer, but they then have to be removed with fingernail polish.

3) Trying to stamp with glitter polish is an interesting idea, but ultimately one doomed for failure. If the glitter cannot get into the image, you will be left with whatever clear polish was able to seep through the glitter into the template. You will get a very odd, very clear stamp, if it doesn't dry before you can pick it up.

4) Holographic polishes make an amazing stamp, but you have to work even faster. They dry incredibly fast! Also, you may end up stamping with just a small wet bit, which then causes the rest of the stamp to pull apart in strings of dried polish. It's weird, and it is not attractive.

5) If you get very, very frustrated, it's possible to make yourself so nuts that it impossible to get a decent stamp, even though your first stamp was perfect. This happened to me. My first stamp was ideal, and after that I spent fifteen minutes getting more and more upset because nothing was working. I finally gave up, put everything aside for a few minutes and read a funny webpage to get my mind off things. When I picked the set back up, I had no problem stamping things.

6) Although I could them stamp with no problem, I had absolute FITS trying to figure out how to line up the stamps onto my fingernails. I still haven't figured this out.

7) Also, it is important to clean your image plate frequently. If you don't, your resulting stamps get wobblier and less accurate as you go. Also, if you switch colors, you will get a strange result.

Once I realized I could stamp consistently, I decided to test my polishes, and see which ones would work with the stampy kit. I was surprised- more worked than didn't. Perhaps I chose well, who knows. But I found that I was still having problems, and I didn't like having all the leftover polish stuck on the end of my scraper.

But then I started to think. See, I come from a very liberal arts background, and I was an art major for a while in college. I soaked up a lot of information in those days. I've also worked with screenprinting a bit, and from what I've seen, this process was the opposite of what it should be (or so it seemed to me). So I took the blob of paint on the end of my scraper and ran it over the image again, and zomg- I got a perfect stamp! I tried again with the paint on the end of the scraper and again- perfect stamp.

I decided to go back and test some of the other polishes that hadn't worked well for me. Sure enough, every single one of them worked better with this method of loading the stamp plate. Even a couple of the polishes that hadn't worked at all worked better than they had! (Click the small image to the right to see the stamp testing page much larger!)

So, I've concluded that this method works much, much better than anything I've seen online. The problem is that I've had a heck of a day, and I'm too sick to do any photoing of konading tonight. Hopefully tomorrow, I shall write up the bits and photo the process. It's really simple, seriously. So, tomorrow. Tonight, you must simply make do with the photo of my sketchbook page with the notes and stamps. You can even compare the stamps with the new method and the old method, I'll label 'em for ya.

And now, let's hope I don't die in the middle of the night from strange, random common cold assassination. It might happen!