Love in Bloom...

Today's manicure was inspired by Day 15 prompt of 'Love' in the MoYou 30 day challenge. Although I haven't had time to take part in many of the challenges, this one seemed a perfect fit for the Polished by KPT beauty 'Love in Bloom' that I was playing around with a little bit ago. I took the polish name quite literaly and surrounded the couple in love with blooms...

All the stamping is from the MoYou London Mother Nature collection plate 01. For the flowers/dragonflies I used the purple Kaledoscope Mirror Polish No f-14 and Pure Ice First Time for the grass. The couple I stamped using KleanColor Black. I had to shrink the couple quite a bit so that they would fit on my nail and since there is no perfect way to do it, they are a bit distorted...

Warm state of the floral shows off all the beautiful flowers, butterflies and dragonflies...

Transition state looks like a pink sunset... perfect time to propose, right?

Cold state...

Ok, now my little soap box! I love MoYou plates, I really do. They are great quality and have wonderful and unique designs, but sometimes their proportions are all wrong and that drives me nuts. This couple is the prime example of that. Although they fit perfectly well into the design of the plate to make it look pretty, I think it is safe to say majority of the people don't have nails long or large enough to make this work. For that reason I'm now very weary of buying more MoYou full image plates. I don't want to end up with pretty plates that are only good for framing and not for using...

To shrink this couple, I used the stamper pinch technique. I haven't had time to make a tutorial, but there are ones available on YouTube if you search for how to shrink/enlarge stamping images. Basically, you need a very squishy stamper for this. Take the stamper out of the holder, put your fingers around it (in place of the holder) and squish to stretch the stamping surface (if that makes any sense). Pick up the image with the stretched surface and then release your stretch to allow the stamper to return to original shape. What you should see is a smaller version of what you picked up. Of course how well it shrinks will depend on how well or evenly you stretch, etc. As you see, my image is slightly distorted. The girl's neck/head is doing some strange ET thing and her boobs got ummm... perky. LOL. A small price to pay for fitting them both on one nail. All in all, I was pretty happy to shrink the image down to about 1/4th the size. Still looks like a couple in love, right?... Now if only my topcoat didn't bubble...