Christmas Nails: Easy Stripy design

This month has just flown by so far and I haven’t been able to post here as often as I have wanted to. I have been sick, our beautiful fur baby Wally has been sick, and the weather has been so hot we have been flat out watering the garden! When you throw in planning for Christmas and attending end of year functions it has been a frantic last few weeks. One thing that I was determined to try (and share) was a cool idea for Christmas nails!

I have really wanted to have a cool red and white stripy set of Christmas nails for a while now. But I haven’t really known how to do it, until now that is! There are lots of links that suggest that you can use sticky tape on your nails to make the stripes, but that doesn’t work unless you have some vital tips.

A few weeks ago I came across this great link on a nail art blog that explained some tips and tricks for using sticky tape to get a two colour nail effect. This link is not for Christmas nails but it explains how to use sticky tape to get two colours – and that was enough for me!

From this link I learnt two very important tips for using sticky tape to get stripy nails:

• Before you use the tape you must get some of the stickiness off it by sticking it to your skin first.
• It is also very important that you remove the sticky tape from your nails while the second colour is still wet.

I have tried to get a stripy nail design without knowing about these two tips and have never been able to get them to work. Now that I do know these vital tips I have been able to achieve a cool funky Christmas nail design. My nails are not perfect but I don’t think that they look to bad for my first attempt at nail art – here is how I did it!

How to Do Your Own Stripy Christmas Nails

1. Paint your nails with two coats of the base colour that you want – I used white as the base colour.
2. Allow your base colour to dry really well.
3. Tear off pieces of sticky tape that are about one inch long.
4. Cut the sticky tape into thin (about 1mm wide) strips and stick them to the back of your hand – I used three thin strips per nail so I needed 15 per hand.
5. Doing one nail at a time arrange three of the tape strips over a nail and press them down onto the nail – make sure they stick down at the edges.
6. Paint the nail with the second colour of choice – I used Red Dazzle.
7. Carefully peel off the strips of sticky tape while the second colour is still wet.
8. Repeat steps 5 – 7 until you have done all of your nails.
9. That’s it you’re done – you now have stripy nails!