The stockings were hung by the chimney with care

Welcome to my first blog post...yippee...And I'm really happy that this will be my first post, I gave reverse stamping a shot and I'm really proud of how it turned out. 

This mani had to tick two boxes, one the base polish had to start with D for a Letter of the alphabet a week challenge we are doing in a facebook gift swap group I admin, Lacquered With Love, it also had to fit the theme for yesterdays (I'm a day behind) christmas theme nail art challenge on Instagram, follow me @briemmara and check out the hashtag #anxmas2013 Dec 7th theme was "family time" and this week the girls and I spent our time decorating the tree and the house so that's what I wanted to convey on my nails.

I also wanted to try out the reverse stamping technique Id heard about in the Aussie Nails facebook group, shown to me by Sarah at Shatter Me Claire.....so this is what I came up with...

Using OPI Designer...De Better as the base

I started my reverse stamping with plate MM21 from Messy Mansion

Now I cant say this is the 'right' way or the best way to do this technique but this is how I did it and it worked for me.

I started with one coat of clear polish on a sheet of plastic, a lot of people use baking paper/parchment paper but I use zip lock bags just because that's what I tend to have more of and it works just as well. 

Once that's dry stamp normally onto the clear dried polish.

Then using polishes and a thin nail art brush, I 'coloured' in the parts I wanted to, the bows and the light bulbs

Once the coloured polishes were dry, you simply peel off the sheet of clear polish. Cut out the designs to place on your nail.

Using a clear polish I applied a thin layer to give the decal something to stick to and placed it on. Once that was dry I simply cleaned up the edges and filed around the edge of the nail.

To finish on the index and pinkie finger I painted a line of gold polish and covered it with some gold bar glitter, brushed off the excess and applied a top coat to keep it in place.

voila, Christmas nails based on family time spent decorating the house.