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Day 12: Stripes
Let me clarify a few things straight off:
     1) The utter and complete ickiness of this main is completely due to my inexperience and not a reflection of polish quality.
     2) I wanted to do this nail art challenge to break myself out of the mold of just imitating others' good ideas, but I have found the added benefit: I am learning SO much about what does and doesn't work in nail art!
     3) I'm trying to stick w/ the 31 Day Challenge and do only Christmas/winter nail art for all of December, so sometimes I have to really s-t-r-e-t-c-h to encompass both of those ideas.

I was so excited to receive in the mail Floam from Ninja Polish--my first from them!

 
 I desperately wanted to use it right away, so I convinced myself that I could use it as a base for striped "wrapping paper" nails. Really, I should have used a base color, then just one coat of Floam, because to get as much opacity as I wanted, I had to use 3 coats of my precious Floam. This is a thicker polish, plus there's the sandy texture of the glitter...

I was not about to try freehanding stripes—not up for that yet! I couldn't find a stamping image that had stripes I was happy with, so I told myself that plaid is just stripes in two directions! Hence, Mash plate 39 and Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Silver Sweep. I will only subject the world to one pic of this awful mani:

I wasn't as careful as I should have been with the Floam application, so I had teeny glitters all around my nail that clung to my skin no matter what methods I resorted to in order to clean them up. The beauty of the Floam was hidden by the stamping, and even with two coats of top coat, the surface was visibly bumpy. I could lie and tell myself it's reminiscent of some funky, imported, textured wrapping paper from World Market, but...not so much. Oh well, another lesson learned.