Literary Inspiration: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened

The fifth prompt in my friend Julie’s reading challenge was to tackle a book in your to-be-read pile that you’ve overlooked time and time again.  For me, that’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir), a hilarious collection of sweetly horrifying true life tales from blogger Jenny Lawson.  My best friend gave me this book years ago, after assuring me that I’d find more than a little in common with Lawson’s various embarrassments, and probably also piss myself from laughter.  And so taking her recommendation to great heart, I promptly stuck the book on the shelf beneath four other things and then totally forgot about it.  Slick.

But some gentle nudging in the form of this reading challenge encouraged me to release this forgotten gem from bookshelf purgatory, and I’m glad I did, because Let’s Pretend This Never Happened was hella funny. Lawson gets a lot of mileage out of a very unique childhood, one that mirrored a lot of moments in my own rural upbringing, only writ extra large and super bloody.  Seriously, there are SO many stories involving taxidermized animals and her crazy Viking father’s penchant for traumatizing his daughters with pelt-centric pranks.  It takes a special kind of writer to wring the humour and humanity out of a dead dog story, and yet Lawson manages it.  I tittered throughout and was sad when I finished the final chapter.  Thankfully, my friend gifted me with Lawson’s follow-up book, which is also currently languishing on my shelf, though not for much longer.

This manicure is inspired by the inside cover art of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, a 1950s-style collection of hand-drawn pigs, foxes and raccoons in various states of repose (if by “repose” you mean setting up a lighting rig.)  They’re probably stuffed.  Everything in this book seems to come back to taxidermy in one fashion or another!

I employed a bit of animal fakery in this mani myself, eschewing my normal free-handed approach for an attempt at stamping (key word here being “attempt,” because lordy, do I suuuuuuccccck at stamping.)  I used MoYou London’s Enchanted stamping plate #14, which features a charming assortment of twee little animal designs, including a sweet pug design I stamped onto my index finger in honour of Lawson’s dearly – and somehow hilariously – departed pug, Barnaby Jones Pickles.  In solid black as against an ivory creme, OPI’s My Vampire is Buff, I think the overall effect looks a bit like faded print on a slightly yellowed page of your favourite, much loved book.  So pretty much perfect inspiration. 🙂

Style Over Substance: A MoYou Stamping Plates Review

I purchased these four MoYou London stamping plates from Daily Charme a few months back in a fit of summertime pique – I had been on a tear of complicated, free-handed nail art, and I imagined my first real foray into stamping would lighten the lazy load a bit. I was also looking forward to stretching my stamping legs – it’s a nail art technique I don’t attempt very often. And when the plates are as beautiful as these four, the results are just bound to be gorgeous, right?

Wrong. Allll the wrongs. It began with the Festive Collection plate. It would not transfer any of the designs to two different stampers, with a multitude of polishes. In between frustrated attempts, I tried my gear out with a previously-used stamping plate from another manufacturer and had no problems getting the design to adhere. After taking a closer look at the plate, it appeared as though the engraved design (an absolutely gorgeous allover one, so intricate in its festive detailing) was simply too shallow to allow for proper design transfer.

I contacted Daily Charme with my concerns, and they were really wonderful – offered me a full refund if I chose, despite the fact that I had already peeled the protective film off two of the plates. But I really didn’t want to choose – I very much wanted to keep the plates, even in a non-functional capacity (I was initially going to frame the Fairytale and Festive Collection plates, a plan it appears I am going to have to once again revisit.) Daily Charme also offered up a number of helpful tips on the technique of stamping itself, which I put into immediate good use, eeking out three whole nails’ worth of designs from three different plates. Already tired of the fuss, that seemed good enough for me.

Earlier this week, though, I got the idea for a kind of decorative tin roof-type manicure, one I thought would be made appreciably easier by stamping on one of the stained glass designs from the Gothic plate. I think you can guess how it went. As in it didn’t. I couldn’t get a single design to adhere to either of my stampers, using four different polishes. It took me half an hour of messy, acetone-splashed frustration to net absolutely nothing. I could have free-handed the design in that amount of time.

I don’t know what the ultimate problem is with these MoYou plates – Did Daily Charme receive a terrible, poorly-etched batch? Is that even possible across four different collections? – or even if the problem is indeed the plates. I mean, I suppose it’s possible my stamping skills are completely deficient – other nail artists seem to think MoYou’s offerings are pretty awesome. But at the risk of sounding full of it, I’m not half bad at this nail art stuff, and I’ve had pretty great results with other stamping plates.

And so with Daily Charme’s generously-offered refund surely no longer on the table all these months later, I’m going to have to press these plates into action as decorative items instead. And they’ll look fantastic, of course (gosh, the unicorn-drawn carriage on the Fairytale plate is stupendous) but that’s somewhat besides the point. Ultimately, it’s tremendously irksome to have paid for something that could not carry out its most basic function. I’m lucky in that I’ve found a good secondary use for these plates, but really, why did I need to find a silver lining in the first place? A regrettable experience with style over substance.

Leadlighting Hello Kitty

Or at least Kitty’s iconic bow and glasses. Wait, does Kitty even wear glasses? No, I’ve seen her wear glasses. So does her boyfriend, Daniel. And I *may* have just spent a bit too long contemplating the eye wear choices of two cartoon cats!

Leadlighting is the new-to-me nail art technique I tried with these nails. Leadlighting, a relative of stamping, is meant to look like stained glass windows – vibrant, slightly diffuse colours trapped within a decorative “lead” frame. Sheer jelly polishes really prove their worth in leadlighting, too, enhancing and brightening up an overall design without obscuring the stamping work. For these nails, I stamped a bows-and-glasses design from my Hello Kitty image plate (Fab Ur Nails FUN number 9) over top of a basic white creme. After giving that plenty of time to dry (I’ve found that unless you give your stamped design ample dry time, it will smudge and smear, destroying the effect AND your mani) I then filled in the bows with a detail brush dipped in an assortment of rainbow-hued jellies. If you’re at all familiar with cookie flooding or, more simply, colouring in a colouring book, leadlighting works exactly the same way – you create a border of sorts out of the stamped design and then fill it in with your coloured polishes. Really super easy, and very cool.

Sunday Morning’s Alright For Stamping

Humblebrag? This is my very first attempt at stamping. Prior to this I’ve tried the technique out on maybe two test nails before dismissing it altogether – too imprecise, too fussy and too messy for something I could probably free-hand just as well. But on the opposite end of the humblebrag spectrum, I’ll note that my free-handing skills are not always totally up to snuff, particularly when it comes to branded characters like our gal Hello Kitty here (depicted as the Punisher; husband’s choice.) In those cases, I’ve got zero problem seeking out a little pre-etched help, and so I decided to finally take a run at this stamping business. And you know what? It wasn’t bad or difficult at all, and being well organized right from the start kept things neat and tidy. Plus, how cute is Punisher Kitty on my thumb, nestled among that argyle bow design on my fingers? Brutally cute!

But there’s a little more than meets the eye with this manicure, so let’s take it from the top! The base polish I used here is actually a jelly sandwich manicure I created by layering Mentality Nail Polish’s purple glaze with Sally Hansen’s Complete Salon Manicure in Cheery on Top, a pink, turquoise and purple glitter (which is itself a dupe of OPI’s Polka.Com.)

Once that dried, I set about stamping, using just a basic, $5.00 scraper and transfer set I purchased from Nail Polish Canada and this Hello Kitty image plate from Fab Ur Nails I bought from Llarowe (which is in the midst of a major restructuring, whittling their stocklist down to just two in-house brands, so no more Hello Kitty plates, regrettably.)

For the stamping itself, I used a favourite sparkly silver, OPI’s My Signature is “DC”, which is very opaque and transferred quite beautifully. I didn’t have any problems with the stamping, but my centering work could definitely use a bit of, uh, work. Except for Punisher Kitty (one of about a dozen superhero Kitties on plate number 9) who is leveling her stone cold vigilante’s gaze at me directly from the centre of my thumb. Still, for a (nearly) first time effort, this is pretty tremendous. So expect this unexpected run of stamping good luck to NEVER happen again!