Konad Q1 Plate In The U.S.A (+ Giveaway)

I'm breaking the silence for good news.

Until now, the Q1 plate has been available in UK and Scandinavia only. While the online shops have been delivering to US, the shipping costs have been awful. But no more.

The Q1 is now available for US Konad retailers through Konad UK, should they want to carry it.


Action - Ask For The Plate!

This plate does not appear to the US Konad shops automatically. As this is a special plate and does not appear in the Konad official catalog, the US retailers may not be aware of it. To get it, they will have to contact Konad UK.

So, if you are interested in purchasing this plate and you live in the U.S.A,
please contact your local Konad retailer and ask for this plate!


List of US Konad Retailers Selling Q1:

I'm going to collect here a list of Konad retailers who carry Q1. So whenever you find a retailer that has it, please let me know!

To get things started, I'm going to send a free Q1 plate to the first person who sends me a link to an US Konad retailer with Q1 plate in their online shop.

You can just leave a blog comment here with the link and I'll contact you back!

Rules:

• Be the first one to leave a comment with the link
• Link to an online shop page selling Q1
• Shop must be in U.S.A
• It must be a Konad retailer (or some other legal seller, not eBay)

Australians - Your Q1 Shop:

Drama Queen Nails sells the Q1 plate

Q1 giveaway winners

Thank you all for taking part in our giveaway. At the time of the draw there were 126 comments by 117 different persons (not inclusing the team). We will use www.random.org to generate the winning numbers.

Here are the numbers:

And the winners are:

Congratulations to Aniiluap, Santtu and Michelle! I will contact you for your addresses.

I have some good (and some bad) news for the people who did not win, but want the plate. The plate is now available in few web shops.

The plate is visible in Konad UK web shop, but you cannot buy it separately from there. Instead, you have to buy something for £50, and then you get it. Sorry guys!

Finnish Konad retailer Cesarsshop seems to be able to sell the plate, but the price is 10€. Good news is that they ship to other countries. You need to contact them separately for it, their mail is: cesarsshop@welho.com

We are sorry that the plate is not easier to get and is quite expensive. But we are still very happy we got this opportunity to get the plate published.

9th of September: Lacquer Lockdown wrote in her blog as follows:

I wrote to Satu, the owner of Cesearsshop, inquiring about the plate and she said that it would be fine to order directly from the site without first emailing.  Simply click the UK flag and this will switch the language to english.  If you are ordering 1-3 plates select "Letter" shipping for only 1 euro and if you are ordering > 3 plates you will have to choose the "toimitus EU:n sisalli" method for 17.70 euros.  Either way the seller is super friendly and it will be relatively easy to purchase here.  Visa or Mastercard only payments.  Happy shopping! 

Konad UK publishes Charming Nails plate + giveaway!

Dear Reader, we proudly present you: The Charming Nails Q1 plate by Konad UK!

Yes, that is right, we actually got one of our plates printed in Konad factory. As far as we know, this is the first Konad plate designed by Konad fans.

We have been really excited about this for a long time and now we can finally tell you all about it. Thank you all for your patience, you have been waiting such a long time!

I guess you all remember how our project got stopped because of the Konad patent. Konad offered us an opportunity to order the plates from them, but the minimum order was way too big for us. They even offered us a special discount, but still the amount of plates was so big that is was out of reach for hobbyists like us. For a while we thought that nothing would ever get published. But things changes when Konad UK told us that they wanted to help us and publish one of our plates. We ended up selecting the Charming Nails plate, as it is really versatile and beautiful and it was also already shown to you.

I apologise for all of you who have been designing with us and did not get your ideas out now. Special apology for The Nailphile, whose plate is wonderful, exotic and really ought to have been published too. But we do not know what future brings to us. Maybe, maybe if this plates proves to be really successful, there might be similar opportunities in the future.

The plate will be sold by Konad retailers, but we were told that initially it is to be used in promotion. So we do not know which conditions they will have for getting it and we do not know which retailers are going to have it. We will tell you when we know more and of course you can ask from your local Konad shop if they will have this plate. 

To celebrate, we have a giveaway - 3 pieces of the new plate. To take part, leave a comment to this post. If you cannot be contacted through your profile, leave also your email. I will skip any anonymous comments that do not have contact information. One entry per person.

We will draw the 3 winners at 7th of September 2011.

Edit: Charming Nails has some manicure ideas for her plate in her blog, check them out here. In the same posting there is a link to the Cesarsshops sales page for this plate, and Charming Nails says that the plate will be available there soon. Great! Thanks for the info, CN.

Edit 25th of Aug. Spellbinding Nails and Apaixonadas por Konad are featuring our plate in their blogs. Thank you so much, Sarahlouise and Adriele! 

Seeing Stars

Hi there! Sorry for the long silence. We are not dead, is it just that there have been no news about our plates. But that is going to change in couple of weeks.

I have for you today some simple manicures done with the new prototype plates of the Charming Nails Designer Plate. They feature my favorite image from the CN plate, the stars. I apologise for the poor condition of my hands in these photos. I have been on low maintenance during the summer :)

2 coats of Essie Turquoise & Caicos. Stamped with Konad Special White. 

This is from early summer and has slightly different stars than the later prototypes. 

2 coats of Essie Playa del Platinum, stamped with Konad Special White.

 2 coats of China Glaze Recycle. Stamped with China Glaze Millennium. 

The lightning is also from CN plate.

By the way, BundleMonster has a new plate set out. It set has only couple of images that interest me, so I am probably not going to buy and review it. Parokeets has an excellent review of it with lots of images. You can get the BundleMonster plates from bundlemonster.com or from Amazon.

DIY: Superlarge Transparent Stamper

Charming Nails just posted and excellent review of the MagnoNails XL stamper. She has good side-by-side comparison images of the Konad large stamper and MagnoNails XL stamper. After reading the review I was tearing my hair again - Why, oh why did I not order XL stamper for myselft?!? After having enough, I decided to cut my nails and go with shorter ones for a while. Now I can again stamp whatever I want. Plah.

But that reminded me of the funny thing I did last summer while being desperate that there would be no way to stamp our big images.

I did myself a superlarge flexible floppy stamper. I apologise the quality of these photos, these were not originally taken for publishing.

It is so soft that you can do even the largest and longest nails with it, plus it is transparent. No more missplaced images. So, how do you use this thing?

Well, much like a regular stamper, but you have to take care yourself that it comes into contact with the plate neatly. I used to keep other side of it in between my fingers and then use my index finger to slide it over the image.

And when taking it off the plate, you have to be careful not to stretch it much, but otherwise it is quite easy. And the easiest part is the stamping, you just flop the thing over your nail.

Here you can see the final result. The floppy is sticky and it keeps part of the stamping polish, so the image has a little thinner layer of polish than when stamping with Konad. You need to clean it up by stamping the rest to a magazine cover or some other paper surface. That is what I do with regular stamper too, it is much easier and faster than cleaning it up with nail polish remover.

I guess you must be jumping up and down by now, and I am sorry to disappoint you but there is a catch here: This did-it-yourself floppy stamper is made of gelatin! Mix some berries and you can eat it after you have done your nails. (Just joking, do NOT eat your stamper!)

There is really not much wrong with this self-made version, except that it basically is "food", so it gets bad quite fast, even if stored in a fridge. Also, you cannot clean it up with polish remover, it would melt. And the last, but not least, you have to be fast or it becomes really sticky and starts melting in your hands. Nice, huh?

Making it is easy, just mix the water and gelatin powder and warm a little in the microwave oven. Then let it thicken in the fridge.

I had some great laughs and fun time with this floppy stamper, but eventually I felt that it was not really worth the trouble. It would have been, if I would have been able to do it out of silicone or some lasting material.

I really wish that eventually some manufacturer will publish a stamper like this.

Konad Sponge Nail Art Set and Shirley's plates

Shirley published her nail art stamping plates yesterday. Way to go Shirley! The plates can be found in her blog, Shirley's Beauty & Nails. Sally, thanks for telling me about these plates!

Shirley seems to have same problems than Chez Delaney had. Only 21 of Shirley's 40 plates are stampable. Even though Shirley's images are nice, I am not going to get these until I see how others succeed in stamping them.

Other thing that I want to tell you about is the Konad sponge nail art set, which I finally bought for myself. I could have tried with a regular sponge, but it would have kept bugging me if the set would be better.

This was my very first try. As always, I started with Nubar Foundation. Then I sponged the tips with Konad Special White Pearl. Super easy and super fast! Almost too fast, so I continued to stamp with a flowery image from Konad m31. I have some yellow stains in my nails that show through, but overall I love this look.

Here is the second try. To hide the yellow stains, I started with Essie BBF Best Boyfriend. I sponged the tips with Konad Special White Pearl and continued to stamp with Bundle Monster BM20. This is one of my favorite BM images and I stamped it using both Konad Special White Pearl and China Glaze Millennium. The stamps came out anything but perfect, but it kind of suits this runny-paint-looking style. Love this one too!

And here is the third try. I wanted to try something non-french that would suit the wintery weather outside. I started with two layers of China Glaze millennium. Then I sponged the tips heavily with Konad Special Pastel Blue and immediately continued to stamp with flowers from Bundle Monster BM12. Then I just redid the same with Konad Special White, sponge tips and stamp. I think this came out great and hope to keep it for a long time. While cleaning the sponges I dropped some nail polish remover on my ring finger nail, but it's not that bad in real life.

I just love these manicures. So as you may guess, I really like the Konad sponge set. It is very easy to use, much easier than Konad stamping set is. It is fast too, and even though the finish is not of airbrush quality, it is really nice. But you need to use a top coat that blends the colors a bit and makes the transitions smoother. I use Nubar Diamont. It does not smudge the Konad special polishes and dries in three minutes.

One of the best things in this set is that now I finally have some use for the stamping plates that contain little images. It is much easier to combine them with this sponge set than alone. At least for me, that is.

Also, as Konad Special White Pearl does not have as good coverage as Special White, this is a perfect way to use it up. With Special White, you get a really clean look. And with Special White Pearl, the look is more natural, which often suits me better.

What I did not like about this set, were the tiny polish bottles and tweezers bundled with the set. The tweezers are probably in the package since the sponge holder keeps detaching from the sponge. But they are too small to be really useful in holding the sponge.

I did like that there is some system for holding the sponge and a reusable plate where to pick the color from. But you could easily substitute with a similar kitchen sponge and any plastic plate. Taken that into concern I think this set is a bit overprice. But I am not regretting for a minute for buying it!

MagnoNails XL plates

No news from our own plates. This is getting a long wait, sorry for that. While waiting for news, me and iso-K made a combined order to MagnoNails. We just had to get those XL plates! Iso-K had plates D,E and F, I went for plates B,C and D.

I was very curious whether the most intricate patterns will stamp or not, so I tried the trickiest ones on paper first.

 These images are from plate B. It has a lot of fancy retro style images.

These are from plate C. I love the little details of the images on this plates. I think these were the easiest to stamp from these three plates. This plate also has many images with interesting edges that are suitable for stamping the nail only partially, in non-french way. 

And these are from plate D. I think the animal prints were not the easiest to stamp with, but they look really nice.

I love the french (and other) edges in the images, which make these more usable for long nail owners. At first sight the images were also great, but now after trying these I wish they has used more thought on image stampability. I mean, the images are still great, but these are not the plates to start your stamping hobby with as the images are not the easiest to stamp.

The images are a real polish hoarders, so you cannot use them by putting the stamping polish beside the image and scaping. You will have to put the polish directly on the image. I guess some of you do that anyway and that is not a change in workflow, but I have always done it in the other way.

Big plate size is also a disadvantage from my point of view. It is harder to clean and store these than the small plates. But overall, I do like these plates a lot. They have images that really suit my taste. I just wish I had ordered the flower plates (E&F) for myself too, they ended up being my favorite. I'd never expected that, but they are so well designed that they made an impression. 

We did not realize there is an XL stamper available too, so these were stamped with regular Konad stamper. I really wish I had ordered the bigger stamper, since I really had problems stamping these (full nail way). My nails are a bit curvy and the Konad stamper is not big and squishy enough to cover them easily.

Here are my first manicures with these plates:

The cells are from the plate D. I had Essie BBF Best Boyfriend on the bottom and stamped with Konad Violet Pearl Special polish. I think the result is one of the worst manicures that I've ever had. The idea did not work at all. Here you can see what I meant about the problems with Konad stamper and curvy nails. I need to roll the stamper to cover the whole nail, so the stamp is discontinuous in either the tip or the bottom. Here you can see the problem in the tips. I did not put any top coat, since I took this off right away.

Here is my second try. Image is from plate C. I have China Glaze Recycle on the bottom, and stamped with Konad Special White. I love the new Konad Special White Pearl, but it does not have the coverage of the old faithful Special White. I really like this manicure, even though I still had problems in stamping. I am not too picky with my stamps. I never redo, even if they would be little off or messy as these are. People (except you) are not going to look my nails up close anyway.

I have heard that MagnoNails would deliver to US (with special email request), but if you do not want to do that, these same plates are available also from Chez Delaney. They are a lot more expensive there though, at least if you are planning to order more than one plate.