Quilted Nails

Arden: I've been googling "quilted nails" for a couple weeks now, but have just never really found any manicures I wanted to emulate.  Until now!  I was actually just searching for "nail designs" when I came across a manicure made up of larger dots connected by little bitty diagonal rows of dots and thought they reminded me of a quilted pattern.  (Unfortunately, I now cannot find the picture that inspired me, but if I do, I will definitely update this post.)

I started by painting my nails with two coats of Essie Mint Candy Apple.

Here are the tools I used to make my dots: two different sized dotting tools.  But I promise you can get similar results using whatever tapered utensils you have at home: nails, paper clips, toothpicks, etc.

I then made a uniform pattern of dots using OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls and the larger dotting tool.

Next, I connected the larger dots with small lines of smaller dots.  On average, I tried to do three smaller dots between each larger dot, but it wasn't an exact science.  On some nails only two dots would fit, on others the little dots ran together and there were four or five smaller dots.

Up close, they look a little messy.  My white nail polish tends to be a bit stringy when I make dots with it.  But, look, once I added a top coat, they were good to go!  (Coincidentally, that's the name of my top coat.)

While my smaller dotted lines weren't as straight as I wish they were, all together they looked pretty good.  Overall, I was quite pleased with them.  Compared to others I've seen, these were some pretty easy to do quilted nails-- no tape required!  Try them out and let me know what you think.