Nail Polish Flowers

I love perusing Pinterest for projects that look too good to be true. Those ones are so much fun to test out and research! This past week I decided to test out one of these pins which looked way too simple on Pinterest. Figured that'd be the perfect H.U.M.P. Day kind of post. 

There's no way this could be as easy as it looks, right?

The Original Pin

http://www.duitang.com/people/mblog/93489682/detail/

They look like gorgeous glass flowers! No way that's real...right? So I decided to test it. 

As it is Use it Up month, I wanted to see what I could find around the house to try this out. I pulled out my most expensive nail polish (for me it was expensive...I usually stick to the $1-2 range...$5 for a bottle of polish was really pushing it for me!), a mid-level, and my cheapest polish. I wanted to see if the quality of polish made a difference.  I also found some floral wire to use. I was set to go!

 I wrapped the wire around the pencil and twisted and warped and finally ended up with my flower shape. The wire didn't want to cooperate and it took some work to get it where it didn't look all weird, but I finally ended up with this:

Now time for the polish. Started with the cheapest polish first. It was a no go. I couldn't get it to form the film!

Surely the more expensive ones would work...right? Nope! Same results.

I was disappointed. But then I thought that maybe it was a problem with the size of the petals. So I rummaged through the house and found a lollipop stick in my baking stuff and figured that would work.

The lollipop stick produced petals that were more the size of the original picture. Now I figured we were good. 

Success! The polish finally was able to form a film between the wire.

So now that I knew a smaller petal would work, I got busy making a full flower.  Again...the wire did not want to cooperate, especially now that we were working with smaller proportions. 

Once again, I tested all three polishes and all three worked, but the blue one covered up the green of the wire better than the others.

Here's the finished teal flower:

Meh. The thick wire really just made it look sloppy I thought. I wanted the dainty look of the flowers in the original picture. So while I was up in Albuquerque for Darrow's MRI (he's good! Everything came back with good reports!), I stopped in at Hobby Lobby, broke the Use it Up rules, and bought a $2 spool of thin wire. Now I was set to try it again.

After putting together the first flower, I knew this one was going to work way better.

I decided to just stick with teal and cream. The cream worked really really well, but I had some trouble getting the teal (the more expensive polish) to make the film. But, they both worked in the end.

My original idea was to make a ton of these and put together a fun spring centerpiece for may table. 6 flowers in and I was done. I didn't want to have to make enough for a centerpiece. So I improvised and made a pin.

So, the original pin actually works! And it works well as long as you don't make your petals to big, and don't use thicker wire. This really would be gorgeous in a wedding bouquet, or in a crown (as in the original pin) for a flower girl, and it would be super cheap! 

For once, I am quite happy to say I was wrong.