Festive 4th of July Toes

So a few years ago a friend conned me into getting a pedicure done with her.  No, it didn’t take much convincing!  Anyway, we did “fun” toes.  They were brown with pink polka dots or maybe we did pink with brown polka dots.  I really can’t remember anymore.  Somewhere I have a photo of them… (probably on my server thingy at the house that I can’t get hubby to fire back up so I can get to old photos….)

But when the gal was painting my toes I watched intently.  It was super simple!  So I decided I could do something like that.  Well later that summer I got a second pedicure done, again I got my arm twisted real hard!!  And they were Zebra stripes.  Again, super simple.  By this time I thought, Ok I can save my money and do my own toes.  Although boy do pedicures feel good!

Anyway, enter the 4th of July… I decided I wanted “flag” toes and that’s just what I did.  Super easy, just a little time consuming, you have to let the nail polish dry after all.

Aren’t these super cute? (yes my printer is on the coffee table, ignore it, I was scanning photos… we’re looking at the toes here people!)

I did them last night.  I’ve had flag toes for the last 3 4th of July’s in a row, I can’t disappoint :).  So I thought I’d give you a tutorial so you could have your own 4th of July toes.

What you’ll need: red nail polish, white nail polish, blue nail polish, and either a couple of toothpicks (which I used this year) or a very small paintbrush (which I’ve used in the past).  If you use the paintbrush you’ll also need some nail polish remover and a paper towel to get the nail polish out of the paintbrush.

So start with clean toes.  Or in my case, you can see they’ve already been dark blue and hot pink.  If I’m repainting them I don’t worry as much about “clean”.  I just cover it up.  Bad I know… some days I’m just lazy.  (and ignore my hideous feet… my shoes have rubbed all kinds of blisters on them…)

So start out by painting your toenails white.

This is one coat.  I figured I should do a second coat, especially on my big toes.

This is the second coat.  The big toes still don’t look the best but not to worry.  And if you get some nail polish on your skin… wait until the end and then just whip it clean (or else be lazy like me and let it wear off… LOL… I only do that b/c I usually don’t get much on my actual skin.)

Once the white has dried, then on the corner of both your big toes, you are going to divide them into 4 quads basically and fill in one of the quads (squares) with blue nail polish like so.

When you go to your other foot do the same corner.  Now some may say, um…  your flag is backward… my answer is… well if you have a flag, one side goes one way the other side goes the other… duh 🙂  So you should end up with a product looking like this.  (Now a friend of mine did mini flags on each toe… I’m not that ambitious.)

Then using a toothpick dip it in red nail polish (or a paint brush) and paint on stripes.  Don’t worry if they aren’t straight b/c if a flag is flying in the wind, the stripes aren’t straight anyway!

So now your toes look like this.  My right foot looks so much better than my left and I did both with my right hand (being right-handed and all…..)

The one last thing that just makes them “Pop” is adding “stars” or white dots to the blue.  So get another clean toothpick (so you don’t contaminate your white nail polish) and dip a little white-out.  (Whiteout works really well too, I had to do that last year b/c I forgot the stars… LOL.)  Obviously you aren’t going to get 50 stars on that small of an area, just use your best judgment to what looks best.

And here is the finished product!

If you try it, let me know.  It’s really not hard, just like I said, time-consuming because you have to let every color dry before adding the next layer.  Now is when the 60-second dry nail color would have been super!

Hope you all have a happy and safe 4th of July

and to all my Canadian Friends, Happy Canada Day today!