Adventures in Resin - Part II

The Big Reveal!

Now, if I were doing this in the style of an American Idol results show, I would put in a whole bunch of uninteresting crap and filler here for about 20 pages and THEN have the results all squished down at the bottom.

But I HATE when they do that (which is why I DVR the show so I can fast forward to the good parts) so I'm not gonna put y'all through that kinda torture.

We'll start with the "totally sucks" results, move through the "okay, but could have been better" section, and then get to the stuff that actually came out okay (uh, assuming there is any of that which I'm not guaranteeing).

Here are all my small mold items - nearly all of which are totally ruined by cloudiness. GRRR!

I'm so disappointed. These would have been so cute except for the cloudiness. I can't figure it out because this is the same batch of resin that worked perfectly in other areas so it wasn't a mixing/proportion issue and it wasn't an environmental humidity issue.

Out of all the small molds, only this piece came out without any cloudiness. It does have a small bubble in it, but it's not very noticeable. Now, why would this one be fine and everything else had cloudiness issues? Weird.

I had better luck with the larger molds, although one of the rings still has some cloudy patches on one side.

This one came out perfectly, though. I used the holeless beads on this and just suspended them randomly in the resin. Some sank to the bottom and others floated on top and I kind of like the effect. I just wish that both pieces had turned out instead of one having cloudy patches. Again, can't figure out why one would be different than the other.

Out of all the molded items, this one came out the best. This was the one where I mixed the mica pigment into the resin and I got this gorgeous pearlized blue color. I have a ton more colors of mica pigments so I may have to do some more experiments like this. Also, no cloudiness.

All in all, the mold experiment was kind of a disaster. I had much better luck with the bezels.

In fact, I'd be totally satisfied with these had I not (like an idiot) used the part of the paper that had the bar code on the back. Ummm...DUH! All I can say in my defense is that it didn't show through like this until AFTER I poured the resin on it so I didn't even realize I'd used that part of the paper. It's a bummer because these are really cute otherwise.

Now THIS version came out perfectly. I'm totally happy with this and how CUTE is that strawberry?!

This one would be perfect except it's got a scattering of tiny bubbles right across the middle. I thought I'd checked and gotten rid of all of them, but these popped up later after I'd stopped checking on everything. Also, while I loved these papers together in real life, I'm not sure they actually have enough contrast to make a good design in miniature like this.

This one came out cute, though. I love the colors and the glittery scrapbook paper.

These both came out awesome and I can't wait to make them into some cool, sophisticated, Parisian jewelry. Vive la France!

My best results came with the Patera images and bezels. No bubbles, the pictures look great, I didn't overdo on adding "bling" to the pictures - awesome.

Lastly, I took a couple of the wooden butterflies I recently bought on Etsy and coated them with resin. I think they came out really well! I'm especially proud that I managed to do this without gumming up the holes that were already drilled in them! One guy even got some little pearls added to his wings. Perhaps I am not completely hopeless at this whole resin thing.

Especially now that I've gone out and bought REAL mold release (no more cooking spray) AND I've bought some silicon molding putty so I can make my own molds of things around the house. I'm determined to solve this whole resin molding thing!

Uh, plus, I still have a whole bag full of embellishments that didn't get used in the first go round and I need to do something with them.

So, stay tuned for more future resin adventures!

KJ