Learn to Make Amazing Resin & Epoxy Clay Jewelry. Gay Isber
and the surprise is part of the fun. A drop of blue, a few drops of red, a few drops of purple—it’s easy to experiment with colors in this artist’s dream medium.
Chursina Viktoriia
TIP: If your makeup bag is exploding with eye shadows that you don’t use, grind them up, make sure that they are dry, and use them in your resins. That will give you a story to tell about your jewelry!
Assemble your resulting work in any way you can imagine!
Gay Isber
Pigment powders are a magical way to add color and shine to resin; it’s well worth buying a giant pack with thirty or more colors in it. They are usually made with mica, which gives them a metallic shine, and sometimes sold as “mica powder.” Adding a bit of powder into resin can colorize it if you have not added any coloring dyes already, or it can add a gloriously glamorous depth of sparkle and make your piece come to life. Pigment powders can make resin mimic gems, minerals, and even butterfly wings. That brilliant flash that only nature creates? You can recreate it in your jewelry. Plus, pigment powders won’t rub off when added to resin.
Keep in mind that almost any liquid substance that hardens with time into a hard lacquer or enamel-like finish—including nail polish—is a resin. You might have been using resin already and didn’t know it! So don’t be scared. Buy a small amount to start, then let your heart point you in the direction of becoming a resin-savvy jewelry artist. Resin just makes me happy, and I know you will love it too.
The kinds of resin we’ll use to make jewelry all follow the same basic concept: you must mix two chemicals (casting resin and a catalyst/hardener) to create a reaction that causes the resin to harden to form your finished resin cast. In jewelry making, luckily, you don’t have to wait years for something to cure or dry. Modern-day chemicals combine in many formulas that allow for a super fast curing time (under ten minutes for certain fast-curing brands or various UV resins) or somewhat slower curing times, usually under 24 hours. From the moment you mix the two chemicals together, you will have a limited “working time” in which the resin is completely liquid and can be poured and adjusted in your mold and on your project. After the working time is over, which can be anywhere from two to ten to fifteen minutes, depending on the product, the resin will start to get cloudy and gel up. At that point, you must stop working with it and leave it to cure.
All curing times depend on temperature. In scientific terms, you are kicking off an exothermic reaction when the two chemicals combine, which is what causes the resin to start to cure. You can’t just rely on the chemicals alone to create the reaction, though: air temperature plays an important role, too. See the sidebar on page 16 for more details.
CURING TIMES AND TEMPERATURES
Adding heat decreases the curing time of your projects.
• 70°F (21°C) is the minimum temperature for a good cure.
• 88°F (31°C) will cut the cure time in half.
• To increase the temperature, place a lamp with an incandescent light bulb (the old kind that throws off heat, not the newer LED types) over your resin projects.
• In winter, cure in a warm kitchen.
• In summer, cure in a sunny room.
• If your house is very cold, preheat an oven to about 90°F (32°C), turn the oven off, and place the resin items inside on a cookie sheet.
The resin starts off as two parts, which you mix together to create a chemical reaction that will cause the resin to cure hard.
Gay Isber
Mix in a disposable measuring cup like this one to ensure fast cleanup and precise mixing.
Gay Isber
The gluey resin has a limited working time of about two to fifteen minutes in which it is completely fluid. Use it to fill up molds, join items together, and more.
Gay Isber
All materials have to be room temperature before beginning. Pre-warm the bottles in a bowl of hot or warm water if they are cold (such as if you left them in a very cool room of your house or in your car on a cold day). Close the lids extra well, as water will ruin the chemicals. Resin can also be too warm and therefore cure too quickly after you mix it, so if you have left the bottles in a hot place or in direct sunlight, let them reduce down to room temperature before attempting to use them.
Heating resin over and over is not a good plan. The catalyst/hardener will turn yellow (amberfication) if you heat it too high. To minimize this risk, buy a small amount of resin and use it up quickly instead of trying to make a giant bottle last a long time.
TIP: Cold resin is a no-no; bring it to room temperature to reduce bubbles and make it pourable.
• Warmer = Faster
• Colder = Slower
aperturesound
You can use molds to make clear or colorized resin casts in any shape. Resin is especially great for “preserving” items, as it essentially surrounds things in clear “plastic,” which tends to look like glass. You can put thousands of things inside resin. Anything you want to add to resin needs to be dried first. You can put tiny dried flowers in resin, but they might lose their color and turn brown. Experiment with dried flowers first so you can push the boundaries later. You can press them, colorize them with markers to add to their brilliance, and then add them to resin. They will be glorious forever.
Reduce photos to fit your projects using a printer and regular printer paper. Try using apps or programs that supersaturate or recolor photos, or use black and white copies of photos, for vivid, impressive results.
Here is a long list of other items, in no particular order, that you can set into resin. Some are also great to cast into a mold into which you can then pour resin to make a resin cast of the item (see info on mold making on page 44). Your imagination is the limit!
Annari
TIP: Don’t put anything juicy or wet in resin, like a fresh flower or a small grape, because water ruins resin.
Gay Isber
The Fly Butterfly necklace is made with butterflies printed on transparency film. The butterflies that I used were ones I printed off more than a dozen years ago for an art installation in my studio. I repurposed them instead of throwing them away!
Gay Isber