How to Use Nunn Design Resin to Seal Pressed Organics onto Flat Tags for Jewelry

SKU VID-1576
Designer: Becky Nunn
In this video Becky Nunn of Nunn Design shows you how to use resin to seal organic materials onto flat tags in your jewelry designs. This technique allows you to preserve organic materials, like pressed flowers, and showcase them on a beautiful metal focal.
Audio Transcript
Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
hi this is becky nunn with nunn design guest designer at beadaholique in this video I'd like to show you how you can press organics and put them on top of flat tags and then put a nun design resin over the top of the flat tag and create pieces like you're seeing here in this necklace charm example I'm showing you several different ways in which you can use this technique slightly different on this right here this is the piece that we're doing in this video and has the organic on the flat tag with the resin over it this one has an open back bezel with the organics this one has an open back bezel that has colorized resin in the base of it and then the organics in the clear resin over the top but again this is the piece that we're gonna be focused on focusing on in this video to start the project you want to select some Nunn design flat tags to work with there's a variety of different shapes and different books that you can choose from you'll also want to have some dried and pressed organics and a nun design resin kit for the first step you'll go ahead and the Nunn design flat tags you can choose from the variety that we have you'll want to go ahead and use a little bit of rubbing alcohol onto the pieces to get the surface of them nice and clean so I'm just using a toothpick and it's getting a little bit of the rubbing alcohol and then I'm going to say I'm gonna mostly focus on this one right here I'm just using the rubbing alcohol the Nunn design flat tags are cast in a lead-free pewter and then it is plated 24 karat gold 0.999 fine silver and copper I'm using a little bit of the rubbing alcohol on these pieces because after we plate them we then oxidize them and this oxidization can come off on the into the resin so I like to have my surface area be nice and clean once you've cleaned your flat tag you want to have a couple of business cards or some sort of card stock that you can place your pieces on because this makes it super easy to move the pieces around depending on the different organics that you have let's see I have some really tiny ones so how about if we do another one that will look like this go ahead and wipe that one off and place it onto a business card the next thing you're going to do is you're going to decide on how you want your organics to be design-wise while these two are drying from that alcohol I'm going to show you you can use a pair of tweezers like this and you can move your organics around onto your clean flat tag and decide how you would like these pieces to be designed as you can see these pieces are very very flat and that's going to be really important because if they aren't really flat the resin won't cover up fully the flower I don't know if you can see but like right down in here it's not there's a little teeny bit of a flower that it's extreme the flowers get two-dimensional you can see it right there it's then won't be covered up with a resin I can put another hit of resin on top of this to bring up the - more and try to cover that up but it's best to just start out with a really flat organic on to the surface area to start with so design how you would like to have your organics look on your flat tags so these two should be dried by now so let's go ahead and move these out and now we'll start to set up like exactly how we would like these to be and you can be very creative with this whole process you can add multiple multiple pieces on here multiple flowers and kind of create different designs but we're just getting an idea of like okay so that flower is going to come all the way down to that surface down there and on this one we'll use this little guy and we'll place them right here so before I mix my resin which is going to be my next step I'm first just taking a look at how my organics are gonna lie on to my pieces and setting up all of my bezels or all of my flat tags prior to mixing the resin and now we're ready to start to mix the resin so I'm gonna set these aside right over here and then I'm gonna bring on all my ingredients for mixing resin when you open up the Nunn design resin kit you'll have a Part A and Part B you'll also have some mixing cups and I always work with a little but a little bit of toothpicks and you'll have a stir stick inside of the kit and I always like to have a piece of plastic to work on it just keeps my work surface very clean and then you will want to have some sort of timer in which you can time the amount of mixing that you're going to be needing to do so let's just double check we have everything we need we have our resin we have our stir sticks we have a little bit of toothpicks that we're going to drizzle the resin on and we have our cup you're gonna want to mix exactly 1 tablespoon of Part A you pour that in always first and 1 tablespoon up to the two tablespoon mark eight of Part two and it has to be a full cup in order for the resin to activate so you want to have a lot of pieces ready to go because otherwise you'll have some waste with the resin start take off the lid and pour in your parts a and I'm getting it right up to that to take that one tablespoon mark and then I'm gonna slightly ease up on my pour rotate my bottle and that will slow the stream down double-check where I am I need a little bit more before I can get right to that 1 tablespoon mark and now I have it you want to use a wet wipe I like to use a wet wipe to wipe away that resin that might have overflowed and so I can keep the surface of my bottle the pouring spout nice and clean now I'm ready for the Part B so I can see that I'm exactly where I want to be at that one tablespoon mark this part is really important to have exact one-to-one ratio now my Part B is going in and I'm bringing it up to the two tablespoon mark bring it right up to that mark as I start to get near it I'm slowing my poor twisting my cap double-checking I'm right where I need to be wiping off the surface of my spout with my wet wipe and putting the lid on all right so now we're done with that part and we're ready to start mixing so we have our toothpicks ready and we have our stir stick let's bring back in our little pieces and now we're ready to start mixing our resin but before I do that I'm actually gonna remove these little guys from the surface of this tag and you'll see in a bit why I'm gonna set my timer for the two minute mark so I have it set at two minutes and I'm gonna push start and start to stir so using your fat tongue depressor that is in the kit you're going to want to mix your resin for the full two minutes scraping the sides and blending these two parts together when you first start you'll see it's really marbled like this and then as we continue to stir it'll be completely activated the two parks blended together and will be ready as you stir scrape the sides of the cup and then frequently scrape the resin off of the stir stick and back into the cup so now we don't have any separate parts of eight to be alright so our timer is going off so I'm scraping my stir stick onto the side of the cup and turning my timer off all right so now we're ready to put our organics into the resin and then put the organics on to the piece so you only need a small amount of this resin after you've mixed this you'll have a lot of little bubbles inside of the resin and you'll see that I don't need to be concerned too much about that because this next couple of steps as we work with it you'll see that there won't be a lot of bubbles that transfer in so what I like to do with these organics is place a little bit of the resin down on to the surface of my work area so that's why I like to use these little plastic bags so I'm just dipping my toothpick into the resin and twirling it to pick up a little bit of resin and transferring transporting it and putting it onto the over here so once I have a little bit of resin over here I'll then come over and pick up my organic I'm gonna do one at a time this little guy wanted to come along somehow these guys are connected and I'm gonna press my organic into the resin and fully coat it this is what helps it prevents a lot of air bubbles from getting into the organics once I have it on the tag by fully coating it first so I'm tapping it and kind of just making sure that if there's any air bubbles or any chances that there could be air bubbles like somewhere in the organics um sometimes like in a petal there might be some air down inside of this area so just by tapping it and fully emerging it into there I'm just pushing all of the air bubbles out next I'm ready to pour a little bit of my whoa that guy broke while I was moving him around I'm ready to pour a little bit of the organics right on to the surface of the flat tag so again with my toothpick I'm just twirling and picking up a small amount of resin and I only want to put a small amount into the onto the base here and this is to help me give it a nice pool of resin to put the organic on again so that I don't trap any air underneath this piece so I like to work with two toothpicks so I can move around my flat tag and not have it be anywhere close to my fingers so I put a small amount of resin onto the base of this piece now I'm ready to pick up my organic and place it OOP this might be kind of tricky place it on to the flat eh so once I have it in the little pool of resin I'm just moving it around slightly and putting it into position and I'm also making sure that I press out any air that might have gotten underneath the organics this was a little tricky one because it was long and skinny and it kind of folded over in the process of picking it up and moving it over so when you start out with this technique you might want to start out with a lesson delicate one or maybe one that's a little bit more solid and didn't have that that long Gatien there so now that I have it in place and I've pressed press it a couple times to make sure that the air is out I'm moving my resin out to the edge of the piece and let me address how to do this top part here so when you're coming to this area here where the circle or the hole is punched into the metal you'll want to slowly drag the resin up to that area as you can see what I'm doing here and then you can bring it around like that now if for what set up whatever reason you got some resin that dropped down into this piece what you'll want to do is use your toothpicks a clean one and lift it up slightly from the card and it'll break the contact of the resin and drain out and then you just move it slightly and then you would have your hole freed up so let's see how we're looking here if I wanted to have a little bit higher of a dome on my piece I could pick up a little more resin drizzle it onto the flat tag and move it about so the resin is a self doming resin so once you've shown it where the side edges are it won't run off the sides it'll just continue to dome it'll be higher in the center and if you pour enough on here you will eventually overflow but I would start with a medium sized dome like you're seeing here and then you will let this cure so it takes about it'll be harder in like 24 hours but it cures for up to 72 hours but during this phase you're gonna want to babysit your piece because you might have some air bubbles start to come rise to the surface as resin often does and if that is the case you'll want to take this piece and this is one of the reasons I like to also put it on to the card is you'll lift it up and I'm gonna move this off of the camera but I'm gonna use my breath to breathe on it in a huff and a half you'll hear a huff sound and the air the hot air from my breath will make the red the air inside of the resin rise to the surface and pop if that doesn't work you can use your toothpick to bring the air bubbles over to the side and drag them off the side I actually don't think that's an air bubble that is something a little more in the metal but if you did have some air bubbles inside of here you can agitate them and bring them over to the side and then continue to breathe on them so you will need to babysit your pieces as they're curing especially for the first two hours just to double-check that they're doing fine and then at a certain point this resin will be so thick that you won't be able to you won't be able to release any of those bubbles and you'll just have to know that it's resin and sometimes there's bubbles and after 72 hours your pieces will look like this if you had some overflow you can pick them up at at 12 hours and you use either your fingernail and you can just pick at the resin and it'll scrape off and release off the sides here's an example of how I had some overflow there's a funny story of how there's white on the base of it but at the 12 hour mark this resin is at its soft cure stage and this is really easy to pick at and remove this is fully cured on there and it's not going to come up but if you had it at the 12 12 hour mark you would just scrape out that with your fingernail and this resin will peel off and be removed so you can clean the backs or the sides if you had any overflow once your pieces are fully cured if you do have a little bit of the organics protruding at the top you can do two things you can put another pour a resin over the top or in this case right here my organics were slightly protruding at the top I used a piece a very fine steel wool and lightly sanded over the top of the resin to kind of give it that dull finish which I love then after all of the resin pieces were assemble or finished and ready to be assembled I added the Nunn design jump rings onto some chain or combined it with some charms from the Nunn design line to create these finished pieces this is becky nunn with nunn design shooting as a guest designer with beadaholique

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