Beadaholique Live Class: Resin 101

SKU VID-1763
Designer: Design Team
In this live class Beadaholique Designers, Kat Silvia and Alexandra Smith, will teach you the basics of using 2-Part Epoxy Resin in jewelry making. If you are interested in working with resin to make jewelry, but have been intimidated in the past, our designers are here to walk you thru the steps of mixing resin, adding color and they will also be sharing some great tips so that you can start experimenting with this fun mixed media technique.
Audio Transcript
Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
hi everyone and welcome back to the beadaholique video studio I'm cat Silvia and today I'm joined by Alexandra Smith and today we are giving you guys a beautiful class all about resin so we've had a lot of questions over the years about making resin jewelry and we're going to be doing a lot of troubleshooting today because resin can kind of appear a little intimidating but we're gonna break it down for you so this is resin 101 so if you've never done resin before this class is for you and if you're interested in kind of up leveling that and taking that to the next level we're gonna definitely talk about that as well alright so why don't you come on in here and just kind of take a look at everything that we've got going on here we're actually going to be doing a resin pour here today so I'm gonna walk you through exactly how to do everything we're gonna do some coloring we're going to add some glitter we're gonna add some mica powder we're gonna kind of talk about all the different types of bezels and types of projects that you might be interested in starting with we have lots and lots to talk about we're gonna talk about how to embed organic materials flowers we actually have a butterfly wing to show you which is very kind of cool so stick around for that so if you've joined us here on our live class before you know that we do a giveaway so we're gonna kick off our live here with a beautiful giveaway so if you are of course I assume you're interested in resin so what we're gonna do is we are going to give you a pack of the ice resin and this is gonna come with those cups and we'll stir sticks in it so you're gonna get this pack of resin to really get you started there we're also going to be giving you the cast and craft mold and this has lots of different little shapes that you can play around with and we're going to talk a little bit about molds in a little bit here and then we're gonna give you several little bezels here just to get you started and I have some beautiful Nunn design bezels and this is from the latest collection and that all these bezels are available at beadaholique.com and of course I'm going to give you some cast and craft opaque pigments a good staple to have it can lighten your projects you can do a kind of cool French enamel look which I'm going to show you a little bit later but white is always good to have on hand to lighten up those beautiful colors that you can get over at Beauty Holly so all you need to do to this giveaway is just leave a comment ask a question let us know where you're tuning in from or if you are liking a project or showing you can shut that out too any comment below it enters you to win the giveaway and we will announce the winner live here and our class is gonna go about 45 minutes to an hour so be sure to stick around for that be sure to ask any questions that you have although will be portioning our instruction out in ways that we may need to feel questions to different times of the video yes we're gonna we're gonna get to a lot of your questions probably in the course of the video but still keep asking because we'll be attending to the comments of course after the light as well but just so you guys have a little bit of overview I said it just a moment ago but we're gonna actually do a resin pour we're going to talk about what you can use to color your resin we're going to talk about organic materials and then we're going to talk about some different types of bezels and some tips and tricks to help keep your resin level and to doumitt so there's a lot to really discuss in there but because resin is a extensive process we are gonna actually start right away by pouring some resin and mixing it alright so let me clear my space just a little bit here because I want you guys to come in and be level with us alright let me level with you let me level with you okay so the first thing that I want to talk about is safety so obviously we are actually wearing our aprons we are wearing our gloves and we do have these little masks here as well if you are working with a lot of resin you're going to want some sort of a respirator or a mask because it is toxic you know it does have a little bit of an ascent to it did you also make mention that our door is open today which we keep yes there and then usual press so yeah so we've kept the door up and you're gonna want to work in a nice ventilated area anytime you're working with resin you want to work in a dust-free environment as much as possible but also as your resin dries and cures it's gonna take 24 to 72 hours so you're gonna want to leave it in a nice cool space nothing too hot nothing too cold and now resin is very temperamental but we are going to be working with we're gonna do two tablespoons here of our resin so I have my little measuring cup here and today I'm going to be using the Caston craft ez cast and I'm going to go ahead and start with my pour here and I'm going to get right down to my level now unfortunately I'm gonna have to turn this around so that I can see it but what's gonna happen is I'm gonna pour my resin and my hardener and I'm gonna go ahead and pour that resin because you always want to work in a one-to-one ratio so I'm gonna pour 1 tablespoon into my little measuring cup here and you can go fast at first but then kind of slow it down because you really want to focus on and this is getting a little science classy on you there is always going to be that little meniscus there that is going to it's that little curvature that's going to come up the edge of that cup so you want to just be really careful and go nice and slow towards the end you did you say meniscus yes I did I just learned a word all right wet wipes on hand is great too in case you have a little drip that can help all right and here is the second part so this is the hardener so you're going to do like I said exactly a one-to-one ratio and you you see that I'm pouring quickly but not too fast because we're gonna end up with some bubbles when we stir it but let's not add more than what we have to all right so I don't know if the camera can come down fairly level with this but I want you to sort of see that it's separated there and I'm getting chest to the top there kind of like honey it is so yeah there we go perfect alright so I have my exact one-to-one ratio you can see that there's a little bit of a different coloring there so we have to let me maybe put my glove behind it there so you can see that there's a little bit of separation all right so now we recommend using one of like a slim popsicle stick and you're just gonna come in and you're just gonna start to stir it and here's what's gonna happen you're gonna start to see that there's a lot of little marbling and striations there the idea with mixing is that we want to get it so that there it is completely mixed so you're not seeing any of that so I don't know if I can kind of move forward there for you it's actually really relaxing to watch someone work with resin when it's not you when it yeah you sure sure the pressure it's a little more on though we'll talk about that too because in troubleshooting I've discovered it's more forgiving than you would realize there are ways of fixing problems and avoiding disaster that we can talk about and one thing too is it's good to like just kind of scrape the sides as you sort of go around just making sure all that resin is getting nice and nice and mixed in there alright so I want to address a couple things while I'm mixing because usually you're gonna mix for a couple of minutes so I'm actually going to pass this off to Alexandra who's going to help me with the mixing she's not gonna do anything different than what I've been doing so far mm-hmm I'm just gonna continue to mix that there so I'll let you kind of perfect alright so while she's mixing all else I'll say kind of my knees over here so one of the things I want to talk about is how different is some of the different types of resin so we today are you gonna be using the EZ cast but you can also see over here on the side of the table I have the ice resin and then I also have the Nunn design resin so what we're working with today is we're working with a two-part epoxy resin it's also sometimes considered casting resin which you don't want to use for jewelry is you don't want to use a polyester resin that's something that's you're probably gonna get at a hardware store and it's gonna be something you're gonna want to use on boating or Hardware material so you want to get a jeweler's grade present and you're going to want to get something that is like isn't ice present I I didn't bring out because we'd had em meet let me start over we've had present his gone bad because it's been in our design space we've used it you know you can it takes a long time to use a good amount of the resin so you can see here that I have one that looks a little bit more yellow this is the hardener and it's not actually yellow you can see as she's mixing it it's very clear but what can happen is your hardener can actually turn more of like an amber color once it gets to that point your resin might not be good anymore it does have a shelf life especially once you've opened it it will start to oxidize but also resin can just sort of age naturally so it won't necessarily age once you've put it on a piece unless you put it under like a UV light speaking of UV light there is UV resin and that's something different that's what you'll need that UV light to actually cure the resin so that reacts a little bit differently to that UV light but what we're working with here today it does not mean that this will just cure and like I said 24 to 72 hours 24 to be dry to the touch but 72 to be fully cured him nice and hard for you so that is what we are working with today so don't try to go to the hardware store and get the polyester resin it won't really set up the same way and also the ratios can be very different you can do like a two-to-one depending on what you're doing for your boat so yeah we saw lots of the jewelers grade resin here we have very various different brands and the only difference between them is just the brands we just offer several brands here at 8 holodeck all right Kurt at least a couple of minutes there are still a few striations which I was noticing it was taking a little longer in our workspace when we were practicing and it may have to do with the cooler weather lately yes but also I'm at I'm gonna ask you if the 10 minutes that we let this set will it clarified during that time a little bit but you also notice once we start to pour it into different cups it will it will really truly become clear okay I'm such a thing is stirring too much you can over stir once you start to you can actually feel the cup get warm so it's nice actually but you can actually I mean there's not really a way to necessarily over mix it I think you just get to a point where you're mixing it for no reason and you're just introducing bubbles yeah I think it is getting clearer definitely so shall I pass back to you to have it Sid sure okay yeah looking pretty good there let me give it give a look it's actually looking pretty good so I'm gonna kind of lift this let this sit and chill here so a couple of the other things that we have on our table here is we have mold release now this is just a little spray and it's a mold release that you're going to use this is by casting craft and you can spray this on to a mold just just like this and what's happen is it's gonna create a nice little clear sheen on it and once you pour your resin into here to make various cabochons you can go ahead and pop those out and it's gonna release from the mold so this is a good little thing to have on hand and we also recommend having molds on hand to see you know you're gonna have extra resin so you can always just make some extra cabochons Zoar this one's actually really cool you can make some little hoop earrings we have some of examples of that to show you in a little bit we do have a question that I want to address right away yes you've actually used it with our artist concrete so that's another material that you can use in it we also do have the putty molds and these are actually really kind of cool you can make a mold in a mold if you wanted to do something like that if you wanted to create a dome effect which is actually very fun and we're going to talk about this as well in just a second but yes you can use the molds for other materials you just want to make sure that it is going to release now if you use the mold release with some other materials it may color it a little bit because it is a little bit wet you want to let it dry of course but it is still like a like a film like a liquid now unrest in you can just polish that off if if if you've put too much in your mold you can polish off the mold release and what about the resin spray that would go over the top as well yes and you can also use resin spray to fix that as well and speaking of concrete though concrete is gonna be a little bit more porous so it might soak up some of that mold release so it actually might colorize that a little bit but you can use the resin spray to sort of seal it and again give it that shine so I'm gonna talk after we do our little pour here I'm gonna talk a little bit about using the resin spray and then what you can do to polish and sand and sort of if your resin does become dull there's a way to get it back to a nice little shine so we're going to talk about that as well I know there's so much to discuss with resin so thank you for kind of sticking with us here alright so my resin is getting a little thicker here I'm gonna give it another little stir it's actually looking pretty good so it is looking a little bit clearer I know it's it's it's so hard to tell we have so many colors kind of going on here and I'm sure you're looking at it against my my blue gloves on it looks blue all right yeah but you can see that a lot of those little striations that were once there are gone I'm just kind of just checking and seeing but yeah it actually looks like it's mixed very well so just take a look at how sort of move this out of the way how liquid this is so we need when I kind of drip it back in there it disappears right away on the surface of that resin so you can kind of see that right there so this is good this is like you know what do we have maybe five minutes in five five to 10 minutes in mm-hmm so one of the things I'm gonna we're gonna continue to kind of let that sit let me draw your attention over here so I did a video of how to actually achieve a marbled look in resin I'm gonna stand it here for just a moment there we go so what happens here and you can see that I also have an example here on an open back bezel is the color underneath so in this example the black resin I let sit for about an hour or two and then I came back in with the white and I let the whites it for at about a time as well and you just kind of drip it in and then take a little toothpick and draw it around wherever you want it to go you can see it a little bit more clear in this example because that green is a little darker but you can actually do a marbled resin look but it just depends on the time that you have because you have to let your resin kind of sit and sort of pre cure a little bit because you want it to kind of firm up and that's the same that I would say if you're gonna try to do resin on like a flat tag type of a situation you're gonna want to have it not as runny as yeah as runny it was sure yeah I was like it just makes me think of a nose but yeah that was runny is kind of what we're getting at alright so let's see you guys ready to do some actual resin I think so alright so let's start and let's let's do just a very traditional bezel resin piece here so I have a Nunn design bezel now you can clean these out with alcohol if you want you don't have to but this is just going to be a really nice easy piece to show you how to pour resin into a bezel all right and I want to bring another example here so this guy down here this is a little piece here and inside there is a transfer excuse me is a collage seat sheet now you can use collage sheets which is this example here and then we also have transfer sheets now the transfer sheets on the back of this these are going to actually become clear which is really kind of a different technique and we're going to talk about that too but for here I used the swelligant sealant so that's this guy here so I just did this in a video for you so I'm going to finish it off here but what happens is you can take that piece use the Nunn design glue and glue your paper or your photograph so this is if you are curious about putting a photograph into a bezel and sealing it you can use the Nunn design glue to place it down there and make sure it's on all little corners and you just use a little paintbrush it's that like a white craft glue yes it okay the that we recommend the no design glue because it is photo safe huh so you want to use a photo safe glue so you wouldn't want to use necessarily like any kind of you'd want to use more of like a scrapbook type of Bloor right because you want to do something that's a little non-toxic but then you're going to add several coats of the clear sealant and this isn't the matte finish and the reason I like the matte finish and that's why we have it here at beadaholique you to see that it's nice and sealed and it's that matte finish there you can see that it's a little bit shiny but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pour resin on top of that okay so let me bring this guy over here yeah can't get that other way okay so come back down here with me what I want to show you is that for this particular bezel and I know it might be hard to see from the camera angle here but the loop on this bezel actually goes beneath the bezel itself so it doesn't sit level so if you want to pour resin in there it's going to drip towards one side so here's my first little tip I'm going to take a couple of quarters here and I'm going to set my little bezel on top of it with that ring kind of hanging off the side and that makes my bezel nice and level now you're on butcher paper we did cover this yes we did cover our table make sure that you definitely cover your workspace wax paper works great for that as well I was just gonna ask if you wanted to pull some in so that oh yeah a mobile sometimes it's nice to be able to shift your pieces around on the little surface yeah so then you can kind of move it around on here alright so let me put this on to my wax paper yeah and I have my other bezel right here now if you want to do resin that you're going to color which is what I'm gonna do here you just need to separate out your resin but because the first thing I'm gonna do in the class here is just pour that clear resin so you can see what happens I'm gonna bring this in here make sure we are nice and level I know it seems like a tedious process but the result is very cool alright so now I have my resin so you can use your popsicle stick or you can use a different like a toothpick if it's a finer piece but basically you're just gonna come over here you're just gonna drip it and I'd like to drip mine right in the center and just make sure that it's nice and slow now I'm gonna fill up my bezel so I can do a little bit more another thing there's a bit of a dimensional edge and lip to that bezel do you want to talk about that part of it yeah so this is a nun design bezel so it's a little bit of a thicker bezel and what you can actually achieve with that is you can create a little domed effect which I'm going to try to attempt here now I'm kind of coming down to be level with it now drip slowly because as you can see the resin is sort of finding its way around that edge it kind of it wants to go and it wants to fill the volume and fill the space so be careful with dripping too much too fast just coming down there but yeah this has a nice thick lip of the bezel for you to kind of just see so that looks like my resin is just about level looking good okay and it's cool as the resin actually creates a little magnified effect mm-hmm so now I'm gonna try to drip a little bit slower this is where I sometimes like to use a toothpick as opposed to the craft stick mm-hmm that's not a bad idea I know everybody hold your breath and here's where I'll say that I've and you'll notice this in a video i recently did if you watch it on the mercury earrings i had a little bit of a spill over this side and what I've discovered is after about a day's worth of curing the piece is safe to pick up at that point but the reven resin is still able to be peeled off and so I've had good luck with saving pieces that have had that dome collapse a little bit or some some spillage so there are troubleshooting techniques that you can absolutely yeah all right looks pretty so I'm so the other came with resin is once you've poured it it's really difficult to move it so make sure it's right where you want it to be I know we said that you can kind of move it a little bit on your wax paper but I'm gonna go ahead and leave mine just right there just as it is and I know we have probably a couple of questions I know they're coming in so give me just a second before I get to that because what I'm gonna start to do is I'm gonna take some of this clear resin and I'm gonna pour it into a couple of different cups here Alexandra can you get me one more cup please thank you perfect all right so I'm gonna pour a little bit into each cup here looks like a magic trick follow the resin and you're doing about a tablespoon just a bunch at ease a teaspoon yes just about doesn't this part doesn't have to be as exact let me just get this over here okay and here's where it's good to have wax paper also so that yeah set that cup down and it won't get show me to put it on your altar get you got it okay okay just like you were handing me a baby I know leave another three all right when you have a couple of questions yes crying yes absolutely mm-hmm yeah yes we are gonna we are gonna actually talk about that here in just a minute let me show you what to do if you want to color your resin so that we can pour it into this puzzle Oh would you hand me the white casting crack huh all right so for cast and crafts there are two different types we have the opaque pigment and once you hand me the green transparent there that one okay yep so you can see that this one is much much thicker and this one has it's a little bit more of that transparent die now you can use both together you can use one or the other there's really no wrong way to sort of add color the only wrong way I'll say is to add too much so if we're working and let me go ahead and set a couple of these aside so I'm gonna start working with this amount here this is like we said about a teaspoon now this is where the toothpicks are really gonna come in handy and here's another little tip I have if you're going to color resin and you want to mix it pour your color into a different cup or at least over a different cup because once you pour it in there it's in your resin so you don't want you just want to be really careful so what you're gonna do is you're just gonna get a little bit on the tip of a toothpick there just like so and see how it's easy to kind of overdo it if you just want to get a little just like so and then I'm gonna drop one drop into my resin there and let it drop okay set that down and now I have one tiny little drop of white so let's see what it does to my resin and it starts to mix in there so that one little tiny drop really makes it nice and rich there so it kind of starts to make it a little bit milky so you can just see that it's got a little bit of that clear to it and I'm actually gonna do a little bit more but I'm gonna go ahead and take my toothpick there and just kind of wipe it off onto my resin because I think that might be enough alright so again just kind of mixing it so these bottles are really more than a lifetime supply yeah is there a shelf-life to this um not that I've seen I've had a lot of mine for a long time and I'm gonna do it just a little bit more actually there we go okay these coloring techniques she's going to show you are usable with the organics as you'll see oh yes yes you can add color to like the backing of an organic if you want it to really kind of stand out what I'm trying to achieve here and so far I've gotten about three drops of that white into a table taken into a teaspoon and I'm trying to achieve that sort of French enamel look so it's still looking a little bit clearer to me so we have we have another question go ahead Brian yes okay so let's talk about what you can use to actually color resin so can't while you're doing that do you want me to talk a little bit about what's over here or did you have something in mind well I just want to kind of I know a little bit more okay now I'm getting into the territory of and this is why I want people to see us I'm getting into the territory of adding too much color so you want to be really careful and that's why I keep kind of picking it up and just checking that my resin is still fully mix and is looking okay all right there we go okay so let me set that down and I can address this so you can use acrylic paints you can use I've seen people using nail polish before you can use an alcohol ink which is what we have this is what the ice resin sort of the dye is it's a little bit closer to like an alcohol ink you can see hopefully again that it's it's got a little bit of it looks more like the transparent dye so you can use that you can also use the patinas and Alexandra is going to do an example with the vintaj patinas so that is an ink you can also use food coloring however food coloring tends to change color so it's not the best thing to use I have seen it done but be careful because your green might turn yellow like cuz it'll just oxidize so that's one thing I can't recommend but from what I've really seen there's not anything you can't use it just might yield a slightly different result than what you want because the color might change over time like that food coloring example but acrylic paints you can absolutely use those are really fun like I said nail polish is great but again nail polish you're going to want to be careful with how much you use because it's not as concentrated of a pigment as an actual resin pigment so you can throw off your ratio and if you add too much your resin won't cure because you've thrown off the chemical reaction that's actually happening in your resin so that's something that you want to be very very aware of I added like barely three toothpick tips to this to my one tablespoon and I'm getting into the danger zone a little bit of adding maybe a little too much color so you want to just really be careful of that okay I kept saying tablespoon suits oh my goodness damn it okay so now I'm gonna actually add something to the white that I have here I'm gonna add some mica powder so this is another way to add to your resin now the mica powder you can pretty much add I'm not gonna say as much as you want but cuz you only really need a little bit but you can add and that won't take on the resin it won't become part of the mixture it will stay on its own so handling one of the one of the whites there I think there's like a bluey white yeah like yeah this is this is actually true metallic blue so if you can kind of see there you can sort of see that it has a little bit of a blue sheen to it so this is crystal clay Sparkle dust and this is the same as like a a mica powder type situation here alright so now I'm gonna just open this up and again this is where those toothpicks are gonna come in handy I know we kind of go through a lot of toothpicks but everything needs to sort of be clean so just a little dab and I think I can get away with a little bit more there we go set that aside alright so now I have my mica powder in there and that is going to just barely kind of take on we want to make sure it's nice and mixed in one of the other things that you can use to color your resin and this is actually turning a very pretty blue I like one of the other things that you can use to color your resin is we we talked a little bit the artists concrete already today but you we have the concrete pigments and those you can use and actually work really really cool I'm gonna show you I did a little trio of examples just show you that right there alright get a little bit more of that in there alright and you know it let's have a little fun with this can you hand me the transparent blue dye which every one is a transparent yep there we go alright so because this has a little bit of blue to it I'm gonna I'm gonna boost that up a little bit so you're gonna get to see one of the transparent dyes as well and again I'm bringing over my empty little cup alright and I have a little transparent dye there and I'm just gonna kind of drop that into my cup they're gonna do one at a time I'm gonna set that down and just that one tiny little blue really makes it blue but now it's all blue and shimmery so kind of different alright there we go alright enough color mixing I'm good when you close that up for me alright let me bring my bezel over here and let's actually put this into the bezel and again it's gonna be that same kind of a style there now this one's a little bit bigger so you can kind of get a little heavier with your drip but just make sure that you're not getting it on to the sides there so this is actually going to be a very pretty powdery shimmery blue I feel like there are two kinds of resin people yeah there are the cautious careful tiny toothpick people and then there's me who's like had more a little more yeah keep going resin has really fun don't let it intimidate you I think you know that happened with me like when I first started working with resin it's like oh god but what if I mess it up yeah so what yeah yeah all right and here's where a like you'll notice that I'm just kind of I'm trying to push it so that it gets in all those little corners but just give it a second let it find its way in there and it will sit nicely alright so before I kick it off to Alexandra I want to talk about some bubble situation that I have happening here alright so you want a heat source you can either use a very hot breath if you got it or you can use lighters I like to use a little bit lighter but if you're worried about your hands getting a little too close or you need to be a little further away one of these little like barbeque lighters is really good as well alright so now all you're gonna do is you're just gonna wave it across the top so you just get your lighter happening and you are the master with the lighter you even have a glove on and you're doing that thank you yeah so just gonna get those bubbles so now you'll probably be able to let the camera come in as close as you can get here and you see that I have bubbles on top there of my little blue piece so here's what we're gonna do okay and those bubbles are just gonna come to the surface and I'm just barely catching them I'm just kind of moving around there we go now the lighter is a process that you might do a couple of times so once that your resinous starts to cure so I'm kind of at a zero hour right now come back in like 20 minutes check it again some bubbles might kind of naturally resurface so you just want to be able to get those lighters within that first hour or two so just come back and keep checking your piece so we have a beautiful little blue piece and that's some clear resin whoo all right I'm exhausted pesky bubbles yeah okay to stick your toothpick back in the resin that you poured as long as you're not pushing the the dome off right at the corners you can actually go in gently and poke those with your toothpick yeah so we're gonna talk about some more molds and everything in a second but Alexander why don't you because we I know we have a lot of people very curious about the organic material so let's talk a little bit about that okay well what I basically did was I took my flower press from when I was 12 years old and that I had left sitting for so long and I pulled it out and finally got to do something very special with it so these were from trips I'd taken up north and that kind of thing and I finally pulled out my special pieces and set them on two flat tags and in two open bezels using the technique that we have a video on that Becky Nunn gave to us and so to pretreat these what I did was I mixed up my resin and you actually dip your organics into a little pool of resin and kind of coat them and then once you have poured a bit of resin in then you can add your organic and that's what sort of slips it in without too many bubbles keeps it from floating to the top angling it funny in funny ways it kind of just sticks better so in this instance you can see that I colorized the resin ahead of time the way Kat just showed you with some Caston crafts I did a first pour of purple on those flat tag and then I overlaid it with the organics I will say that because it had been poured over before it didn't dome or adhere to the sides it sort of slipped off and that's where I'm saying that that's okay because I was able to come after a day or so and just scrape the edges used my flush cutter to kind of clip off little bits and it turned out so it is possible yeah the thing you want to be careful with with the organic materials is exactly what you just said is the bubbles so be careful about how you slip that in and the other thing is you were talking about dipping your piece in resin another alternative to that is to use the resin spray so you can do a couple of coats of the resin spray on top of an organic material and that will again kind of seal it and prepare it for the resin so that you won't have to deal with any sort of seepage onto the piece from the thicker epoxy resin you have that resin spray that will kind of seal it as well well and here's a perfect instance where I should have done that well we show our mistakes yeah just a personal project and experiment that I did with a found object a black swallowtail butterfly that I found intact on the ground and I'm a nature lover I'm a collector and just an honor of all things May so I wanted to preserve that and you can see when I put my hand back here that it sort of discolored and parts of it came came off now this was just my first try and I could have sprayed that wing like cat is saying I also could have poured just a little bit of resin in first and then added the wing and then added more resin after so it's a learning experience and I'm showing the back of that just yeah again it's it's part of the learning experience is that part of it popped out of the back because it did like you see that there were some air bubbles that kind of tried to get underneath it so that was another thing that can happen so if unfortunately if that does happen there's not a whole lot of ways to fix it once it's in there in terms of the bubbles but you can try to just sort of press it down again with like a toothpick or a clean popsicle stick to try to push out some of those bubbles as you're working we do have a question sure so the question is about using resin with organic materials and does it change the color of the organic material I think the only thing that it really does is it might darken it slightly but it does actually sort of preserve that color now like I was talking about earlier resin can over time and over UV exposure kind of yellow a little bit so you do want to be you know take good care of your resin pieces but it won't color the organic itself it might just turn a little bit amber so that can that has to do more with a tint of the resin that it does with the piece that's trapped in it yeah exactly any other questions you know I haven't noticed if certain brands yellow more over time my go-to is either to use the ez cast or the ice resin I think that it is a much clearer resin when you're working with when you want it to be truly clear once you start adding color you're really okay because it'll keep that color at my yellow oh god like I'm talking like years and years like I should have pulled out a piece that I did about ten years ago and it's it's just a little bit of like an amber yellow instances yeah the the tint lends itself to the style of the piece so there are some sort of vintage II antique looks that it could actually look kind of sepia and yeah and so Nunn design in particular is the resin that I've used with the organics and the ones that have the oxidized metals and those kinds of pieces let me say so okay so I do have a piece here so if you want to I'll try to kind of show you so this is a piece that was done maybe maybe six years ago and it hasn't yellowed at all but it's been you know it's been taken out it's been photographed it's been in the sunlight you know and I know it's hard to see cuz the back is black and it's it's really maybe only coming through for me here but this is not yellowed so this is maybe like yeah like I said six maybe even seven years old now at this point but when things do yellow so this is another example and I know we're gonna get to this in a second so you can see hi let's see here this is white so you can see that even the resin itself is a little bit of like it takes on the color that the organic material is but if you look at the side it is really clear it just I hope this is coming through on camera for you guys it's what a prismatic yeah it's pretty yeah it's prismatic but it can also when it does yellow it's it's so slight but there's no real way to necessarily fully avoid that yeah I do can we show your shells there yeah because this was this was cool because this is another way to do an organic material where it actually is three-dimensional so I'm gonna set this down so my plastic a gloved hand isn't under it these are shells again from my childhood and as a collector I have boxes of little special things I don't know what to do with and this is a great application for for a collector who wants to showcase a piece that you wouldn't other not otherwise want to just set out on a shelf that kind of thing keepsakes and so the resin does not clearly dome over and cover all of the shelves but that's what's neat about it is it gives it an aquatic feel and really it lends itself to to what I was trying to do there so that was fun but as you as you did your first pour you covered everything but there were a couple shells that had that we're sticking out of the resin and a shell cold and they had lost their luster and so I took and just actually with my toothpick just brushed a little bit of extra resin led a little bit drip on those spots and then dry over them and that worked fine and you can actually paint resin on so that that's another kind of example there as well can you wash the paintbrush after that or it's it um I tend to use disposable paintbrushes when I'm working with resin mostly because if I try to use it with a different dye it will be stiff and sometimes you can actually have flakes of resin come off in your paint so clear nail polish actually maybe would would help with that yeah clear nail polish is another option there I tend to not use nail polish when I'm working with jewelry just because I never quite know exactly what's in it you know how much acetone and if it's gonna affect a metal but it's entirely your choice it does work but it's just up to you yeah so can we go back to this little organic piece yes let's talk about that well meanwhile I pulled this a piece in progress and I'm gonna make a ring out of it so what I did was painted the inside of that bezel with some vintage patina which we're going to talk about more and I think the black really pops that flower nicely so I'm gonna glue that in and what I'm gonna use for adhesive is diamond glaze because I don't want anything kind of gloppy that's gonna dry weird and this glaze is very what would you call it this gets a little bit runny and it works really well with the resin so that is a work in progress and should I go into the vintage yeah let's go ahead and do some of your your pieces there I'm excited about it yeah so let me move these out of the way so we can get the camera in there nice and close good so I think I'm actually gonna use this mold here and this is an experiment the vintage was kind of a happy accident where I was painting the backs of bezels and some charms and we decided can you just mix it into the resin well let's give it a try so that's what I did here and you can see how the petal line turned out and also the ver degree and beyond that I dipped a little bit into some closed jump rings and you can see the ones on this side I domed and the ones on this side are flatter and so that was an experiment and I'm looking forward to doing more with that so what I'm gonna do here is take some of our resin and put a little bit into each section of this mold and then drip some color in and see how they turn out and then I'm going to put them into various sizes of jump rings perfect yeah okay so you have your resin there G need to actually say yeah yep I'm gonna get down level with you give this a little bit of a stir and actually pull in the colors I want to try so I'm going to do some green I'm gonna do some yellow I want to see how different this turquoise turns out and also some purple so I did shake these at the beginning so I wouldn't have to be too noisy so I'm just gonna take my craft stick and drizzle some resin into each of these sections when I experimented with the other two colors I was not scientific about it I did about five drops of the petal line in there and then for the verdict rial be honest and say that the the dried patina inside of the applicator caught and then when I squeezed it more came out than I had it intended so I really don't have a measurement on that but I think the way these behave is they kind of come out the color that you see on the bottle regardless of how much you add so and then in terms of how it sets we had to wait and see on that too though it doesn't seem that adding any more of the patina changed the rate of time that it cured or anything like that yeah the only thing that you might end up with is if you if you found that you've added too much and your resin is a little sticky you can use them the resin spray and that will kind of that will seal any of that away so a little quicker about this yeah yeah you're good take it take your time resin that's hot you said yeah don't worry resin takes a while you're doing that cuz that's fun to watch but let me show you guys a couple of the other colors and I want to talk to you about the concrete pigment it is something that I had pointed out and I know we have a question about it so I'm gonna go ahead and handle that now so here is what we did with a concrete pigment now hopefully you're seeing this on the table here but this is the difference so this is a lot of that concrete pigment fully mixed into a piece of resin here this is that concrete mix and I added some of that copper mica powder and this right here this is kind of cool it actually has a little speckled look because I wanted to make sure that the resin cured like this and what happens is I didn't mix it fully because I wanted it to kind of look a little bit more like a rock I thought that could be kind of cool so this is the same amount of pigment but not fully mixed so that's the only difference between this one here and this one here so this one is fully mixed and this one is not fully mixed so you get all those little flecks in there so kind of a cool little little thing there and then when we're talking about adding color to resin I want to point this out to you as well the color of the metal does have an effect on the color of the resin so let me draw this in here this was the exact same resin poor meaning it's the same color yellow it is just dripped on a silver back and it is dripped on a antiqued brass ox back so that's what I mean where it's like it's the exact same color not another mix not another day so it just really does affect the way that that comes and to into play and you can also see that here I did a green one on the brass ox and then here's that same green on silver so it's similar but it is different so it does have a different little style to it no one needs discovery I really like yeah one of the other cool things you can do with the color resin is you can actually get a little enameled look here and I'm going to kind of set that there so you can see what happens here is I did a little red and a little green so I made little Holly earrings now these bezels are the Geetha bezels and they're typically for Swarovski crystals but I found out that you could add a little patina or excuse me a little resin in there as well so I thought that was kind of neat there's a lot of things that you know you might not think of to use with resin you know cuz it's not a bezel for resin but try to experiment and have a little fun with that so the last thing I want to show you before I answer that question is I have this here and this is a piece this is obviously already finished but what I did here is I used some museum putty and this is just the top of a little jewelry box and this helps keep your resin level so remember we were talking about using a couple of quarters well with a leverback earring how are you supposed to balance that so I used a little bit of this museum putty which is great you can get this at a craft store it's really fantastic but this will help sort of level your piece there so you can pour it and get that nice flat top to the top of it so that it looks like a piece of enamel alright so Brian we had a question oh yes all right so here's what I did the other day I I made this little ring here now this is an open back bezel and I'm gonna talk to you about this in just a second but this is an open back ring that I did and I had that little hexagon there and I wanted to do a little amber to make it look like a little honey so I thought that was really cool but what I did is I took some of that resin and I poured it onto some wax paper and just peeled that off you can actually take hole punch pliers and punch a hole just right into the resin there and now you have a hole for pendant or you can make connectors all kinds of fun things so yes you can drill a hole it just depends on how thick that resin is and how thick your pliers are and we do have this tool and I don't have it out here with me I'm so sorry we do have a tool where you can actually crank so you can see how far it's gonna go down and that kind of thing as well but you can absolutely drill resin it's really it's kind of a pliable material it doesn't cure like like a glass would but go ahead and take a look at your resin about 24 hours into its initial cure and see if you want to punch it at that stage as opposed to letting it cure the full 72 hours - well it's like fully ready to go so that's another thing to kind of consider if you are going to drill or punch holes or anything like that and tear isn't so when you do flat tags one of the things that can happen is your resin can collapse into the hole that's where those hole punch pliers are gonna come in handy because let it collapse it's fine come back in with the hole punch pliers and REE punch that hole and you'll be just fine you'll be all set to go all right how we doin over there that's what I so I've put a few drops into the different colors of metal in these closed jump rings I have various gauges and you'll see what I've done is I've got some utility tape and it's upside down so the sticky sides facing me I will admit that a couple of times in this video my arm has caught I've had to peel this off of my job so I'm I'm that kind of resin person that's the same way that you would do a project like this with an open vessel you take your frame you press it down against tape and then you pour your resonant it's really that simple but it looks so like art artistic it's just like a real accomplishment so I'm going to actually try to apply some resin into this small lotus which we've never tried before so oh and yes to get the tape I like to get the stickiness off the back you can just use something like a like a Guzan just to just to remove any of that I don't love that Lotus that's so cool pedal I want to just try to get a little bit now already I've gone off on the edge a little it's gonna have to go into some crevasses so that's gonna be a work in progress can you some fresh toothpicks too yeah sometimes that helps like once you've dripped in to use a fresh toothpick to kind of push it around and actually drag it just a little bit into the crevasses mm-hmm I've really chonus chosen a special project to do with you here the section matches my glove so there's really just no end to the possibilities with what you can do and my thought with the jump rings was once they're dry to set them into a larger open piece like that butterflies in mm-hmm yeah so I have secret plans for that and while you're doing that camera you can you can stay right there I'm just gonna remind people that we have the giveaway I know we've been getting lots of questions I can hear Brian typing away furiously but we've been getting lots of questions which is wonderful but we do still have that giveaway happening so if you guys are just joining us right now be sure to get your comments and for that we're gonna still do a little bit more of the resin work here but we're we're here to answer questions because we know that resin is really just an intimidating process and it's it's like oh can I use this can I use this you know and one of the things that we that I love especially here at beadaholique so if you're curious about something you know send send us a message on Facebook or Instagram or however you connect with us on YouTube you know with customer service and let us know because we're happy to test stuff out because that's how we learn as well you know sometimes we'll get questions and like oh you know I didn't think about that but that might be a really interesting technique or a neat idea so really good at following up - on the movie table Wednesday's you'd come back to people so that's really nice yes yes if questions come in you know over the weekends and even in the coming weeks I'll try to address those in our bead table Wednesday's that we have every week on Facebook live so you can connect with us there as well so we'll kind of talk about some some new things that we've been able to test out and speaking of testing trying different colors these little jump ring experiments are a great way for you at home to try things if you don't want to wreck you know a bezel because those costs money and they're special and so that's part of the pressure with resin that can be alleviated when you figure out ways of of trying things out until you're comfortable and just to keep doing it - and to spill you got to spill a little bit to get comfortable has been my experience but I love that that deep turquoise that you're working with there that's really beautiful because then you can put them on a piece and do you like polka dots or make it make it its own little thing and these are closed jump rings yeah and you did hammer these a little bit right to get a nice little that what great idea just in case there was a lift in any of these cat said why don't you just give it a little tap with a hammer so I tapped five times on each side and I think that will work well and there's no seepage happening like there were with my first couple of experiments with this can you do the yellow I'm curious how the yellow looks yellow is always a difficult color but I think you could do something really cool where this is like the center of a flower design mmm ideas yeah so that could be cool yeah a whole rainbow of possibilities now I am noticing the resin getting a little bit more viscous mm-hmm and my my gloves are catching a little on the toothpick too so sometimes I will be without gloves when I'm doing this the ocean of it we've been working for I'd say you know 45 minutes or so right right yeah explain it about 45 minutes or so okay so about an hour so yeah I know this class is running a little long guys stick with us we've been answering as many questions as possible I do want to talk about the silicone putty mold here so I'm going to let you finish up there go to it may get to that all right so let me take you guys over here so this is a cool cool product and this is something that I've really enjoyed working with so basically this is another two-part system so this is the easy mold silicone putty now what happens here is that you take the same amount it works very similar to like a crystal class you take Part A and Part B and you put them together and you kind of mix them until there's no more striations and then what you do is you can form it around a piece so again here's an organic material now I didn't want this to be part of my finished piece but what I wanted to do is kind of recreate this so I created a mold around it and I actually formed it up and over because I wanted that little lip there but you can just see and I'm gonna kind of pop this out this isn't a mold that I made and I can use this over and over and over so you can see it has all those little bumps on it and bumps and ridges so you can just do it like that and then what I did is I pressed it down a little bit on the table one of my mold is forming to give me that flat little edge so it'll stay nice and level for me and then I mix some blue resin and some mica powder in there and poured it in and let it cure and then about 48 hours later I popped it out and you can see that I've been sanding a little bit this is kind of unfinished thus far but I've been sanding it a little bit on this side so it's a little more dull but on the top I did a little bit of that resin spray so you can see just how shiny that is so I'm gonna turn this into something that may be like a cool ring or it can be just kind of a fun little cabochon you can do some really cool things with that so the other thing that I want to address before we close out here is glitter so these are the glitter rocks pieces here now in this piece here and again I really hope this is coming through on camera you can see that a lot of that glitter has sunk to the bottom and what happened here was I actually mix it into the resin and I didn't love the way that that looked because it was all sunken but what happened was then I added glitter on top and it just sat on top there so there's two different ways to do that there's also a third way to do that and the third way is to use crystal clay so I mixed my crystal clay and put a really thin layer of black into the bottom of this bezel and then I sort of used the glitter rocks like as though they were shit ons is something where's frosty crystals Hans and I picked them up one at a time and placed them into that bezel and really put them into that crystal clay and embedded them so they stayed at that same level and then I added clear resin on top and that is the result there that's kind of another cool little look so many other things that I wanted to talk to you guys about is the French enamel so this is what that looks like it is just a nice white clear it has that flat kind of almost under-filled look and that is like the French enamel look so you can get this as well and this is just using that cast and crafted opaque pigment see well I have just finished up here and there's a one quick thing I wanted to show you sure that our jams uncharacteristic of me I managed not to drip anything yeah so here the resin was spilling out of its section and what I realized was I can enamel this side and I'm very curious to see when I take the tape off how it seeps into those holes and fills and I think that on the other side I'm gonna have my petals okay I think you'll have that that enamel look again yeah but I loved that you were able to get some domes on some of those little yeah jump rings there oh so yeah so guys keep your questions coming I know this wasn't we threw a lot at you today it you know a lot kind of happened with resin and it does take a little bit of time to work with you know we didn't really get into a lot of the flat tags there but that's definitely something to experiment with now we do have videos to show you all of the things that we talked about here today adding color adding mica powder adding you know glitter all these different things working with the flat tags working with organic materials we've been very fortunate enough to have becky nunn come into our design space here and shoot some amazing resin videos for you there's a lot you can do with shadows like with the shadow box style with that open back bezel and she's fantastic at that so please head over to beadaholique.com watch those videos mhm and yeah so thank you so much for joining us guys we're just about ready here to announce our giveaway winner I don't want to go over the flap flat tags I really just went I know I have in the press worse and probably after we're done with our life because we still have some extras to use all right so Brian do we have a giveaway winner for today alright congratulations to gene Sanders so congratulations gene all you need to do is send our service team a email so that's service at beadaholique.com so congratulations to gene Sanders so you are the winner of our fabulous giveaway and we hope it inspires you to create all kinds of fun Reza projects and to share them with us so I know we covered a lot guys but thank you so much for sticking with us I know this was a little bit of a longer class but we're going to be doing more resin in the future so if you guys have any suggestions or something you'd like to see a color combination or anything like that be sure to hit us up here at beadaholique.com yeah all right thanks so much for joining us guys and we'll see you back here very soon hi you

Customer Reviews

Based on 7 reviews Write a review

You recently viewed

Clear recently viewed