A little update. The UV resin has begun to yellow. So not good for long term projects. With the cooling of the temperatures, so has my abilities to work with resin. I bought a small space heater so we'll see if I can steal a few moments to make something Christmas-e. I do have a nice little caddy to keep the resin paraphernalia contained at least.

There's another break coming up for me, 6 weeks more or less. Which is good, I miss being crafty.

Lessons

One thing I learned while working with resin..gloves are not an option. I made that mistake and I'm still paying for it. I had some resin on my fingers, I had an itch, I touched my face...
Sigh..Long story short, I touched my eyelid it swelled up and now it's at the crusty stage. My doc told me there wasn't really much he could do. I had to wait for my body to naturally shed the 'glued' skin off. It's almost all gone now, only a little bit left. But learn from my mistake. Luckily I was still on vacation, so I limited my outdoor excursions to the bare minimum because it looked like I had a really bad black eye. I'll be able to go back to finishing up one of the pendants I'm working on.
I am going to insert a small photo into it in front of those two little arms before sealing it. In the end it'll turn into a puffed heart.

Picture testing

I made a mold that is more or less keychain sized out of the hard case from my Ipod Nano. It does have the grooves from where the two plastic pieces come together. I plan on sanding that down and making a more permanent mold out of the finished piece before I drill in the hole for the jump ring. This time the test will be on pictures. One set, the first keychain, will be sealed with ModgePodge. The second, smaller oval, will not be. One thing to note is that the paper these photos were printed on were done on my Polaroid Pogo Printer which uses Zink paper. This paper is heat responsive, meaning no actual ink. If this trial comes out it'll give a no glue sealing option to photographs. And since the size of the casting is small anyways, this works out great since the paper only comes in 2X3 size paper.
One other thing I was working on is sealing some more tatting with the glue. When I made a motif of tatting with UV resin, the lighter shade went transparent with the resin as it cured. I'm hoping that by sealing it, it will retain its true colors, as they are vibrant and beautiful.As you can see above the modge podge sealed picture came out somewhat washed-out. The smaller oval on the left was has no sealant. It came out with the colors more true to life. Now I have a new way to encase photographs or small graphics with no need to seal. The tatting also did not go transparent when I applied Modge Podge to it. Now I know what I did wrong when I did my first project, I didn't seal the tatting. I will have to do another test with the white flower in resin and see how that goes.

I decided to do a full puffy heart of this one. Primarily because the tatting stuck out past the edges of the pendant confines. The problem I'm having is joining the two halves together, I kept getting air bubbles between them. Those are next to impossible to pop since they do lay one on top of another. I'm going to try leveling out the top of the pendant and then recasting to get a doming effect.

On the hunt

It is so hard to find a mold for a keychain. I don't want to drill a hole into the resin and attach a jump ring, although this would be the easiest way to do it. There was a technique showed on the UV resin website but she just laid a ring on the top layer of the resin before it cured. That may work for some pendants but I don't think it will with keyrings because they are subjected to much more abuse. I suppose I'll have to find one with a close enough shape and make a mold of it. I also have to make sure it will be deep enough to work but still be thin enough to not be bulky.
We got some buttons from Disneyland and I'm making a button mold out of this one. I did finally find my Pogo printer power cable so maybe I can do pictures without have to seal it since the paper it uses is no ink but rather heated color crystals.I will have to do some sample prints and put it to the test. Finally a purpose for this little toy. I would have taken it on the family trip to Disneyland but I couldn't find the power cable and the battery life on this is horrid. Like my husbands cell phone..*laughing*

Failure..er learning moments

They all came out too obscured. I should have stayed clear and waited to play with color for another time. Or perhaps another layer. If there had been no objects to embed, they would have come out really pretty. But while you can still sort of make them out, it's not to what I had in mind. now let's think of the positives, I now have a heart template to trim future pictures with. The facets on the 'ring' did come out, although I broke the mold pulling it out of the encasing. I know how high up with the molding putting to engulf an item to make a mold. Oh and let's not forget, I know how to get a sky blue/lilac with my eyeshadows.
It's still early enough in the morning that I can tat up another magnolia and redo the casting in clear before we leave for our vacation. Making that mold will take about 10 minutes, tatting an hour roughly, and mixing and laying the resin another 10 minutes roughly. Yes, it can be done.

Easy Casting

I finally began using the Easy Cast resin. I should have measured how much I may need but I wanted to hurry and start it while I still had the opportunity to not be interrupted. After mixing per manufacturers directions, I set aside a small bit of it and poured that into a paint palette. Having received good results with the previous experiment, I added some eyeshadow to the palette. One was mixed a bright blue/magenta which gave me a soft metallic purple and the other I mixed the gold/silver. These are two of the eyeshadows used.
After carefully putting in a clear layer of the resin, I slowly added the colored resin with a Popsicle stick. Using a pointed straw, the kind you get with kid fruits drinks, I swirled the surface to get some veining mixed into the clear resin.

Then it occurred to me to add yet another layer of the shimmer eyeshadow to the resin as it started gelling up to give even more dimension to the piece. The good thing is that all I had to do is lightly tap the brush and it flaked down and got absorbed into the resin in a very even pace. It showered down like a light snow, which is the effect I wanted, soft blurring. You still can see through on a few of the pieces but on one of the medium pendants I went back to completely obscure the back. That would be the gold swirled one below. It's a polaroid picture and I didn't want the black of the back of the photo to show. On this one I wanted the back to be more opaque since the thread was white and that tends to turn a bit transparent when mixed with resin. So I 'dusted' it with three more layers of silver eyeshadow. I'm really excited to see how this one will turn out. If it comes out as I hope it will, this will be a permanent mold.

On this one photo, it kept rising and air bubbles kept forming. I think it's because the picture was cute haphazardly. So rather than continue to fight, I flipped it over and added more clear resin to make it more transparent so the picture can be seen. Since the bottom will be more 'puffed out' than the other, I will have to sand that down to make it nice and flat like a coin. I had almost no air bubbles, and those I did have rose to the surface and many popped on their own. I did have to pop a couple but it was nothing compared to the first attempts with the UV resin.
One thing to note: I did seal both the pictures and the thread with a layer of Mod Podge. The directions say to do this so you don't get bleeding or fading of your pictures or anything else that would be porous and trap air. Which would make sense. BUT you must make sure that the glue is completely dry before you expose it to resin. Otherwise the chemical reaction can damage both the item and the resin. Wasted effort and all that.

Working on molding

Today one of the Oyumaru molding compounds I ordered came in. The sticks are pretty small but I suppose you don't really need too much. I melted it all together then split that to make 2 molds. One is for my ring encasements the other was a little bit of fun making.
I only did the mold a small bit past that bottom of the plastic ring because I wanted the backing flat so I have the option of rings or keyfobs with the same mold. I think I'm not going to reuse the compound on this mold because of how veristile it can be. This was for my husband. He is such a gamer.
My oldest daughter had this keychain fob and while I did make 2 different castings, I'm going to have to make a 3rd. Those little joystitcks really do move and as I spread the compound over, it left gaps. It's not going to be the 3D version, just the front of the controller. I found some helpful hints on coloring resin with regular eyeshadow. I wanted to see how it come out so I made one small test subject.No real mixing. I just put the resin in the tray then added a bit of the loose gold powder eyeshadow I had and using a straw, blew air into it to get the swirlys. I like how it colored but still left it a bit transparent. Here's another view:When I felt the color was too 'bunched' in one area I just blew air again and mixed it around. It also help to pop the few bubbles I got. I think I found a cheap and neater alternative to the glitter for coloring. I also found a few YouTube videos showing how to add more decorative swirls to the mix. Let's see what the weekend brings..I'm so excited!