Faux resin necklace - inspired by Craftster

I have had a lot of fun experimenting tonight :)

Nothing turned out quite as planned, but never mind.

I have been admiring all the gorgeous resin jewellery over at Craftster, and decided it might be fun to try and do something similar using UTEE and my melt pot - which I haven't used in forever.

It turned out to be a bit of a comedy of errors...but I still like the finished article, and will happily wear it.

I took step by step photos just in case it turned out so well that the denizens of Craftster would be crying out for a "tute" - I think perhaps I was a little over confident there lol

But here they are anyway.

First up I made a couple of little shrink plastic embellishments to encapsulate in my "faux resin".

The tree is a Magenta rubber stamp, stamped onto clear shrink plastic with black Stazon ink. The bird was drawn freehand onto black shrink plastic and carefully cut out.

I shrunk them both with a heat gun.

Next, I melted a load of clear UTEE in my melt pot, and added a fair bit of flex so that the finished piece would not be prone to crack or scratch.

FIRST MISTAKE - I stirred the flex in, which caused a zillion bubbles. Apparently I should have exhibited more patience and left it longer to mix in by itself.

I poured a thin layer of the UTEE/Flex mixture into a round cookie cutter which I had "greased up" with a bit of embossing ink to ensure it would release easily later.

I also put a similarly "greased" drinking straw into the mixture so that my finished pendant would have a stringing hole.

SECOND MISTAKE - I didn't realise how thick my finished pendant would be, so I didn't grease high enough up the cookie cutter, which made it a bugger to get off later. Also the drinking straw was a bit big, I might look for something smaller to use as a hole maker next time.

Next step was to add some colour.

I waited until the first layer of UTEE was cool and solid, and lifted the cookie cutter off (easily, as it was still on the "greased" portion :) ). Then I used alcohol inks to colour the top of the UTEE.

I used butterscotch, terracotta and red pepper inks graduated from lightest colour at the bottom to darkest at the top, but the difference in the colours doesn't show up all that well on the finished piece. Ah well, there's nothing wrong with subtle :)

Next I replaced the cookie cutter, and put in the tree embellishment, and then poured a second layer of UTEE in. When this was solid I added the bird and poured on a third and final layer of UTEE.

This makes the piece nice and 3D, as the bird sits a couple of mm in front of the tree.

Here is the finished article:



A full view of the completed necklace with gorgeous copper clasp I bought from Ebay:



And what it looks like on:



It also looks pretty funky held up to the light as you can see at the top of this post.

All in all, despite the wrestling match I had with it to get it out of the cookie cutter, the equally exhausting battle trying to remove the drinking straw from the stringing hole, and the fact it is too thick, too dark and FULL of bubbles, I think I like it :D

And that's 1 piece of jewellery down, 14 to go, yay. I can now go and update my progress bar :)