Experimenting with different art, craft and making techniques is brilliant fun - especially doing it together with my daughter! Over the Christmas holidays, my daughter and I created some pieces of resin jewellery. I used techniques I learned as part of a workshop with the incredible Diane King. You can see what my friend and I made here. I can completely recommend her workshops, she has a lovely teaching style.
We used this Fans Arriche Epoxy Resin kit available from Amazon, and I would recommend it. We started out by using a digital scale to measure equal parts of the resin and hardener into a paper cup. After mixing it thoroughly with a wooden spatula, you have around 30-40 minutes to create your pieces. The kit comes with some silicone moulds to make keyrings with - but I went and bought other cheap ones from the Range to experiment with. The kit comes with a good range of dye colours.
You can see here the dye colours which my daughter made up for her earrings. She experimented with having plain rectangular earrings pictured at top of this post - then adding green glitter to the green for her keyring. The photo below shows some of the results. Her keyring worked out really well. She mixed some white into her yellow dyed resin, to make it opaque. She pooled it at the bottom of the keyring mould then added the glittery green at the top. This technique was really effective. The oval yellow earrings did not work out so well. The yellow dye on its own was somewhat mustard in colour and she did not use enough resin in the mould so they warped - which led to the stud falling off.
Below you can see my experiment. I filled a half moon silicon mould and pooled different colours together, so see how they would merge. 24h later, after they were nearly cured, but still flexible, I bent a stud post around the earrings at the top. Together with Gorilla Glue, this has made a really strong fixture. It was brilliant fun experimenting. It is also one of the reasons why I love making things - you do not know how things will work out and what unexpected effects may arise. My daughter was so pleased with her keyring and rectangular earrings. She also understands why the yellow earrings failed - but knows how to make them work next time. Doing creative activities at any age is a wonderful learning and personal development tool.
