resin

I’ve been mixing a lot of resin lately (making more cabochons for these thumb tacks), and thought I’d share a resin project I made for my wedding. I also love any excuse to look at/share our fantastic wedding pictures from ~~Life As Art Photography~~ The Minnericks.

Wedding Rings and DIY Cufflinks Eddie’s cuff links with our wedding rings and aggie rings – photo by The Minnericks

I’d never done anything with resin before, but Eddie and I decided a fun gift for the groomsmen and our fathers would be personalized cuff links. We also ended up making sets for our officiant and Eddie 🙂

Supplies:

cuff link blanks* (like these)
craft resin (can be found at hobby lobby)
clip art of choice
cardstock

*I would get a few extra cuff link blanks in case you make a mistake or something gets messed up!

First, I found/made some clip art for each of the guys. Maps for my dad who loves traveling, a plane silhouette the best man who is in training to become a fighter pilot, our wedding symbol of two penguins for Eddie, etc.

DIY Wedding Cufflinks photo by The Minnericks – p.s. I also made my necklace in the background 🙂

I then printed these off on white cardstock and trimmed them to size for the cufflinks. I set them inside, poured in resin, and let dry in a frame I made out of a cardboard box to hold them level. After playing with resin more, I would suggest coating your image with mod podge or (clear drying!) elmer’s glue before adding resin- mine were mostly fine, but a couple had problems due to resin seeping under the cardstock.

Wedding Cufflinks Tutorial photo by me.

And, for good measure, another couple of wedding pictures because I love them 🙂

Wedding Dancing photo by The Minnericks

photo by The Minnericks

Bridesmaids photo by The Minnericks – and I made those dresses!

I’ve been working lately on making my office-cubicle-space a little bit happier. I already shared the paper sorter I made from cereal boxes. Today, I’m sharing some thumb tacks I prettied up with some resin flowers.

I got a silicone mold a while back from etsy to make these super cute dahlia/chrysanthemum cabochons. When I got the mold, I used it to make some earrings out of clay. This time, I used resin to make the flower cabochons. I used three different resin dyes – an opaque white, transparent blue, and transparent green – to make a range of slightly different colored push pins.

Since my mold only has three flower spaces and they take at least 12 hours to harden, I could only make three pins at a time. That made this project take several days, but it wasn’t much time each day. To make each set of flowers, I mixed the resin according to directions on the box (follow them exactly even if they seem tedious!) using a food scale to ensure even quantities of resin and hardener. For each batch, I mixed up about 10 oz. of resin which was more than enough. I then added a few drops of dye, and poured the resin into the mold. I did lots of shaking/taping the mold (carefully to avoid spilling!) to release any bubbles formed in the fairly intricate mold. You can tell that some of the earlier ones I made have several bubbles on the petals – lots of tapping the mold helps get rid of these. You can also find perfect already made ones on etsy – just search for ‘resin flower cabochons’ under supplies.

Then just set it aside to dry overnight, and popped them out it the morning.

Once I had my flowers, I just superglued them onto plain silver pushpins. Easy-peasy!

And here there are holding up some of my favorite pictures in my office! They sure brighten up my day at work 🙂

Cuff Links

Flower Thumb Tacks