Transcripts
1. Wooden Pin Class Intro: Hello, I'm Amy Stoddard and I welcome you
to try out my class on turning your designs into lovely hand
painted wood bridges. This class will take you
through the process of using your cricket maker
to cut out shapes. We will go over the sanding
process and we will go over the myriad of ways that you can apply a color
to your projects. This will include how to
stain your pieces to allow the wood grain to shine through,
creating test swatches. And we will go over
all the other tips, tricks and media is you can use to apply color
to your pieces. And last but not least, we will be adding a nice shiny resin dome
on top of our projects. And I will also go over
attaching the pin back. So come along and join me in a happy shiny pin
making adventure. See you in class. Bye.
2. Wooden Pin Class - Lesson 01 Setting your Files Set Up in Cricut Design Space: Hello and welcome to
lesson number one on turning your designs into
wooden thin branches. But we're going to start with choosing a couple of designs. And I am going to tweak
these designs just to make sure that the shapes are as nice and as perfect
as I want them to be. You can spend as much time as you want on this
part of the phase, or as little as you like. In this example here, I am using Clip Studio Paint, but you are more
than welcome to use any other digital
drawing program that you're comfortable with. And I would also like
to make note that I am using the
symmetrical ruler tool, which I believe a lot of
different editing programs have. And this allows me to create a perfect mirror image
on the other side. So I can really get this
shape nice and tight. Once you have
finished your design, you are going to want to
copy and paste that design either into the same document or another one, whatever is fine. Then what we're going to
be doing is we're just gonna be making the fill image, which means we're going to be basically filling in with black, the entire outline of your
shape as you see here. The reason why we're
doing this is so the cricket will pick
up this design and say, Hey, this is the
silhouette shape that I need the cut on
this piece of wood. If you aren't 100%
happy with your shape, you can feel free to go
ahead and continue making little adjustments
until you have it just right after you have your
design, how you want it. You're just going to take
the lasso tool, select it, and then we're going to copy and paste it into a new document. Alright? Now once you have it
pasted into a new document, you can crop it if you wish, or what have you. You don't need to worry about transparency or
anything at this point. But what you are
going to want to do is to go ahead and save it as a JPEG because that is one of the files that
cricket recognizes. Alright, so the
next step is to go ahead and load up your
Cricket Design space. And we're gonna
go ahead and make a new project so you can
go ahead and click that. And once you have your
new project made, we're gonna go ahead
and go to upload. And we're gonna go ahead
and upload our new design. Then we're going to
choose Upload Image and we're going to find where we saved our image and
bring it into a program. I'm choosing complex just
because I feel it's safer. So if you want to try something
simpler, that's fine. The next step is we're gonna go ahead and we're
going to select all of the white to make the transparent background
and make the cut image. Basically, if everything
looks satisfactory to you, you're just going
to go ahead and approve and click Continue. Now here's the important part. We're going to choose. Just cut image on the left. We don't need to print or cut, we just need the cut image only. So you're gonna go ahead
and select cut image. Then you're going to click
the Upload button and then it should all
show up in your files. And now we can go
ahead and select the cup files that we want to
bring into the project. For this project, I am going
to be doing the cat head, but I'm also going to be
incorporating the Corky as well. Then cricket is going to import your files like
ridiculously gigantic. And you will need
to shrink these down to the size that
you want them to be. Now what size you want to make your pins is gonna be
totally your choice. But I like to make
mine around 1.5 by 1.5 inches large just because I find that that's a
nice approach size. But if you want to go
larger or smaller, It's totally up to you. There's no hard fast
rules for sizing. Now I'm going to digress
very briefly here to discuss the woods substrate we're
gonna be using to save money. It's a lot cheaper
just to go out and buy basswood sheets that
usually the largest width they come in is four inches. So I'm going to be setting
up my project so it fits width wise in that
four-inch section. Now, if you want to use
the cricket basswood, that is a much larger sheet, you're more than
welcome to use that. But for this example, I am going to be constraining ourselves down to
four inches of width. And you will see how that
goes as I continue here. So here I'm just shrinking things down to the
size that I would like them and I'm trying
to keep them within that four-inch width
that I'm working with. Now, once I have my sizes, I like them, I'm going to go ahead and start
duplicating them. Generally speaking,
I like to try to get about six pins per
piece of wood. So I'm going to copy those cats and then I'm going
to copy the core buggies. And it may require a little bit of jostling around to
get everything to fit. Now I do want to mention here that the only
limitation in height, even when you're using the
bargain basswood is 12 inches. Typically, I like to
keep it under 12 inches. I work around six or eight inches just because the
longer the piece of wood, the greater the chance of it lifting up off of
your cutting mat. So the smaller the piece
of wood that you have, the greater the likelihood that the cut is going
to go perfectly. We will get more in depth with the wood and the cutting
mat and how to set this up. In the next lesson. We're gonna go ahead
and stop this lesson here with finishing
up your project file. Now, after you have
your file setup, you're going to want
to go ahead and select all of your pieces. And you're going to want
to go ahead and group them and then go ahead and
attach them all together. The reason why we attach them
is so that the cricket will recognize to cut all of these six pieces on one
single piece of wood. So that wraps up this lesson and I will see you
in the next one when we get our machines
to cut up all this would see you next time. Bye-bye.
3. Wooden Pin Class - Lesson 02: Using the Cricut to Cut Basswood: Hello and welcome
to lesson two on turning your designs into
wooden pin approaches. This lesson we're
going to pick up where we left off with our project. And we're going to get
these pins ready to cut. Be sure that you've attached
everything altogether. And when you've done that
and everything looks good, go ahead and click
the Make It button. If you have done
everything correctly, all of your cuts will
show up together on the sing on this single
strong grip cutting that. It does look slightly odd here because I have
black on dark gray, but I can see that
everything looks okay. At this point, we're
going to pause and prep our materials
and our cutting mat. I'm going to have to cut down my piece of wood a little bit. So I have a cutting board
here and my wood ready, I'm going to measure the length
that my board should be. And then I'm going to
mark it and create a line with my ruler
or this example. I am cutting it at 6.5 inches. And here's a little
ruler tip for you. If you mark, makes several
marks across your width. At the 6.5 mark, you're guaranteed to get a
nice straight line in the end. Here, I've plotted all
of my marks at 6.5 inches across the
board and I'm just going to create a
nice straight line. Next step is to lay my piece of board over my little
cutting board strip. And I'm going to want to make a little trench to get
started with the saw. And usually I like
to press the saw down into the woods to
make a little groove. Then it'll be
easier to solve it. Once you have your little
groove and the board, you'll want to carefully, very carefully start slowing it. And the more of a trench you make than the faster you can go, shouldn't take too long, and eventually your board
is going to come free. Now there will be
a little bit of sanding needed to be
done on that edge, but we'll get to
that in a minute. Now the sanding will be
pretty straightforward. Just use around a 400 grit
piece of sanding paper, doesn't matter what brand. And we're just going to
gently sand off those little, little scratchy bits
on the end there. Next up we're going
to go ahead and get out our strong grip cutting mat. And I do mean strong grip. Do not try to do this project without
a strong grip, Matt. It will only end in heartache
if you try and other mat. And now we're gonna go ahead
and press our piece of wood onto the top left-hand
corner of our mat. So go ahead and give it a
nice extra firm press there. After you have pressed
it onto the mat, you're going to
go ahead and take a brayer and really roll this thing onto the mat
because you do not want it to move at all during
the cutting process. Now next you're gonna
go ahead and take some regular old painters tape or masking tape
or what have you. We're going to tape
this down to the board. We are going to tape down all four sides in a
perimeter around your board. And don't worry too much
if some of the tape is in the cutting area because it really
doesn't matter at all. After you have applied
all of the tape, go ahead and really press
it down really well. And also folded
around the edges of your boards so you don't have random tape sticking
out everywhere. When you're done, it should look something like this,
nice and clean. Now that we have our
materials prepped, we're ready to get back
into cricket design space. We're gonna go ahead
and choose Make it, and then we're going to need
to set our base material. So we're going to go ahead
and go to Browse materials. And it'll bring up
this nice big menu. And the material
we're looking for is the 1 16th basswood, which is going to show up
in the other category. Now here in the other category, the basswood should
show up in about the third or fourth
material slot, since I believe it
goes alphabetically. So we're going to choose the one 16th password if you are using something
else besides that, Like the 132nd basswood
or any of the balsa, you can, of course, go ahead and select that
instead of the basswood. Select that which goes with
the material you are using. After you select your materials, you are going to notice that a little alert pops up
under your base materials. It is basically informing you
to adjust your star wheels, put in your knife blade
and use a stronger at met. So let's tackle the
star wheels first. These little wheelie
nubs that are on your little rods here. And what you're going
to need to do is slide them all the way
over to the right. And you can see me pointing at each one of my star wheels. And I've also made little
marks on underneath each star wheel
so I can remember exactly where I want
to put them back to. Here I am. I'm just moving them
all the way down to the end because
these star wheels, otherwise, if you leave
them in position. They will mar your would ensure they're all the way
down here as such. Next, we're gonna go ahead
and load up the knife blade. The knife blade
essentially looks like an exacto blade inside
a blade housing. So go ahead and unlatched your blade and go
ahead and pull out your regular cutting point and be sure you put it away
someplace safe for the meantime. Now, let's go ahead and get that protective cap off
of the knife blade. And I want you to pay
attention that there's this plastic overdue on the
top of this brass wheels. We're going to just
make sure that that plastic protective
section around the wheel is facing out
and the gear is facing in. And then you're just
going to go ahead and clamp that in there. And now we're ready to
actually load the material. And while you are loading, it is going to help to give this just a little
very gentle shove while you hit the arrow button. Now let's talk about accidents. You'll notice that my mat
did not load properly. There is a big
bubble in the mat. If this kind of thing
happens to you, just go ahead and unloaded
and reload it again. It's not a huge deal, but you definitely do
not want to send it through the cutting
process like that. It will cause problems. Here. I've loaded it
in a second time. No problem. It takes perfectly this time and we are
finally ready to cut. Your machine is ready, go ahead and hit the cut
button and it will do its job. Now it's important to note here that while the cricket
is cutting wood, it will give you the classic
percent progress bar. But it's also going to tell
you how many cuts out of 14 passes it has completed. There. No way to change this at all. It is gonna do all of the 15 or 16 total passes until it feels it is done cutting
that would however, it will finish before it completes all of
those 16 passes. So therefore, you are going to have to babysit
this a little bit. Don't just leave it and
then leave the room. Stay in the room. You can work on something else, but you will need to babysit it. At any point during the process. You can always hit
the pause button and then check how
far the cut has come. Pause it. You can gently
Prague the peace. Use your fingernail maybe very gently with the exact
dough knife and your board just a little bit to see how far the cut
has come through. I have ultimately decided that it's going to need
a few more passes. After you are done checking, just go ahead and hit the pause
button to resume the cut. Now, a little over halfway
through all of the 16 passes, I decided to have another look. And I can see that one of the pins definitely
wants to pop up. And I just plotted it a little
bit with my exacto knife. I was able to get
it to pop up then. So at this stage then I am going to go ahead
and unload this and finished cutting out
just the little bits that need to be got with
my exact dough knife. Reason why you want to babysit
this and not let it cut 16 times is because it will 100% cut through
your strong grip. Matt, I salvage this
one by taping back. But as you can see in the
beginning of the footage, that it totally just cut
completely through my mat. So basically, don't
let it eat your mat. So once you are
satisfied with your cut, go ahead and unload your mat. After that, carefully
remove your tape and then start removing
all of your cut pieces. They should be pretty
easy to pop out. Use your exact dough knife if you have a little
bit of trouble. Also be sure to save
your cut scrubs because we're going to be using this
further on in the project. So at this point you
should have a bunch of little pin bases
made out of best one. And we're going to
stop this lesson here. In the next lesson, we will sand and begin painting
our new little threads. See you in the next class. Bye bye.
4. Wooden Pin Class - Lesson 03: Sanding and Staining.: Hello everyone and
welcome to lesson three on turning your designs
into wooden pin branches. So we left off in the
last lesson having just cut out our new
wooden pin blanks. A little reminder, don't forget
to keep your scrap wood. We're going to need
this in a little bit. But before we get to that, we're going to need to do
a little bit of sanding because the cricket is
not completely perfect. You can see here that I have a couple of little
wood chips coming off. The surface might be a little bit too grainy for your liking. I'm also going to sand the
surfaces of these as well. Now for the sanding, any old 400 grit sandpaper will do for this part of the process. And you'll just want to smooth things down
to your liking. Aside from sandpaper,
you can also use regular old Emery
board nail files to get into those
little hard to reach nooks and crannies
around your designs. Here you can watch
me sand a few hard to reach corners on
the core gaze bot. Now, I do want to
mention here that oftentimes basswood can have these really fine fibers of wood fibers on the
surface of your pieces. You are really going
to want to spend a little extra time during the sanding process
and get those down nice and smooth because any little fiber
that's standing up is it's eventually going to cause problems when
you apply the resin. And it also will cause some problems when you
start painting as well. So take a little extra time. Be sure you get everything
nice and smooth. Once you have everything
sand into your liking, it is now time to
apply base colors. In this lesson specifically, we're going to discuss
using a base stain. So it lets that nice
wood grain show through. But if you want to
start off with opaque, that is totally up to
you now to make a stain, you are going to water
down a little bit of gouache or acrylic paint. Here you can see me. I have a really soupy bit of stain here made from goulash. And that's what I'm going to
color my core gaze width. Here is the reason why you
save your woods crafts because it makes a
really great place for you to swatch your colors and really
see how they're going to work on the wood before you
commit them to your pieces. Alright, so once you have your paint colors
to your liking, It's just time to go ahead
and get these things painted. Choose whatever brush is
most comfortable for you to use and work pretty
quickly on these, because the paint does soak
into the wood very quickly. So therefore it dries
fairly quickly. You will want to get
a nice even coat of your gouache or
acrylic staying on. So you don't have any splotchy
***** in your application. After you have your
first face done, go ahead and lift them up and
just drag your paintbrush across the sides because
you will want to get those nice and
stained as well. Now because the
wood does like to absorb a lot of this
water and the pigment. After you have finished
painting all of the sides. The chances are that
the front face that you started painting
first is going to be dry enough so you can go ahead and set that flat
down on the piece of paper there and go ahead
and start painting the back before everything
has completely dried. And here I am, I'm laying my finished
painted piece down and I'm gonna go ahead
and start painting the back. Now, if you are uncomfortable
with this pudding, slightly damp paint down on the paper, That's
totally reasonable. And if you want to wait until all the sides completely dry
before you paint the backs, that's totally up to you. And I understand. If you do just want to
power through it like me, just be sure that
you're not setting them down in other pink
colors are such, otherwise you might
get some transfer. So at this point you're
just going to keep, continue on with the
painting process. Once you have a piece finished, you'll wanna go ahead
and set it aside on a nice clean area of
paper and let it dry. Here. In this clip, I'll
just leave you with a little bit
of footage of me applying a darker navy blue
stain to one of my pieces. Just so you can see how
different things work out. Alright, now here are all of my completely dry
stained pieces. And I want you to notice that the pieces have
curled a little bit. Because when the water
gets into the wood, the wood grain is
naturally going to, like the fibers are
going to expand a little bit and it will curve. But this is a completely
solvable problem. To solve this, we're just
going to impress them beneath some of our
heaviest art books. So yes, all those
art history books, you've saved all those
reference books. You can actually use them again. So at this point, we're just going to
leave these under these books overnight tend
to flatten out perfectly. And we will pick it up
in the next lesson. So that is it for now. And I will see you
in the next lesson. Have a great day. Bye-bye.
5. Wooden Pin Class - Lesson 04: Painting and Tips and Tricks: Hello everyone and
welcome to lesson four on turning your designs into
fantastic wooden branches. We left off with the
last class having pressed are pieces
under books overnight. You can now remove the
books and you should find nicely flattened
wooden pin forms. If the flatness isn't
quite to your liking yet, you can go ahead and leave
them under the books longer. For me with this 1 16th inch, would they flattened out
overnight perfectly. Alright, so when your pin
forms are to your liking, then it's finally time to start painting in those designs. The first thing I like to do is print out a copy
of my sketches for reference and collect all of my supplies once I have
my supplies together, the first thing I
like to do is to very lightly pencil my
designs onto my pieces. I just feel it gives me a
nice framework to work from. And my pieces don't end up looking to
drastically different. Unfortunately, it's a little bit difficult to see
my pencil sketches on my pieces because I am putting the bear lightest amount of
lead onto my pieces. But hopefully you at
least get the idea. And here's a little bit
of a more up-close view. So you can kinda see those
very faint graphite lines. If you happen to make any mistakes while
you're doing this, you can just take any old
kneaded eraser and gently tap, slash brush away any lines that aren't where
you want them to be. Of course, when it
comes to darker stains, it's gonna be really, really hard to see here. I know you can't really see
this at all in the video, but you'll just have
to look for the little graphite shine
to see your design. But I can see it in person. But obviously you can't
see it in the video. Once your sketches are done, it's time to go ahead and
start applying some paint. Here I am testing
out a little bit of acrylic wash on my
practice, my scrap piece. And this again is a really
important reason to save your scraps because they are excellent for
testing stuff on. Now, briefly, I want to
show you the reason why we sand the front faces
in the back faces. Because when you apply paint, you can see that the little
fibers of the wood will start lifting upward and it
will make a rough surface. And obviously the
smoother your surface, the better it's
going to take paint. And the more professional
it's going to look. Here you can see me applying some acrylic gouache
to the core gaze ears. Acrylic gouache is
excellent for this project. And I will start
going over some of the other media
that you can use. Them really work out
really well for this, another media that works really
well are Posca paint pen. However, there is
one thing I want to make note of on high
contrast colors. Sometimes the posca pens
can be a little bit, I guess you could say juicy
and they can have a tendency to bleed on the woods surfaces. But I have a little bit
of a hack for that. And here you can see what I mean is this little circle is just a little bit rough
around the edges and I would like it to be a
little bit cleaner. So here's my little tip
for getting around this. You're going to take
a white polychrome, most colored pencil. I'm sure that any other
brand will work fine. And you're gonna
go ahead and draw your design that you want
and go ahead and fill it in. Here you can watch
me applying it to one of the kitty pins faces. I'm just drawing a big circle. And I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to fill
it in and I'll go ahead and fast-forward to
the end piece and result. This will leave you with a little waxy barrier between the wood and the
paint you want to apply. And therefore, it really cuts
out any bleeding problems. Once you have your colored
pencil plotted out, you can go ahead and
start applying the posca. I think you can
see here how much cleaner and nicer
these edges are. I just really think it's
worth the extra effort to get those nice clean edges
because it looks so professional and just lovely. Basically. You can of course, just use acrylic
paint to do this and you won't have
the extra steps. I just find it's a lot
easier to work with a pen style tool to get those clean edges
because my brushwork. Whereas I wish it
would be better, it's not a merely as perfect as when I'm
working with the pens. So basically you can consider this kind of like
a nice little hack for you if you also are
frustrated with your brushwork. And now here's a little view of the eyeball whites that doesn't have my hand
in the way, basically. Alright, so for my next
tips for painting on wood, we're going to go ahead and add a few dots of water
to some acrylic wash. I'm going to use this
on the core. Good. Now basically, what you want to do is you
want to thin out your paint enough so it
has a nice glide factor, but yet still keep that
opaque consistency. Your mileage will
probably vary a little bit depending upon what
your designs call for. But just keep on messing
with it and testing it on your scrap pieces until you get it
where you like it. Now the reason why we thin the
acrylic paint a little bit is because it makes it
much easier to apply. It's a lot smoother
to work with and your brush can just glide
across your pieces easily. The other reason is because acrylic wash is essentially
a plastic paint. The thicker that your paint is, the more clumpy it
is going to be, it's going to start
creating a 3D surface. What you want this paint
to do is to level nice and flat because it will look cleaner and much
more professional. Also, don't worry too
much about messing up your paint consistency
because in the end, if your paint is a
little too thin, it doesn't really matter
because you could just paint over it again
in a nice new layer. And then you should
eventually be able to get a nice opacity with a
nice smooth finish. So just don't stress about
it and it'll all be okay. I know that. I like
to say that art is basically a series of problems and mistakes
that you must overcome to make a final,
beautiful product. So just have fun
with it and go with the flow and do those
problem-solving puzzles. Next media I want to discuss
is using Copic multi liners. For some reason the
disposable ones and particularly the
large tip one's, had a tendency to bleed
through the wood grain. You can see an example of me trying it out now on
my little wood scraps. And you can clearly
see the bleed just spread right after
you apply the ink. However, if you use the higher-quality
SP molt eyeliner and you use a smaller
tip like a 0.3. The bleed is much
less considerable. You really there's
practically none. I actually have no
idea why this is, but I'm gonna go ahead
and take it as a win. So here I am going
ahead and using the Copic multi eyeliner to get the little dots of the
eyes on my coordinates. Again, I like to use as many Pen tools as I can
simply because it is really, really difficult to get a little perfect circular
dot a pen brush. But if you have that
capability, by all means, go ahead and get out your brushes and apply
the acrylic paint. I also want to add that the Copic multi
liners work great. Going over top of any acrylic
gouache or acrylic paint. And you can also
use your posca pens on top of the acrylic gouache
as well, with no issues. And it is of course, really nice just to be able to take your posca pens and
your multi liners and do those tiny little bits of fine detailing that to kind of bring out a little bit of pizzazz on your pieces and make them
look a little less plane. And here is just
a little close-up of some of that detailing. Alright, so that's about
it on all the tips and tricks I learned while I was painting these
wooden pieces. So I'm going to end
this lesson here. And you can spend the time detailing all
of your little pieces. And we will come back
in the next lesson and start prepping
them for resin. Thank you for joining me on this journey and I will see
you in a minute lesson. Have a great day. Bye.
6. Wooden Pin Class - Lesson 05: Applying a Resin Dome.: Hello everyone and
welcome to lesson five on turning your designs
into wooden pin virtues. At this point in the class, you should have your
pins completely painted and ready to take resin. If you've already resin domed in some of my other classes, it will still pay to pay
attention to this lesson as resin works
differently on wood. And here's a quick
rundown of supplies. You're going to want a
two-part resin epoxy. You're going to want some
mixing cups, gloves, and something to apply the resin width and
of course your pins. And it really helps to have a silicon mat underneath
where you're working on resin so you don't mess up your surfaces with
supplies out of the way. Let's go ahead and
mix some resin. Here. You are going to be pouring out equal parts hardener and resin, both in separate measuring cups. Both of these cups, I know it's hard to
tell on the video, have fluid measuring and I make little black marks with a Copic marker just
to help me see. Also while you're
pulling the resin, be sure you keep track of which part of the
resin is in which cup? I usually just
keep my bottles of resin behind each cup to keep track of which
one is which. Here you can see the
measurements better on the side and you can see we're really
close to having equal parts. Resin and hardener. Do take your time
on this and get it as close to exact as you possibly can to much of one or the other will cause your
resin not to set properly. Once you are satisfied
with your measurements, it's time to mix the resin. To stir the resin, you can use any old craft stick
like I have here. And this one has actually
seen multiple uses as well. Go ahead and pour the
hardener into the resin. Also, I want to make
note that as soon as you start mixing your
two parts of resin, you will only have about
45 minutes of work time. This is plenty of time, but you shouldn't stress, but do keep that in mind. And as you can see, I'm using my stir
stick to scrape out as much of the hardener as possible so we get as even of
the two parts as possible. Now, the art resin instructions say to stir this really well for a good three minutes
and don't forget to scrape the sides
while you're stirring. This is important. So you don't have some oddball mixing of
things cannot quite mixed because that will also cause your resin to
not cure properly. After it's mixed, there are gonna be bubbles
in the resin, but do not be alarmed, they will go away. Alright, we're ready to go ahead and start applying the resin. Go ahead and take your
little applicator stick and be careful not to get
the resin everywhere, but go ahead and give a nice
dollop to your first pin. Here. I don't quite have
enough resin on the piece, so I wanna go ahead
and just add a little more so it'll be
easier to spread it around. Once you feel like you have
enough resin on your piece, then you can take your
applicator stick and just very gently spread the resin
over the surface. You will want to
push the resin all the way to the outer
edges of your pieces, but you do not want the resin to spill over the outer edges. If at anytime you
feel like you do not have enough resin
on the Surface, Go ahead and apply some more. You're going to
be aiming to have a really nice high dome on these pieces without of
course filling over the edge. And another thing to make note of when you're
working with wood is that resin does like
to soak into the wood, which means you're going to be losing some of the
volume of the resin. And I believe later
in this video we'll go over adding a little
bit extra resin. After that happened. After you get your resin
on your first piece, you're going to go ahead
and grab your heat gun. Any old heat gun will do. And if you have a torch,
that's even better. The reason why we use
the heat gun is to, of course pop the bubbles. And here I'm using the
heat gun on this piece. And you can see the
bubbles because of the heat are rising to the surface and
therefore being popped. One thing I like to do is
after each piece I finish, I go ahead and get
out my heat gun. I use the heat gun
on the new piece as well as the older piece
because there will still be some
bubbles coming up to the surface and you will want
to use the heat gun again. And of course keep your pieces covered while you're
not working on them. Now, as I said before, the woods likes to
absorb the residence, so you're going to want to periodically check these pieces. And it helps to just kinda
get a different angle on your pieces to see
that nice glossy dome. If you happen to know, notice rather any deficiencies in that nice dome like you start to see a little
bit of wood brain. Go ahead and apply
some more resin. You probably have about
a half an hours worth of time to do this in. But as it starts getting
close to 45 minutes, you'll want to stop. Otherwise you can
mar your designs. Alright, so once your 45-minute work time
with the resin is done, you're going to want to go
ahead and pop these under some plastic so it prevents dust from
landing on the resin. And you're going to let these
cure for a full 24 hours. Don't mess with them. You'll just end up with sadness because you'll
end up messing them up. Just leave them be for 24 hours. Alright, so that's
it for this lesson. And in the next lesson
we are going to go over adding the pin
bucks to your pieces and also tackling if you had any mistakes or accidents
happen and how to fix those. So thank you for joining
us for this lesson, and I will see you
in the next one. Have a great day. Bye-bye.
7. Wooden Pin Class - Lesson 06: Applying the Pin Backs.: Hello and welcome to
lesson number six on turning your designs into
wooden pin approaches. We start off this lesson
with our pins having rested for a full 24 hours for
the resin dome to cure. Now it's time to go ahead
and get out our Pindex. And as always, I like
to check and make sure every single pin
back I plan to use works. Check and make sure that it
opens and closes easily. Because the last thing
you wanna do is to essentially super glue
these things on the back with resin when one
of them is broken. And once you have your
pin box selected, go ahead and collect all your supplies and get your
little workstation setup. Okay, I want to pause
here and mention a little something I had told
you in the previous lesson, how the resin likes to
soak into the wood. And you can see on the backs of these core good
pins how it's done. So the resin has absorbed into the wood and width up
along the grain formation. And this is nothing to
be concerned about. As soon as we put
resin on the backs, this won't show but this
is just let see let you see how much the resin
actually soaks into the wood. I also want to mention that
I like to go ahead and sign the backs of my pins
before I apply the resin. I just think it's a nice touch and you can choose whether or not you would like to do that. You don't have to obviously. Alright, once you have
everything squared, it's time to go
ahead and mix resin. Now we're going to be
mixing the resin the exact same way that we
did in the last lesson. If you need a refresher, just hop back and review
and then come forward. I'm not going to repeat it all again because I don't
want to bore you. Alright, so once
the resin is mixed, we're gonna go ahead and
dab it onto the backs. Now when we're putting resin
on the backs of these, you aren't going to
want to build up as big of a dome as
you did on the faces. Because if you have too
much resin on the backs is going to wick up into the pin backs whenever
you put them on. And it's basically going to
glue all the mechanisms shut. And you don't want
that to happen. So you want to be
sparing and just apply a nice thin layer that is just the right thickness so that when you put
the pin back in, it's going to hold it in there, but it will not wake up and
get caught in the mechanism. Once you have a
nice even coating of resin like I have here, you are going to want
to go ahead and get out your heat gun and pop
those bubbles again, because there will be bubbles
on the backs as well. Now once you have
pop the bubbles, it's time to put
on the pin back. And I want to call attention
to the little class here. What you want is you want the little clasp facing upwards. Facing towards the sky like this rather than
off to the side. It just helps prevent resin
to wick up into the class. Then you're just going to pop it on your little piece, like so. And then just didn't lead
tap it with your fingers. You can also use a little bit
of it like a toothpick to position things and get it
exactly where you want it. And here is my second pin back. And you can see that the
class is facing upwards. And again, I'm just going to gently pop it onto the back of the chord G pen and move it into position
with a toothpick. Here's a little
close-up footage of the two pins that I just
completed just so you can get an idea of about how much resin I
have applied on the backs. If you feel like your coverage isn't quite as good as
you'd like it to be. You can go ahead
and add a couple of little droplets of
resin with a toothpick. And another thing
I like to do is to try to get a little
droplet of resin and put it inside those two little
holes in the, the pin back. If you can get a
little bit of resin in there very carefully, it will really create a super-strong bond and
you're less likely to have the pin back breaking away from the brooch and somebody losing their
beautiful brooch. Alright, and here's a
little bit of a side view for you so you can see exactly how much a resin
I have on my pieces. So hopefully that helps give you a better idea of how much
you can put on yours. And go ahead and be
sure you hit it with your heat gun again just
to loosen up any bubbles. It especially if you see them. You can do this
periodically within about a half an hour
before the resin hardens. Okay. And once you are satisfied with how your
pieces are looking, Be sure you cover them up to
protect them from the dust. The dust is the enemy. And then we're gonna
go ahead and leave these cure for good 24 hours. Alright, so I'm gonna go ahead
and stop this lesson here. And then in our final lesson, I will go over how
you fix things. If you have a little accident, because accidents do happen. And part of being a good artist is
solving those problems. So let's solve those
problems together. And I will see you
in the next class. Have a great day. Bye-bye.
8. Wooden Pin Class - Lesson 07: Fixing Accidents: Hello and welcome
to lesson seven on turning your design into
lovely wooden pin approaches. This lesson is going
to be all about mishaps and how to fix them. As you can see here, I have an errant resin blob on my otherwise
perfect kitty face. That happened because
I apparently put it in a small puddle of resin with
the core game pin here. You'll notice that
in around the edges, around the ears that
there is just not enough resin coverage
because it did soak in. And I'm going to be showing you how to fix these two things. Now because the pin
backs are attached, I'm going to need to put them on my domain tray in order
for them to lay flat, to take more resin on the top. Now to fix these
very minor defects, all we're gonna
need to do is just apply another coat
of resin to these. Now, since we're mixing up
such a small batch of resin, I'm just going to use this little medicine
measuring cup that I have. And I'm going to
put both parts EQ, into the same cup using the equal measurements
on the side isn't why I'm doing this is simply
because I do not want to waste resin because
it is expensive. So when you're mixing
resin all in a single cup, you wanna go ahead and
start with just the resin and I'm pouring it until
the five mark on this. And then I'm gonna go
ahead and double-check my measuring before I
put the hardener in. Here I go pouring
the hardener in. And keep in mind, we're keeping equal
measurements of both parts. Keep in mind that this is risky if you are a
beginner with resin. Just keep that in
mind as a caveat. Otherwise, if you'd been
doing resin for awhile, this is no big deal. You still need to
stir everything exactly like you
would store a stir, a full batch of resin. So if it a good stir, scrape the sides
while you're staring and don't skimp on this. And after you have stirred it for the prescribed
amount of time, it's time to go ahead and add another smaller resin dome on top of these to
fix the problems. You won't need as
much resin this time, you just need to get
a nice even coverage. And then let's get the
resin to level off nicely. Also be careful and be
mindful of your edges because you don't want
to accidentally have some drips go
underneath your piece. And then you have a
resin drip you have to fix on the backside of
your piece after this. So just a nice thin layer, as long as it looks
nice and smooth, that will do the job. Alright, so once you have
a nice even coat on there, give them a good check to
be sure you hit them with your heat gun to pop any bubbles because there will
be bubbles again. And then if everything
looks good, you shouldn't as
always be sure you cover your pieces to protect
them from getting dust. As I said, dust is the enemy. Now, one more thing I want to mention is you are
going to be left with a little bit of resin in a
glass cup or a plastic cup. If it's glass, you need to
go wash this out immediately and be sure you do not have hardened resin in this
so you can use it again. If it's a plastic measuring cup and you don't care about it, then just go ahead and pinch it. That pretty much wraps
up this class on turning your designs
into wooden benches. I hope you had a lovely time and created some
lovely projects. And I do really hope
that you will share them in the class space
for sharing your projects. I would absolutely
love to see them. If you are curious about
any of my personal work, you can visit my website, Amy illustrates.com,
and my socials are apt to Cuno find me
on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you for joining me
in this class adventure, and I hope I will see you in my classes in the future.
Have a great day. Bye bye.
Amy Stoddard, Amy Illustrates
