Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi. I'm Ray, a former research scientist turned maker. Throughout my professional career, I always practiced art and even got the opportunity to help co-found a makerspace. I now have my own small business called Maker Comment, where we pioneer creative experiences and encourage everyone to think like a maker. I am beyond excited to be sharing what I know here in Skillshare. Now, for today's class, we will be exploring a unique resin that cures with sunlight. I'll be reviewing the tools that you need to get started, how to color your resin, fun mixins and decorations, and tips and tricks on how to clean up after you've made a mess. For this class, we will be decorating a simple open vessel charm like this one. If this sounds like fun, stay tuned for the next section where we discussed why UV resin is awesome.
2. Class Information and Project: The use of UV resin for decorations was first popularized in Japan and China and has since made its way into our crafting markets. It's now widely accessible and as a ton of fun to use. Unlike traditional two-part resin, UV resin does not cure until exposed to UV light. This gives you ample time to create your piece without having to have one eye on the clock. Additionally, UV resin can cure in as little as 30 seconds. This means that you can create multi-layered pieces in a fraction of the time it would take using a two-part resin. In this class, I'll walk you through everything you'll need to get started. I'll offer some hints and tips I've picked up along the way and we'll discuss how to troubleshoot some common problems. By the end, you'll have created a simple but unique piece that can be worn or used as a keychain. In the next section, we're going to talk about the materials you'll need for this project.
3. Resin: The first material that you'll need is [inaudible] you guessed it resin. My favorite brand is Padico Star Drop, which is imported from Japan. This is a good-quality clear resin that has a fast curing time. However, you don't necessarily have to buy this brand specifically, as it can be difficult to source in the US, there are many other brands available on Amazon as well as Etsy, eBay and resins specialty shops such as Sophie and Toffee and Let's Resin. I've even started seeing UV resin appear in my local craft store. However, a couple of important things to look out for would be the curing time and the odor. One other point that you should be aware of when using any resin is that all resins yellow over time, the chemical compounds that make up the resin begin to break down and this causes a yellowing effect. Now, before you panic, this doesn't happen right away. In fact, it usually takes quite a long time for any yellowing to become noticeable. However, there are some things that can accelerate the process, such as constant exposure to direct sunlight or to extreme heat. Using pigments like alcohol inks, glitters, and pigment powders tends to negate the yellowing effect in part, if not completely. When you go to purchase your resin, make sure that you are getting the hard type for this project. I mentioned this because there is a soft type UV resin out there, which also comes in these tiny tubes like this, which I picked up at the Japanese $ store. Now, soft resin is exactly as it sounds. It is a rubberized resin that cures soft and bendable like this. This is really cool stuff. You can actually use it on fabric or ribbons to add decorative elements. You can even cast soft resin pieces into hard resin like I've done here with this pendant. However, as cool as this sounds and as useful as that might be, we need hard resin for today's project. Double-check and make sure you're getting the right kind. In the next part, we're going to go ahead and talk about UV lamps.
4. UV Lamps: Let's talk about UV lamps next. There are two main types of lamps out there. There is this style here, which has UV bulbs and you can see those on the inside here, they go all the way around and then there is this style here, which is powered by a UV LEDs. All of these little guys here, and usually these come with a fold-out stand. Now, both of these lights will work fine on most UV resonance. Now I will say that the bulb style here is my go-to because I can set it for longer curing times if I need to. Whereas with the LED version my only two options are 30 and 60 seconds. That can be annoying if you need to go for a little bit longer, you have to press the buttons several times, so there is that. Now you really don't need either one of these fancy lights, if you don't want to buy them. You can simply place your piece outside in direct sunlight, now this is going to take longer to cure and you do have to worry maybe a little bit about the debris blowing into the uncared resin. But when I first started out, this is what I did and it worked fine. I wanted to quickly bring up curing times for UV resin. It does make a difference whether you're using an LED lamp or one of the UV lamps with bulbs. Double-check the instructions on your brand of UV resin to make sure that you're curing it for an appropriate amount of time. On Padico star drop, you can see on the back label here that for an LED lamp, it will take 30-90 seconds to cure whereas if you're using a UV lamp with bulbs, it will take 2-4 minutes. Always double-check and air on the longer side for curing just until you know exactly how long it's going to take to harden completely. Now, a final note on UV lamps. You don't ever want to look directly into these lights, either the LED version or the incandescent bulb type here. UV light is damaging to your eyes and so that's one of the reasons why I have a foil covering the front of my box here. The interior of this box is very reflective and it bounces a lot of that light out the front so I gave it a protective door. Now with the LED version here, all of the LED lights face downward and the legs make it so that this sits fairly close to your work surface and so there is less of that UV light bouncing out towards you. But you still may want to consider putting up a shield in a way that protects your eyes. The next section that we're going to talk about are the tools that you need. It may be less than you think.
5. Tools: Resin Essentials: As far as tools go, you don't need much when you're first starting off. A few toothpicks, maybe a pair of tweezers, a sheet of wax paper or baking parchment, and some clear packing tape are really all that you need. I also like to wear a pair of gloves when I'm working with any resin as it is a chemical substance, and I want to protect my hands. Now, it's easy to quickly spiral down the resin rabbit hole, as I like to call it. As you progress in this hobby, you may want to upgrade your tools. I have a silicone mat, which is great, and when I'm moving it to my UV lamp, I usually have a piece of plastic or cardboard that I put underneath it and that makes it easier to get it over to my lamp. However, if you're working with the LED lamp, you probably don't even need this piece here. You can just put the lamp on top and away you go. This map actually came from a hot glue gun that I purchased a long time ago, but you can actually get silicone mats that are made just for resin. Now, you'll want to look for ones that are translucent or white, like this one. Colored mats make it really difficult to mix your pigments, and colors, and inks into your resin as you won't be able to tell the true color. Opt for ones that are white or translucent. Now, if you'd like to move away from toothpicks, there are resin tools out there like these. I purchased these on a trip to Japan, but you can easily order these as well. These have two ends to them. This one actually has a scoop for glitters, or other powders. Those can be really handy for moving the resin around, spreading it out, or precisely positioning pieces like beads in your resin project. There are also nail dotting tools for nail art decorations which you can get at your local beauty supply store if you can't find these. Sometimes these can be difficult to combine, but these are pretty common here. A lot of them have a balls-shaped tip on the end, but there are others that have a sharp-pointed tip as well. Same as these, you can cure the resin on these once you're finished with your project, and then the resin peels right off so easy cleanup. Finally, there are these color shapers which I recently discovered, and these are rubberized paint brushes. What's cool about this is it's similar to the silicone rubber that is in your mat. The resin peels right off of these once it's cured. Again, easy cleanup with these tools here. Now, color shapers as awesome as they are, are pretty expensive. If you don't want to go that route, there is nothing wrong with any of these tools, or really at the end of the day, toothpicks. This is what I started off with. This is what I've used for a long time before I broke into any of these other tools. At the end of the day, all you need is a toothpick. In the next section, we are going to be talking about the various mixings and bezels that are available for resin crafting.
6. Decorations and Accessories: Here's where things start to get really creative. There are a variety of different decorative elements that you can add to your resin projects to make them very unique. I just have a few examples here. We're probably not going to use all of these for today's project, but I just wanted to give you an example of stuff that works really well for resin. I've got some tiny rhinestones over here. You can get these in various sizes. There's some chunky glitter here. This came in a variety pack shaker. Then I've got some chunky glitters over here. They're mixed glitters. There's also some fine glitter right next to here. Then I have some pearl beads here. All of these things are readily available at your local craft store. Oops, there we go. You can also check your local beauty supply store for some of these items as well. For example, this fine glitter here and these mixed glitters are both items that I found at my local nail salon supply store in this area. Go ahead and check yours out as well. You might find some really unique items there. Just as there are seemingly endless possibilities of resin decorations such as these, so too are there resin charms. From cute characters to unique shapes, there's no shortage in the varieties of resin charms available. It's very easy to feel creative. Today, I will be using this ice cream vessel for our project. Feel free to use any shape that you like. However, you may want to choose one that has more than one area like this one, so that you can experiment along with us. In the next section, we'll be planning out our piece and then casting some resin.
7. Planning Out Your Piece: In the last section, we talked about the overwhelming variety of bezels and decorations used in resin craft. While this is great, it might also be intimidating because there are too many choices. My suggestion would be to plan out your piece and stick to that plan as much as possible. My friend Stephen has this rule of over-engineering which basically states, "Stop while you are ahead." I'm definitely guilty of overdoing it, especially when there are so many fun materials to play with. I'll start with one idea and then think, "Oh, I really like this glitter. Maybe I'll add some of that." Or, "This alcohol ink is really cool. Let's have this as another color." Then I'll add some pink colors and white stones. Before I know it, I have no idea what the original piece was about, and I'm left with something completely confusing. Long story short. Learn from my mistakes and plan out your piece at least a little bit ahead of time. If you are more of a kinesthetic, go with the flow type, have no fear. There are ways you can redo your piece if you mess up. Here's the plan for the ice cream bezel. I'm going to start with some silver glitter mixed into some resin for the spoon. For the dish, I thought I might try some blue alcohol ink and a little bit of blue glitter. Next for the ice cream, I'm going for a raspberry ripple here, so I'll be using some white alcohol ink as a base, and then I'll swirl in some pink iridescent powder. Finally, what's an ice cream sundae without sprinkles? We'll finish it all off with some chunky glitter shapes. If you're still on the fence about your bezel design, even after all this planning, or if you're one of the more kinesthetic learner types that I mentioned earlier, have no fear. Remember how I said that you could redo your design if you mess up. Here's how you go about it. Go ahead and start pouring the design. If you're unhappy with the results, just cure the resin. Then use a toothpick to pop out the resin from the frame that you're unhappy with. Easy, right? Just know that this particular trick will only work up to a certain point. The point of no return is when we seal off the bezel with a final clear coat of resin. After that, the design becomes permanent. Also, I will say that I've only attempted this trick with metal bezels, and so it may not work with all the different types of bezels out there. With plastic bezels or bezels of other materials, you run the risk of breaking the frame as you attempt to pop the resin out. Just keep that in mind and be careful.
8. Preparing The Bezel: Welcome back. We are about ready to start taping off our resin vessel for resin casting. First things first you want to grab at your packing tape or just regular tape like this. What we're going to do is cover off the back of our charm here with clear tape. This is going to prevent any of the resin from leaking out the sides as we add it into the charm. I would avoid using really cheap tape for this because you don't want resin leakage, that could be a huge mess. So go for a good quality clear plastic tape. I prefer to use wide packing tape for mine because it covers the entire charm. For the most part, you may have to angle it in a certain way, but for the most part, you can fit the entire charm on one strip of wide packing tape, instead of having to pull off several strips of skinnier tape like this. But it's up to you. You can also use double-sided tape as well. You can stick the charm to one side and then stick the other side to your surface here and that works fairly well as well. I'm just going to go ahead and start by pulling off a strip of tape that is longer than I actually need and I will show you why in a second. We're going to go ahead and take our charm. I'm going to put this tape down on my surface sticky side up because this charm is a little larger and probably going to have to angle it a little bit so it all fits. Just like that. Then go over all the edges, make sure it's really stuck there on that tape. You don't want your resin to leak out because that's a huge mess. Ask me, how do I know? My last note here is to make sure that you're working with a clear or white colored tape. If you use something like painter's tape, for example, you have this blue color and that can be bad for mixing your resin colors because you won't be able to see what it actually looks like on the blue tape. The blue color is going to add a blue tint to whatever colors you're working with and so that can make things difficult to see what the final result is going to look like. I always opt to use a clear or white tape when I'm making these charms. Next piece, we're going to put this in place. I don't like working at weird angles, so I'm going to angle this guy up just like so and I'm going to tape it down using just regular standard-sized tape here. I gave myself a little bit extra length when I pulled off my packing tape and that's so that I can use just regular tape to secure those edges down onto my work surface like this. You want this as flat as possible, and you also want it to stay in place. We'll just secure those guys down like that. That's going to prevent you from accidentally sticking yourself to the bezel and knocking it loose, hopefully. So tape it down well. So here we are. We are ready to go and move on to adding our resin into this piece.
9. Casting Your Charm: Glitter Resin: Now we're on to the creative part which is decorating our charm. This is where things get a lot of fun. I went ahead and put a piece of plastic, white plastic underneath the charm so you can see what I'm doing a little bit better. I'm going go ahead and grab some materials here. Now, first things first, I think we're going to go ahead and do the spoon first, then we'll move on to the dish, and then we'll finish up with the ice cream here. Maybe it's not ice cream. I don't know, is that moos or ice cream. Whatever this is here, whatever dessert is in this bowl. We're going ahead and start with the spoon. Now for the spoon, I thought that I would use some glitter, and this is just a fine silver glitter. You can also use chunkier glitters, and those are totally fine. No problem, use what you got. Then of course, our resin. Now, here's a fun trick. You don't necessarily have to have a whole bunch of resin cups or other things to mix your resin in unless you want that, that's totally fine. You can actually mix your resin directly on your mat, which is what I'm going to do. We're going to start off by adding a blob of resin directly onto our match, like so. I'm just going to squeeze out as much as I think I'm going to need for the spoon. You can always add more, but you can't take away. I don't like to waste resin, one because it is pricy, but also I don't like to have a whole bunch of uncured resin that I have to clean up later. I'm going to go ahead and add a little scoop of our silver glitter to directly into the resin like so. Then we're just going to mix that up. See how we're doing this all directly on the mat, so you don't have to worry about any other tools or cups unless you want to. Then that's totally fine. There we go. Now, if you are working next to a window like I am, this stuff is going to be exposed to UV, so that means you're going to have to work a little quicker. I'm going to add a little bit more glitter here, because I want this to look really silver. You know what, I just realized I forgot to put on gloves, so let me do that really quickly. I usually wear gloves when I do these projects just because I don't want resin chemicals all over my hands. Here we are, we've got our silver resin, silver glitter resin, and I'm just going to go ahead and scoop that up and then pour it directly into where the spoon is on the vessel and then just go ahead and move it around with your toothpick or your resin tool, just like that. You can add a little bit more if you like, so it goes all the way up to the top. UV resin was really made for layering as well. If you wanted to layer other things into your charm, you can do that. Then cure between the layers. But with the spoon I'm just going to go for a silver glitter here. I think that's going to be perfectly fine. For my charm, I'm going to fill this up pretty much to the top. This is a lot like, I don't know, I might be dating myself here, but does anybody remember those stained glass baking charms that you could do as a kid where you put the crystals into the frame and then you bake it and you get this cool stained glass decoration. This is sort of like that. At least it reminds me of that. That is filled up. I can already feel my resins starting to gel, because of a window. You can actually see these parts here becoming solid. That's one thing to keep in mind if you are working near a window or any outside UV light, your resin is going to start to cure. Normally, I'm not working near a window, so this isn't an issue but since I'm filming in front of a window then it is. Cool. Now that you have the spoon finished, before we move on to the next part, we'll go ahead and give that a quick cure under our UV lamps for whatever specified time your resin cures at. I will be right back and we'll see you shortly.
10. Casting Your Charm: Alcohol Ink: Next up, we are going to start working on the ice cream bowl here. Our resin from the spoon should be cured and you can give it a little tap and make sure that it's solid. It doesn't have to be completely cured yet, because at the end, we're going to cover the whole piece with a layer of clear resin, just to seal everything off. During that last cure, anything that needs just a little bit more is going to get that. It's fine if it still feels a little bit tacky or sticky. I always opt to tap it with one of my tools or my toothpick rather than stick my finger into it so that I don't leave any impressions in the resin just in case it is on the soft side. What's great about silicon mats like this is once you've cured your resin, you can just peel off any of the excess like this from our mixing experiment that we just did. Actually, this may sound crazy, but I like to save this stuff because it can be added to other pieces. You can cut it apart and you can make it into shapes. I don't know, call me crazy, but I do like to hang onto my scrap resin a little bit. I might be a little bit of a pack rat that way. We're going to mix up our blue resin next, these two areas here, the ice cream and ice cream bowl are both larger areas in comparison to the spoon. The trick where we mix the resin directly on the mat to scoop into the bezel worked great for these small areas, but it might get a little messy if you're trying to mix up a whole lot of resin for larger areas like this. You may want to grab a small cup or a container. I save a bunch of my takeout containers from my local taco stand where they give out salsa in tiny little plastic containers like this one here. It's been used and abused that's why it looks a little messy, but I reuse these containers over and over and over again for mixing my resin. You can cure the resin directly into the cup and then just yank it out when it's solid. That's one option. If you're going to make up a quantity of this stuff and you're not sure that you're going to use it all. You can get these containers, similar to this with a lid and you can keep your resin in this. I typically will wrap this up in foil, and particularly right now too, I'm working next to a window, so my resin is going to cure probably a lot faster than yours if you're not working near an open window. I'm going to wrap mine in some foil just to shield out the light while we're working here. That way I can maybe keep my resin wet a little bit longer. That's one way of saving some of your excess resin. It's not going to keep forever, you should try to use that up, any extra resin that you have leftover, use it up as quick as you can because it will start curing once it's exposed to light. It is going to be slowly curing there and while it does take a lot longer than if you just put it under UV light to cure, it will start to cure a little bit on its own and get sticky and gooey and chunky and that's not great to work with. If you do happen to have any leftover resin that you're trying to save don't keep it for too long, just use it up. In my little foil, make sure foil cup here. I'm going to go ahead and mix up some blue resin as we saw in our diagram. For that, I'm going to use some alcohol ink. It usually comes in small bottles like this, this one is blue colored. You can get these on lots of different stores on Amazon or on the webs. This is, Let's Resin brand, not sponsored or anything, but this is a pretty good quality alcohol ink, it's very concentrated so you don't use too much. I'm going to get that open. Let's go ahead and pour out some resin, here we go. Again, I'm just going to try and estimate how much I need for that dish, just eyeball it. We will just add one drop of that. I'm going to use a toothpick, one of my favorite tools here, and then just mix that up until the alcohol ink is well distributed. You want to make sure it's nice and even so try and get rid of any streaks of dye. Always start with less. You can always add more, but you can't take away. It's that same rule as in cooking like when you're adding salt or something. You can always add more but you can't take away. Add your dye one drop at a time until you get the color that you'd like. I may go just maybe a smidge darker. I used a total of three drops for mine. We've got a nice blue color here. Then in the plan, when we're talking about planning out our design, I had mentioned that I wanted to add some blue glitter to this. This is the same as when we did this for the spoon, except this time I'm going to add in some blue glitter. Again, I've got some finely powdered blue glitter here. I think two scopes for me will be enough. But remember this is your charm, your resin charm, and feel free to do this up however you like. Like I said, if you mess it up, you can go back, you can fix it. We'll just swirl that glitter around in the resin. I will say that that finely powdered glitters are a little bit nicer to work with because you can get a little bit more of a uniform distribution rather than if you were using a chunkier glitter. But really, it's up to you and the look that you're going for. Lots of different options out there. That's looking great. Working as quickly as we can here since we are exposed to some UV. Let's just go ahead and start scooping this stuff in. UV resin is very thick, you are going to have to move it around to get it to fill the bezel. I can already feel mine gelling because I'm right next to a window. Hopefully, you won't have that same issue. We've pretty much filled up, we missed a spot down here at the bottom. I got a little messy there, that's okay, I can clean that up later. We've filled up the ice cream dish, and I'm going to show you a cool trick here. If you grab a toothpick or you can use the pointy end of one of your resin tools. We're going to use some clear resin here to add some polka dots. It's like those glasses or vases that have dots in them or glass dome bubbles, you know what I'm talking about. If not, that's okay, I don't know what they're called, but grab some clear resin like a good blob, and then go ahead and just drop that clear resin into the blue resin. As you do this, hopefully, you'll be able to see these polka dots appearing. This is a cool trick that I liked to use to add some interesting detail. Cool. You can see some cute dots there. This is more visible if you use a bit more glitter maybe than I used, those will be a little bit more apparent. We're going to go ahead and cure this and then we'll move on to the last part, which is the ice cream on top.
11. Casting Your Charm: Opaque Pigments: We are in the final stretch. We're going to be finishing off our ice cream bezel here with the ice cream on top. For this, I'm going to make a white base and then I'm going to swirl in the raspberry ripples. For the base, we're going to start with some white alcohol ink and we're going to mix this into our resin. This is an opaque ink, so you do have to be careful when you're using it. Less is definitely more. When you add this into your resin, you add it just like a regular alcohol ink and just start with one drop at a time and then work your way up. You want to be careful when using opaque pigments like this because it can interfere with the way your resin cures. We are working with a resin that cures under UV light. Well, if UV light can't penetrate the resin then it's not going to cure. Just be careful, keep that in mind and start with less and work your way up. The same is true for things like pigment powders such as the Pearl-EX brand and others. This will add an opaque color to your resin. Just like with this white alcohol ink, it will block out the UV rays that are necessary to cure the resin. That being said, we're going to mix up the white resin first, I've got one of my little salsa cups here from the talkers tent. We'll go ahead and do that first. I'm going to work pretty quickly here just because I'm sitting next to an open window and I've noticed especially, with the blue area here, it started to cure while I was still working. I'm going to mix this off camera and I'll be right back. I'm back. I've got my white resin here, so we're going to start working pretty quick. I'm going to shield this with my hands to try and keep the light out. We're going to start adding this in to the bezel which I'm also going to try and shield from my window. Sorry if it's getting a little bit dark here. All I'm doing is just scooping my white resin into the vessel and then scooting it around using my resin tool. I wound up using two drops of the white alcohol ink in my resin to get a nice solid white color. It's always important to mix your resin really well when you're using these pigments because you can get some streaking which is not great. You want a solid color as you can get using less dye or less ink, I should say. Because we mix this pretty vigorously, we might have introduced some air bubbles and this is a problem with mixing things very rapidly but there's a way around it, so never fear. I'm almost finished here dropping in my white resin. It's okay if we don't fill this completely all the way up to the top because we are going to be adding in some more resin in the form of the raspberry color. There we have it. Now, I'm going to grab my lighter. I can see some tiny bubbles here, it's probably not very apparent on camera. But I do see some tiny bubbles there and some bubbles around the edge. There's a couple of things you can do here. One, if you have a dry toothpick, you can simply pop the bubbles with the toothpick or drag them out of your resin. Pop, that got rid of that one. This works for larger bubbles. If you have some smaller micro bubbles then you can just grab a lighter like this and quickly just flame the surface of your resin. You want to do this very quickly because you don't want to add heat to your resin, you don't want to warp any of the other areas that are already cured. You don't want to set fire to your desk or your silicon mat, it probably won't catch on fire but it will burn. You're playing with fire, we're working with fire, I should say. Just do this very quickly just to zap those bubbles. Now, that our surface is nice and bubble free, we can move on to adding the raspberry ripple next. We're back here with our lovely charm which I'm going to shield off here while we get the next part ready. We are going to use Pearl-EX powder next for the raspberry ripple that we're putting through the white resin. Now I haven't cured the white resin yet. That is still uncured and we just want to swirl this stuff through. The best way to do this is to actually mix your pigment powder into some clear resin and then use a toothpick or one of your resin tools to swirl it through. That's what we're going to do. Just like we did with our glitter, I'm going to just go ahead and add some resin directly onto my mat here. It doesn't take much because we're not doing a whole lot. Then always cap your resin when you're not using it, so that light doesn't get in through that little nozzle at the top. Then we're going to add some Pearl-EX powder here. This is rose gold. I just spilled it all over my desk. Go me. We'll go ahead and use some of that. There we go. We'll just mix that up really quickly and I just used a tiny little scoop there. Cool. Then get a little ball of it on my pick and then we'll just start dragging it through the white resin to make some swirls. Maybe it'll pull up that way towards the top. Here we go, so maybe go from the bottom to the top. I'm going to make this a little thicker. Here we go. There is no right or wrong way of doing this. It's ice cream, so of course, it's not going to be uniform and perfect. Do this however you want. Let's maybe add a little drop in here in the bottom. Here we go. Cool. I think I could be happy with that which is good because my white resin is starting to cure on me. Gorgeous. I'm going to go ahead and clean up my spilled powder here. Get this over to the UV lamp and we'll finish it off with some sprinkles on top.
12. Casting Your Charm: Decorations: Hey everybody, welcome back. Thanks for sticking by while I cleaned up my prolac's powder explosion, which if that ever happens to you, just note to have a vacuum cleaner on standby. You can vacuum up or scoop the rest of the powder if it's still okay into the jar, vacuum up the rest because it does have a tendency to smudge everything, and then whatever's left on your surface, you can clean up with a wet rag. If you ever run into that same issue, I'm a bit of a klutz, so this is quite frequent for me. I spill everything. Let's move on to the last piece here, which is going to be the sprinkles on top of our ice cream. In our plan, we decided to use some cute hearts and stars, which I just realized I don't actually have gold stars as we had in our illustration. I think I'll use some holographic silver ones instead. Now, if you're still on the fence on what this might look like, you can grab some water. I have a little cup of water here. My favorite tool, the toothpick. You can test this out. I've got some of the glitter pieces off to the side here. I just wet the toothpick and pick up a piece of glitter. This is pretty chunky glitter, so it makes it easy. Then you can just set it down on your piece. The pieces are already cured. We haven't added any resin yet. I'm just trying to get a look at how the final piece might turn out and if I like this particular glitter with this particular piece and so that's actually looking pretty cute. I think I can be pretty happy with that. I like the way that looks. Then it wasn't in our original plan, but I thought maybe I would add a little decoration to the spoon here, which I know I'm breaking my own rule. But I happen to have these rhinestones. Oops, come here, rhinestone. I thought maybe that might be cute just to add a little bit more detail here so that the spoon isn't so plain, something like that. You can absolutely test out different materials if you're using chunky glitters or beads in your design before you actually commit to making it permanent with the resin. I'm just going to go ahead and take those guys off. I'm going to scrape these out of here. Get out, get out. The first thing we'll do is add in a layer of clear resin into the design. Now, this is going to do two things. One, it will allow us to float the little glitter pieces in the resin. Two, it's going to seal off the entire design. Now is a good time to bring that resin level all the way up to the edge of the bezel. That's going to keep all of the resin pieces in place. This is like the point of no return, remember, because you can pop the pieces out. But once you get to this point and you're sealing everything off across the metal, then that makes it a bit more permanent. If you had any misgivings about your design so far, now would be the time to change it before we seal the whole design. We're going to repeat this process on the back of the design as well. Here we go again, I'm going to go ahead and add in my clear resin into this area first. You can work area by area as we've been doing. In my case, it's probably the smarter thing to do since I'm working near my window which is curing my resin a lot faster than it's probably curing yours at home. We'll go ahead and just scoot that resin about. Go all the way up to the metal just like so. We're downing the resin over the top of the charm really I should say. There we go. Now, we can grab our toothpick again. I'm just going to dip it in some of the resin this time. Then I can start adding in my chunky glitters into the resin here. You can just push it down under the resin. What's great about UV resin is you can do this. Oops, that's not. There we go. That's the right one. What's great about UV resin is that unless you're working in extra window like I got for the filming of this, you have plenty of time to scoot those little decorations around wherever you like. Maybe I'll add one more heart. Maybe I'll add two more hearts. There we go. Beautiful. That's looking good for that section. We'll go ahead and finish. Oops, bubble. Get out of there. We'll finish off the spoon with a layer of resin. Just scoot that around so it covers the metal bezel. Dab on that over the top. If you notice any bubbles as you do this, make sure that you pop them as you go. Once you've got everything settled, just make sure you pop any bubbles. That looks cute. Something like that. It helps to look at your piece from the side. Get your eyes down rather than going right over the top. That way, you can see if there's any bubbles floating around on the surface. I don't see any on mine, which usually if you're not mixing in pigments. If you're going straight from your bottle to the design, you get fewer bubbles, I've noticed. Just finish off the ice cream dish here. Get that sealed off. If you'd like to add some more details like glitters or other decorations into your ice cream dish, feel free or if you're using another charm, feel free. No problems. The beauty of UV resin is in its ability to layer. You can make beautiful dimensional designs just by doing multiple layers upon layers of resin. Stay tuned for that. I'm actually going to be putting together a new class on creating a frame bezel. It's an empty frame where we put in and layer different decorations like flowers. It's a lot of fun. Stay tuned for that. Coming soon. I think I can be pretty happy with that. That looks pretty cute. Now that you've gotten the resin all over the edges of the bezel, everything seems pretty sealed off, you can go ahead and do one final cure on this guy. Then we'll finish everything off in the last step. I forgot to mention that for this last cure, you want to make sure that the surface is completely cured and solid, not tacky or sticky. In the last few steps, we've fudged that a little bit. You can cure the resin and then work on some other areas and that's not a problem, but for this final cure, we want to make sure that everything is completely cured and solid to the touch because we don't want to introduce fingerprints into our resin if it's partially cured. Just make sure that everything is completely solid and ready to go. You may have to run your UV lamp a little bit longer for this last step.
13. Final Touches: Everybody, welcome back. Now we are ready to remove the cured piece from our tape. Mine is nice and solid, and ready to go. We'll go ahead and pull the tape off. Oops, I cured a little bit of my powder there. Very carefully take your charm, and then peel the tape off the back. Like so. There we go. You'll probably notice that on the back of your charm, there's a ripple texture. Got a little extra on the outside there. Oops, break that off. You'll probably notice that there is this Ripley texture to it, and that is from your tape. Even with our best efforts to keep the tape flat, you are curing a resin on top of something that's not, really flat. It's flexible. As resin cures, especially with UV resin, it does shrink a little bit. That is why you've got some ripples back here. But don't worry about that. We're going to fix that by adding one last coating of clear resin over the entire back of our charm. Then that will take care of that you won't even be able to see it, it will have a nice smooth finish to it. I'm going to go ahead and get my gloves back on here. We'll add that last bit of resin. Oops, bubble. Just like before, we're just going to go ahead and this time, since the resin is pretty much level with the bezel, I'm just going to go ahead and drop my resin all over the back here. Make this go a little quicker. Then with your toothpick or resin tool, just start scraping that around. This doesn't have to be a really thick layer. We're just going for a nice coat over the back. Just a nice even domed coat. I'm probably going to just speed this part up here so you don't have to watch me scraping away at my resins. Here we go, speed cam. All finished with putting my last layer of resin on. I'm going to do one last flame here. Just get rid of any surface bubbles and there we go. This is ready for its final cure. Now, if you wanted to make your design dual-sided, and you wanted to decorate the back as well, you can absolutely do that. But I figured nobody would see the back of my bezel here. I'm going to go ahead and do one last cure, and we'll call it a day.
14. Final Thoughts: How did your charm turn out? I am super happy with the way this turned out. I think it's super cute. I hope that you had fun in this class and I would love to see what you all created. Please post your creations in your project files so that we can all be inspired by your work. Please stay tuned for more of my recent classes coming soon, where we explore how to make your own silicone molds and how to create layered resin designs, which is where UV resin truly excels. Thank you so much for taking my class, and I will see you soon.
Rei Cameron, Pronouns: she/her
