A Little Resin Challenge

Monday, April 30, 2012 - Leave a Comment

Today I learned that not all creativity ends up being in the form of artwork or in a piece of jewellery. Sometimes creativity comes in the form of solutions.

Take last night. I had mixed a batch of resin but had some left over and as I hate wasting anything I decided to use the last of my resin by painting it onto some Friendly Plastic beads I had sitting around. Resin is great for protecting the foil of Friendly Plastic and it also makes the beads much more durable for use in jewellery.

I usually make my Friendly Plastic beads on bamboo skewers so it makes sense to thread them back on to a skewer whilst coating them with resin. The skewers can be pushed into a block of foam to keep them upright whilst they cure.

All was going well, but when I checked on them this morning, I discovered the resin had run down the skewers and the beads were stuck hard!

Now, it's not for lack of experience that I know this will happen if I don't pay attention to them until the resin gets to gel stage.... but last night, I completely forgot. So now I have a little challenge on my hands - how to get the beads off the skewers!

If you've ever worked with resin before, you'll know it is a very strong glue so no amount of twisting and pulling is going to separate the bead from the bamboo. This calls for a little bit of creative thinking. I can't use heat to soften the resin because the bead is plastic and it will melt onto the skewer compounding the problem.

But being quite handy with a Stanley knife. I try my hand at scraping away the resin where it's attached to the skewer.

I think this is going to work. So I scraped all the way around the bead and then grabbed my pliers to hold the skewer whilst twisting the bead firmly to remove it. But before that happened, the skewer went "snap!".

OK, another challenge!

There's not enough of a stump left to grab hold of so there's really only one solution..... drill the hole out. My trusty Dremel did the trick and in no time the hole in my bead is ready for stringing.

So today's lesson is this: if you're applying resin to vertical or curved surfaces, pay attention to the drips and you'll make a whole lot less work for yourself!

'Til next time.....