Give a girl a bunch of flowers and it will last a week.... but give her a resin bangle filled with flowers and it will last forever! Flowers are really important in our lives. We use them to landscape our gardens, as tokens of our love and affection, we eat and brew some, and we enjoy the fragrance of others. There are so many ways we use them. But I like to use them in my resin bangles. Whether it's a posy of flowers from the garden, a bunch of flowers from Mother's Day or a wedding bouquet, using them in resin or other crafts is a great way of remembering that occasion or the person who gave them to you. Unfortunately, you can't take a beautiful fresh flower and place it in resin. It will become brown, sludgy or mouldy in a short time. Flowers and other organic materials need to be thoroughly dried before they can be embedded in resin. So, here are the techniques I use. I've tried a few different drying methods and some of my results have been really good and some not......

I've been playing around with dried flowers and resin in the studio lately and one of the pieces I made is the pretty floral focal in the bracelet below. You can learn how to make pieces like this in the Resin Jewellery Workshop (held monthly in my studio). The flower-on-flower look is rather sweet and it only needs a simple stringing design to highlight how pretty it is. I chose watermelon pink glass pearls and just a hint of green to play up the floral nature of the bead. Whilst you most likely don't have a similar resin component on hand, don't let that stop you from recreating this simple design - just choose a focal bead with WOW! factor and beads that complement it. Here's what you'll need: a knockout focal bead of your choice 6 coordinating 8mm beads (I used 4 rounds and 2 bicones from Cousin Corp)  14 #8 seed beads 68 4mm glass pearls  2 3mm metal spacer beads.  You'll also need: 7 eye pins 2 #2 crimp tubes 2 crimp covers 2 wire guardians 0.012" be......