 Hi friends, Rebecca from Art Resin here once again and today I'm joined by Michelle Deckers, who is an amazing, amazing jewelry resin artist, as well as other art, as you can see here. But Michelle, what are we going to work on today? So today I'm going to be using the mold making material from Art Resin, of course, to make these lovely leaf shaped necklaces and earrings, as well as the teardrop shaped ones. We're going to incorporate some wood, alcohol ink, and of course the Art Resin. Amazing. Show me how. So we're going to be making these lovely earrings and necklaces, and in order to do that, we have these acrylic cutouts of the leaf shapes, as well as the teardrop shapes, and we're going to be using our own mold making materials to make our own molds for it. And we're going to be using this coaster mold, so we can make these earrings and necklaces time and time again. So first, before we mix our mold making material, I like to make sure that my acrylic cutouts are going to stay in place. So we're going to use some glue. Now you can use any glue, but I like a fast drawing, so I'm going to use my hot glue gun. We don't need much on it, just enough so it's going to stay there once we put a fluid over top of them. So we just pop them into place. That way we know once we add the fluid, it's not going to float. Now we're going to be mixing our mold making material. It's an easy one-to-one ratio that cures within three hours before we can use it. One of them is blue and the other is clear, and when you're mixing them together, just mix thoroughly and make sure that it's one consistent color, and it'll be ready to use. Now it's time to mix it up. I like to use a rubber spatula. It's very versatile. You can use it again over and over. Just peel off the mess once it's all dried. Just scraping the sides, kind of going in a circle, not trying to cause too many bubbles as you do with your resin mixing. All right, now that we're all done mixing our mold making material, we're ready to pour. Now I like to just pour into one spot and allow the mold making material to flow evenly as it does over top of the acrylic shapes, and again, it's self-leveling, so it's just going to level itself out, and if you need to add more, then obviously go ahead. And since we have it glued into place, we don't have to worry about the items floating away from us. And there we go for our last one. Okay, now that our molds are all poured and done, we just have to wait the three to four hours for it to cure. We can pop them out and look at our acrylics and see how the molds look. Okay, just something to note as you're pulling your objects out of the mold making material, even with gluing down our objects, sometimes a little cleanup is necessary. A small exacto knife or fabric knife, such as this one, can really help clean up the edges. And look, they pop out of the molds super easy. Okay, so I've gone ahead and I've made a couple extra molds so we can have fun with some alcohol inks doing a couple different styles, and we're ready to mix, pour, and have fun with some resin. So as we have our resin and our hardener, I'm just going to go ahead and make about two ounces of this to fill up our molds. It doesn't matter if you start with the hardener or the resin, it's a one to one ratio. It's one of the easiest resins to use. So we're just going to go ahead, pour the hardener up to the one ounce line and then our resin. And just up to that two ounce line there with the resin for a perfect mix. And now we just go ahead and mix for three minutes. So the great thing about using a silicone mold is with the resin, once it's cured, you can squeeze it and it pops right out for another use, which is very environmentally friendly. And I know I'm using a wooden stick, but you can find lots of silicone mixing sticks too. All right, now that we're all mixed up, one thing I do like to point out is I like the silicone molds like this. It's easier to get into those smaller crevices and it leaves a little bit less of a mess for you. And we're ready to go. I just like to pour it in straight from the middle and then kind of move it around a little bit so we can get into those crevices. These are pretty small and we can just kind of encourage it a little bit. And I don't like to fill the mold up all the way just as we're going to be adding alcohol inks to this. We don't want it to overflow. And if we need to add a little more resin after the inks are added, that's definitely something we can do easily. But see the stems can be a little thin. So we definitely want to get it in there with no problems. I like to let it settle for a little bit, again, it's self-leveling. Now that we're all done pouring our resin here, it's time to have some fun with the alcohol inks. I'm going to stick to more of the traditional leafy colors with the alcohol ink here. So I've got a nice vibrant green. I'm going to put a couple drops in. Again, you don't want to get too overwhelming with how much you use. And we're going to be using a couple colors. So just drip them in periodically that likes to spread. And once we add more colors and the ink sinker, it will really do some really cool stuff. And like I said, I'm just sticking to the greens and the traditional leafy colors. Now we're just going to go into a yellow. There we go. Just a couple drops around again. I know it looks like we might have some empty resin spots, but once you start adding that ink sinker, it really starts to spread and do its thing. Okay, I might add a little bit more green, especially to this bigger one. And now the magic happens here with our alcohol ink sinker. So you just pour it right on top of the colors and look, it starts to spread and have a reaction. You can see it starts to sink into the color. It's so cool. And we can add a little bit more color on top too of the white. And look, it makes such a cool reaction. Now we'll let that reaction happen. If we want to add some more color on top of the white, we'll come back in a minute and see how it looks. You can add a little bit of gold too. Just a little couple drops just to give it that extra shine once it comes out. Where it's super dark, I'm just going to add just another couple drops in here so that it will really sink that ink. That's basically it. Now it kind of looks like some of them could use a little bit more resin and that's fine. It's really better to add a little bit more and then you can kind of spread it around so it doesn't dilute the alcohol ink that we just did or if you find that you pour it in the middle and it diluted it, now you have a clear spot, add some more alcohol ink on to it. This is a great thing about art. You don't have to be an amazing artist as you see, you just drop them in and it does its own thing. This is just cool, fun stuff. Now that we're all finished with our first style of molds, we have some leftover resin that we're going to be using for our second style of mold that we made. So with the teardrop mold here, I wanted to incorporate wood. So I grabbed the acrylic cutouts of the teardrops that I used to make this mold and placed it on a piece of 8 inch thick wood, traced it out and used my skill saw to cut it out from there. I've already used the bottom half for our project here, however now for my next project I've got the top half all ready to go. I'm thinking, I just want to add a little bit of the white mixative, it's just a little bit for color kind of thing, so I'm only adding a couple drops and I think it would be pretty fun to add some gold flake into this. So we just added in, it can be really sticky, sometimes a little hard to work with but that's alright and it really wants to stick to their sides so we'll just try to scrape it off the sides like that and get it right down. I'm just going to make sure it's all mixed really nicely and we're ready to pour. It's nice to be able to squeeze that silicone so you can just ease it in. Perfect amount. The beauty about the silicone molds are so easy to clean off. If you do that, here we go, perfect. The wood is a little bit higher than the mold so we don't want to fill it up all the way to the wood in this case because we don't want it to overflow so once we're finishing it we'll just be sanding a little bit extra off of the wood which is a great process to learn as well. So we're just going to make sure that they're not moving, sometimes if they want to start floating you can add some weight onto it and something small like even just a rock works great. So now that our products are all poured and looking perfect, we want to keep them looking perfect so we want to keep the dust out and other environmental contaminants. So just simple enough, we have a lid here from like a veggie tray where you can use Tuberware containers, whatever works perfectly like this to fit over top of your products. Now let's check in tomorrow, pop them out of the mold and see how they look. Okay, we're back, it's been 24 hours and I am excited to see how our objects are going to look coming out of our molds here. Okay, so let's see how easy it is to pop these out of the mold. I just sometimes like to encourage the edges with a little popping out motion like that and then you can just pull them out just as easily like that. Now sometimes as it's pretty thin, the alcohol ink can dilute like the epoxy just a little bit and it may need that full 72 hours to cure. They're looking so good, they're going to come out of these molds perfectly, our edges are fairly clean and just look how easy it is. Oh my gosh, isn't that so cool? Look how the alcohol ink really makes the pattern on the leaf just so unique. Let's see how our necklace is going to look. Just like that, perfect. What a nice match. Now we can see how these ones are going to look. Now just the same, just encourage the edges to kind of let go and it pops right out super easy. There we go, a little clean up on the edges but we're going to show you how exactly to clean up the necklaces especially with the wood we had noted it was a little bit taller than the molds and I'll show you how easy it is just to clean those up. So cool. Okay, so as you saw our earrings and necklace pulled out of our molds really nicely but a little clean up goes a long ways for getting those nice crisp edges. I do like to wait that full 72 hours in order to get that nice crisp edge. So I did make some earrings and necklaces previously using our molds so we can show you how to clean them up so they're nice and beautiful, ready to go. As a woodworker I always have a bulk supply of sandpaper. You can also find nice packages of sandpaper off of Amazon for cleaning up your jewelry accessories. However, just a simple nail file found from your local dollar store. It's really all you'll need to clean up your jewelry. It's got rough edges all the way down to buffing. It just works so clean and easy making sure that once you're wearing it against your skin it's not going to feel rough in any way. So we'll just go through each one just cleaning off some of the rough edges that may have overflowed from putting it in our molds. Now with our wood pieces I'm definitely going to start from the coarser grit or if it was the sandpaper we'd start with a hundred and I like to go down all the way to two thousand. So just as easy as this. For the wood ones I do like to use the rougher one, sometimes the epoxy does leak just a little bit but once we finish our wood product you're really not going to notice that color difference. And as I mentioned before with our wood here it was a little bit higher than our molds which again you can just rub it on there until it's down and nice and level. This takes a little bit more than the cleaning so sometimes that is when I will refer back to my sandpaper just so I can get a good circular motion just like that. Not too long it will be nice and flush with your epoxy again. Now once we're happy with how the edges are looking and feeling we're ready for our hardware. Okay so we have all of our hardware here. I have a lot of different color options so we can pair them perfectly with our earrings and necklaces. I found all of this off of Amazon. I'm also going to be drilling my own holes into the earrings and necklaces so I've got my nice drill here and some pliers that you're going to need to open up some of the hardware to get it onto your earrings. Now we're ready to assemble. Now I do like to be conscious of where I am drilling not too close to the edges or the top just in case and I do like to drill onto a harder surface. So you can start on an angle and just slowly and carefully just making sure you get to the other side and we're ready to add some hoops and hardware. I do like to go with a nice 18 inch length unless I want it to be up and tight closer to my neck. There it is. Your necklace. Now this part can be a little tedious and very delicate when you're drilling and adding the hoops and the hardware. You don't want to be too hard on pulling it just as you don't want anything to get wrecked or ripped but just take your time and enjoy the product and it will be absolutely beautiful and worth the little wait. Okay now for our wooden pieces I do like to finish them with a food safe oil. You can really use anything that comes from your cupboards that you use for cooking but I am using a mineral grade oil to season the wood and finish it to its beautiful natural state. This will also help if you had any overflow of your epoxy that you didn't quite sand off. It really brings it back to the one uniform color. Okay, here we are with our finished products. They're looking absolutely beautiful. The creative wood style and the cool alcohol ink. Now we can wear functional earrings and necklaces wherever we go. What do we have here? Michelle, these are so nice. I love this alcohol ink, how that came up to the surface and the gold flake that you have in here. Super on trend. Thank you. You were good girl. Well you're welcome back anytime. Awesome. You're welcome back anytime. You can leave your comments, your questions in the comment box, subscribe and we'll see you next time.