A little while ago I decided to try making some jewelry in open backed trays, using small stones that I had bought a few years ago and never put to use. I was also trying out "resin tape" for the backing to keep the resin from flowing out of the back of the trays, so it was multiple experiments at once!
I laid them all out on the tape and set them up on a level surface and got out my resin. I have used this resin for coating wood jewelry many times but not for anything like I was doing this day. Since it's been cold I made sure to warm the resin up before I began, with the extra mixing it had lots of tiny bubbles.
My go-to for removing bubbles is my little torch, generally it draws them to the surface and pops them quite nicely. What I found out, after I had poured the resin and sprinkled in the stones, is that the resin tape does NOT reach kindly to heat! it began to buckle and warp, threatening both the level and containment aspect of using it! Well poop. I tried short bursts of heat, which seemed to be the most effective way to eliminate the bubbles without totally messing up the tape the pieces were secured to. You can see that the surface I had them on was black, in retrospect that probably wasn't the best
choice either. It was harder to see what was going on in each individual piece. From what I could tell, they looked fairly bubble free so I left them to dry until the next day. That was when I discovered tiny bubbled embedded in each piece! So I am chalking all this up as a learning experience in my jewelry endeavors. ;) Here are the things I learned:
Make sure your resin is warm before stirring.
Don't rely on heat to remove bubbles if you are using the resin tape!
Use a light colored background.
Make sure you have LOTS of good light to see what you are doing. (I thought I could see what was going on but, NO, I could not!
Buy a lighted magnifying glass to get a better view of small pieces (done!)
I will be trying these again but I will use UV resin instead...although that is also going to be a learning experience because I've not tried it before. ;)
Even though these are imperfect, I still like them! Perfect is rare to achieve and stressful to pursue, that's not what my life is about at this stage. If I can improve each time I try something, that is what motivates me. I'll keep you posted when I make my next attempt!
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