Festive gifts

Recently I've been busy making some gifts for friends and family to wear. My mum has always liked pandas so when I found this porcelain panda bead online at The Bead Shop Manchester, I had to buy it: http://www.the-beadshop.co.uk/beads-c491/porcelain-beads-c190/porcelain-animal-bead-4-p1419

I added it to some silver plated chain and combined this with some Swarovski stars and Millefiori hearts and round beads.

All of the beads were attached to the chain with headpins. You can buy these from most jewellery supply shops: http://www.beadsunlimited.co.uk/Headpin-SP/bo4095?sid=2750#item2750. A headpin is basically a thin stick of metal with a flat end at the end to stop beads from falling off. You thread it with beads and then cut above the last bead and create a loop using round nosed pliers. then you can attach them to a chain or an earring finding.

While searching for animal beads I came across these cute ceramic fox beads from Eljo's Habedashery on Folksy: http://folksy.com/items/2549281-3-x-Ceramic-Fox-Beads.

A friend of mine really likes foxes, so I thought some fox based jewellery would be a perfect gift for her. I began by creating some beaded Kumihimo using seed beads. I used colours I thought would tone well with the foxes. I glued the ends of the Kumihimo to some end caps and attached these to a chain.

I then threaded a fox bead onto a headpin with a bead at the bottom, to stop the fox from sliding over the end of the headpin. I attached this to the necklace using some ordinary sewing thread and some glue.

To match the necklace I attached the remaining two fox beads to some earwires using headpins and added beads to match the beads in the necklace.

I also made this necklace and earring set using the same methods as for the fox set. This incorporates a longer stretch of beaded Kumihimo.

 

Experimenting with beads in resin - what went wrong!

In my last post I showed some pictures of molds I had filled with clear resin and beads. These were using 1 part epoxy resin to 1 part hardener, which is meant to cure fully in 72 hours but soft cure in 24. Well, I kept checking and it just wouldn't harden. In the end a few semi hardened and the rest are a squidgy mess! It's also pretty difficult trying to get them out of the mold.

I had a look around online to try and find out what the problem could have been. According to Craftbits.com it could have been my mold: http://www.craftbits.com/project/basic-resin-casting 

"Latex molds: These are great to use as the flexibility of them means you can literally POP out your resin cast. You may need to experiment with your resin as some resins require a little extra hardener to cure in a latex mold due to the fact that the temperature of the resin is effected because of the latex". Hmmm, maybe I should have added more hardener. 

Some more interesting words from Crafbits.com:

"Mold Release: If you are using a flexible mold there really is not need to add a mold release agent. However a perfect inexpensive release agent is spray cooking oil. Simply give your mold a quick spray and wipe over and it's ready to use". I used Vaseline and it seems a bit sticky and not particularly effective. Next time I will try cooking oil. Failing that, I think I'll buy some mold release.

Other reasons why resin might not cure, can be found here: http://www.resinobsession.com/Resin-FAQ/134/12-reasons-why-your-resin-didnt-cure.html

From these reasons the only things I can think of that would have gone wrong are not adding enough hardener for a latex mold and not having a warm enough room. I did warm the bottles in hot water before using it (specified in the instructions) and the heating was on, but it could have been a reason.

So now I'm left with the difficulty of trying to get the gooey shapes out of the molds and get rid of all the sticky mess. Might just leave that for a bit!
 

Experimenting with beads in resin

As I currently have a bit of free time, I thought I'd spend some of it practicing jewellery making techniques in the hope that I can make some things I would be happy to sell. I have just been experimenting with adding beads to resin. I'm still using the Epoxy resin used in previous posts, where you mix one part resin with one part hardener. 

I've already found that some wooden buttons I added keep floating to the surface, but the other beads seem to be staying in place,so I'm looking forward to seeing how they turn out once fully cured. I'm particularly keen to see how the large star (top left in the pictures below) comes out. This is embedded with some multi-coloured Italian Millefiori beads.

This time I have put Vaseline in the molds, which should hopefully make the shapes easier to turn out. Last time I didn't do this and had great difficulty getting them out.