My sterling silver and resin jewelry has been a bit neglected for the past couple of months. The scrabble tile pendants have taken off with orders, and I have been mostly focusing on them as of late. That is changing a bit as we move closer to the holiday shopping season. These are just some random pictures from this weekend of resin and silver pendants in progress.
The resin gets poured in stages. I only pour one color at a time.
The silver portion of the pendants get "staged" first. Then I pour the colors.
Can you tell that red and green were my last two pours? The resin needs at least 24 hours to cure before I pour the next color.
I "overfill" the resin in the silver well. This will get sanded down later.
When I'm done pouring the resin, I let the jewelry set in a glass pyrex dish covered with plastic wrap. I will check on it from time to time and make sure nothing is going wrong. For example, a couple of hours after I poured the green resin, one of the pendants was leaking from underneath. I was able to get it out and clean up the resin before it made a huge mess on a several pendants.
I hope to have many of these pieces ready for the Downtown Festival and Art Show in November.
I make the "master" silver piece and send it out to get multiples cast. I try to avoid soldering a piece then inserting the resin because the solder can "wick" in tarnish which will never get cleaned if there is resin over top of it. Obviously if it's a dark color resin, you will never see it, but if it's light colored or clear, oh well. If you're soldering on a bail or something, that's different. No resin on that.
ReplyDeleteYes, the solder will tarnish first. I worry that even though a solder joint may be covered by resin, the tarnished look will "wick" into the solder and work its way to the place where it joins with the resin. I might just be extra cautious, but knowing that people abuse their jewelry, I'm just trying to head off any potential problems.
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