Sunday, March 29, 2009

Experiments: Epoxy Resin

have never worked with epoxy resin before, and felt utterly intimidated
blueberry jam

i used black accent beads, they're reaaaaaaaaaaaally tiny. less than 1mm. but rather uneven, so i dumped them into the remainder resin from making the orange jelly (?) with a bit of cobalt, bit of red, and a touch of purple.

it's hard to take a good angle of them, i'm not sure which looks more convincing as blueberry jam atop cakes, the ones with more or less 'blueberries'?



jellied oranges were actually failed caning experiments. didn't look like orange slices (IMO) so i quartered them and am hoping to make lovely stick cakes out of these. we'll see!

i actually made an earlier batch (this being the 2nd attempt) with 15 drops of each resin component, but that failed miserably. plus i was too impatient so i kept touching it (and getting sticky gunk onto myself), so fingerprints were left all over, it got slanted and wouldn't level properly, stuck to the aluminum foil ARGH i chucked it out.

lessons learnt:

- the needle that you get from pharmacies is too narrow to suck up the goopy resin
- forgot where i got the straws that fit perfectly onto the nozzles :(
- oil paints in minute amounts (tip of toothpick will do) give a wonderful transparent hue
- sticks to aluminum foil :(
- does not stick to cling wrap (yay!) but i used a dollar store knockoff, so it might or might not work better with the branded stuff?
- does not stick to bakery takeout plastic container bottoms, but is quite a bitch to remove :(

notes to self:

- have to experiment with using a mold release agent. will try baby oil :X
EDIT: Does not work, resulting resin does not cure hard, remains limp. I guess I could use this result for other projects.

- baking it
EDIT: no change. not sure about colour, since i only used the 'blueberry' one.

i have left them to cure for about 10 hours so far, it's slightly flexible but not sticky. i've read popping them into the oven will cure it faster, however i'm not sure how this epoxy would react since i have no working instructions to read. the bottles are medicine bottles labelled A & B :P

4 comments:

  1. oh no.. dun this dry by itself? No need to bake!

    ReplyDelete
  2. yes they air dry but i'm experimenting with incorporating them into polymer clay items :P pics coming up!

    ReplyDelete
  3. wow! we can use bluberry jam to make a lovely stuff like this.. thank you for the idea! :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Where do you get epoxy resin from?

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for taking the time out to comment! :D