Too Soft!

Got around to doing some resin samples this morning, but didn't clock the fact that I had miss-measured one of the batches of hardener until a couple of hours ago. So, half have set, half haven't...and none of them want to come out of the new moulds I bought. Typically one horrific chain of supermarkets silicon ice cube trays are indeed superior to another.

Fortunately however, I know that the thing I was trying to set will work and look good and I can get on with a few idea! Hurrah!

I'm quite enjoying making resin samples of colours and different pigmenting agents. Or in other words working out what I can (a) buy on the cheap or (b) find in the house and given my hardener has started to become increasingly more yellow (it must be two years old by now!) I may as well use it up experimenting or on opaque work. I did the above samples at Christmas using mostly soft artists pastels ground up using a pestle and mortar and glitter. What can I say? I'm a girl and I like glitter! Anyway, today's experiments included loose tea after being inspired by designer Claire Lowe, and gel food colouring as an alternative to transparent resin pigments. The main samples I'll keep secret until I can work them into a design because they go with a particular piece of poetry etc. But on the others, the gel colouring works really well as an alternative to the expensive dyes and I only used the tip of a straw and this over pigmented my samples. They cost about £15 from Lakeland and that's less than most of the dyes I found for resin - plus you get to make yummy things like this:

Not resin, obviously, and I wouldn't recommend using them for baking if you're re-dipping your resin sticks, but if you aren't, these are yummy. I'm slightly obsessed with making proper French Macarons at the moment, these aren't todays attempt, they're the last ones and I just prefer the colour combination even if the new batch look more like macarons.

Anyway, instead of whinging about the resin not working, I'm going to put it back on my shelf out of harms way, give it until the morning to see if it'll set and go have a nice treat and enjoy that something did go right today!