These bowls are made from air dry clay and decorated with watercolour and acrylic gold paint. I experimented with a few different methods, shapes and styles. Some are large and deep for finished jewellery and some are shallow with a spout for beads during jewellery making that can then be easily poured back into their bags. Read on for a step by step and some tips if you want to try it for yourself.

I picked up the air dry clay from Hobbycraft with no particular project in mind and it sat around for a couple of months. It was £3.75 for a 1kg block and I used about half to make all these bowls. So that worked out at ~16p each. Plus a bit of paint – call it 20p per bowl. Other things I gathered were talcum powder to stop the clay sticking to my hands (something I read online somewhere and it worked really well), a rolling pin, a scalpel, a silicone mat to work on and a round bottomed glass.

2. My plan was to roll out the clay to ~5mm thick, cut out a circle and mould it around the glass bottom into a dish shape. Then pop it off, put it to one side to dry and repeat – easy!

hmmm, not so easy. It rolled out and moulded ok but it would not “pop off” the glass. It just peeled off the glass and instantly became a flat disk again.

3. alternative plan needed. I would need to leave the bowls on the glass until dry. many more glasses needed. I ran around the house like a headless chicken, gathering up anything that would do the trick. I found a few things but didn’t want to risk ruining anything so only a few plastic lids.

4. This set back also gave me the opportunity to try other ways of making the bowls. A few I just moulded by hand as you would generally imagine working with clay. Another method was to slice into the rolled out disk around the edge and then overlap the sections. the fewer/deeper the cuts, the deeper the bowl with sloping sides. Lots of small cuts gives a shallower dish with vertical sides.

5. I thought that moulding a spout might be difficult but actually it was fairly straightforward and just kind of fell into place. Once all the bowls were shaped I put them to one side with the intention of leaving them to dry overnight.

6. About 40 minutes later I happened to be walking past and saw that the bowl moulded around the blue glass had cracked in half!

7. Of course, the clay would be shrinking as it dried! It was too late to save this bowl but I needed to take the other bowls off the glasses before they also cracked. They mostly popped off fine and held their shape. (now they pop!)

8. one did crack as I peeled it off but not all the way through so I rushed it to the sink and patched it up in a scene that was not in the least bit evocative of Demi Moore in ghost. Since it was so soggy I thought i’d experiment with dripping and splashing some paint and see what happened. I liked the effect and left it hoping that it would look just as good once dry.

9. The next day I splashed paint (watercolour) on all the dried bowls and let that dry.

10. I then added gold acrylic paint to the edges in various ways to finish them off.

the cracked/repaired/swayzed bowl dried great btw

the little spouted bead bowls also turned out great

 I’m really happy with them – they look good and do exactly what I wanted. They’re all slightly different shapes and styles, different colours and different techniques of adding gold but similar enough to look like they belong together as a set.

I’ve been experimenting with resin the last few months and finally at a point where what I’m making is good enough to wear and sell. I’d like to share some of the process with you.

I watched a lot of tutorial videos and read some blogs while I waited for all the supplies to arrive. It seemed there were lots of things to be aware of:

• mixing needs to be done very carefully so as not to introduce bubbles
• but mixing also needs to be very thorough so that it cures correctly
• proportions of the two epoxy parts need to be measured carefully also to ensure correct curing
• whatever you mix in to the resin to colour it could also effect curing
• maybe I need release spray so the resin doesn’t stick to the moulds?

This was my set up for the first attempt. I had my A and B epoxy parts, silicone moulds, mixing sticks and pots, oil, a paint brush, toothpicks and grease-proof paper:

plus some metallic leaf (silver, copper and gold) to embed in the resin.

I brushed oil into the molds so that the resin wouldn’t stick and measured out 10ml of part B followed by 20ml of part A. Then I started mixing. very slowly and very carefully for ages and ages :)

For my first few attempts I tried various different substances to colour the resin – the results were not always predictable:

acrylic and oil paint did not work well at all. It just wouldn’t mix into the resin but stayed as small solid lumps:

nail varnish mixed in well but whatever colour it was in the bottle the resin always turned a yellowy beige colour – ok if that’s the colour you want I guess…

colourant for soap worked ok but was really tough to mix in – I guess it’s water-based and just didn’t want to integrate.

I saw a few tutorials using eye shadow – this was great but only gave slight tints of translucent colour. I wanted to experiment with a more opaque finish – acrylic ink was quite successful.

I now have some ‘official’ epoxy colourant but it’s good to keep experimenting I think.

everything I tried cured perfectly but sometimes it took a very long time. The time on the box says 24 hours, the reviews said more like 48 and I would agree with that. It’s winter here and the temperature makes a big difference to setting time. It’s more like 24 – 48 hours in the airing cupboard or 3 to 4 days in a regular room.

I got a bunch more moulds and realised that the oil (or any other release substance) was not needed. You need to be careful and ease the rings out gently but I’ve never snapped a ring trying to get it out of the mould. I have squashed them though because it’s too soon and they’re still soft! Even the thin rings are very strong once fully set – there’s no way I could break one with my hands – probably if you purposefully propped one up and then stood on it in solid shoes you could do it.

after a few rounds of this and seeing that everything turned out ok in general I started to experiment. Since the setting takes such a long time I might as well use that to my advantage. Monitoring the moulds over time I started to take the pieces out when they were not yet completely solid. soft enough to cut and shape but solid enough to hold their shape and not pick up finger prints on the surface. By cutting with a scalpel and then applying more metallic leaf I could achieve some great effects looking like raw stone, carved stone, or some kind of metallic ore.

then I left them to set for a few more days and brushed on a fresh layer of clear resin to seal the metal leaf. A few more days for that to set and then we’re done.

final touches for all the rings included sanding down any rough or uneven edges with increasingly fine sandpaper and then a quick polish.

Jewellery making was one of the first crafty things I started doing as a teenager. Continue reading “beaded bracelet diy” →

DIY bead loom bracelet. This was much easier to set up than I thought although the actual beading was quite fiddly at times. I don’t know if a shop bought bead loom makes things easier but I managed well enough that I’ll probably make another. Maybe with elastic next time.
Continue reading “bead loom bracelet” →