I was following Amado Gudek for its beautiful jewellery ( I got a pair of earrings from their Fallen Trees project), and had asked if they conducted workshops. The founder said unfortunately no back then, but a year or so later, I saw that she had set up Resin Play and I couldn’t wait to sign up for a workshop.
I saw a number of different art pieces posted on the Resin Play instagram account, and really loved the resin seascapes, and was really pleased to see a seascape resin & acrylic jewellery making workshop in June.
Beautiful seascape pieces lying around at the Resin Play the workshop:
Elaine, who founded the Amado Gudek label and also Resin Play was our instructor for the day. We were going to be using the crowning technique, where resin is poured on the surface of acrylic pieces (versus casting where you poured the resin directly into a mould to create the piece).
The workshop started with us figuring out what is shapes our jewellery pieces would be, tracing them onto the acrylic pieces, and then sawing them out:
The shapes I picked out
Instructor shot a clip of us sawing the pieces – it was quite an arm workout, but also having to balance being gentle (someone in the workshop broke 3 saw blades…)
Thank goodness for filing, which helped me smooth out the edges of the acrylic pieces I sawed out
To get the beach / shore on the pieces, we painted them on the edges of the acrylic pieces:
After which, we had to mix two parts of transparent liquids to get the resin, and mix in colours, which we proceeded to pour onto the acrylic pieces. By then, we had to wear gloves and only had ~30 minutes to do the pouring (before the resin started to harden).
The instructor helped us with a bit of alcohol ink in the white coloured resin to create the wave effect. Apart from pouring, we also did some blowing (through straws) to get the various shades to blend together.
Here’s what my output looked like (the ocean bits kept flowing to the shore so I had to blow them away to retain my beach…):
Resin takes some time to dry, so I came back on anther day for the second part of the assembly and finishing for the jewellery.
Had to find my pieces among the many students’ work
Thank goodness for my photo documentation – managed to dig my pieces out 🙂 (the stray odd shaped pieces were from the excess resin which I poured out on the sheet)
I decided to make two necklaces and a pair of earrings (need to “drill” tiny holes into those pieces), and a brooch. And I cut the stray pieces up to make some ear studs 🙂
Little drill for the pendent
Putting the parts together
Here’s what the final product looks like – I love it so much (I’m biased), it feels like my own jewellery collection ❤
I chose more blue hues than green, and my output looked a bit more like the world / earth than the sea, but it’s still really pretty (to me) and I really love it.
I also loved how the stray pieces turned out as ear studs! The marbling was gorgeous, and it was a real bonus to have all these earrings to bring home 🙂
It’s so dreamy to wear the ocean – here’s how the teardrop shaped earrings look like:
Details of the workshop
Duration: 2.5 hours to create the resin-crowned acrylic pieces, and ~1.5 hours for the jewellery assembly
Price: $65 for the resin workshop, and $35 for the jewellery assembly; they have a range of many other workshops on their website
Level of “fun”: 4/5
The entire experience was a good mix of design (where we chose shapes and colour, and what jewellery pieces to make them into) and hands-on work (where we did sawing, pouring, jewellery assembly).
Level of difficulty: 3/5
The sawing looked a bit more challenging (as mentioned above, someone broke 3 saw blades doing it…), and the jewellery assembly can be a bit difficult if you’re not used to working with very small parts. Theoretically, the pouring is easy, but to get to a design / blending the colours to exactly the way you want – that’s something that takes lots of skill and practice. Nevertheless, Elaine managed to give us clear enough instructions to get to a decently good output for beginners 🙂
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