Hello everyone,
After a rather long hiatus I am back in full force 🙂 discovering a lot of new craft projects. One of them is using stainless steel disks, painting them and then applying resin to make sure the paint does not peel.
This blue earring and pendant set you see as well as the red one here on the side is a custom order that had to be done rather quickly to get out the door.
Now, quickly is always challenging in many ways. For one, what if something goes wrong. Is there enough time to redo the project? Sometimes yes, many times no.
Here I painted the stainless steel disks and waited several hours before I painted the little glitter dots just to make sure everything dries correctly. After letting them sit overnight I was ready to put on resin.
I do not like to use 2 part resin very much, as it creates heat and takes quite some time to dry. My friend and I were playing around with resin a long time ago – more like several years – and I have a pendant from this time that is still sticky. Not very pleasant and certainly not something you can give to a customer. So I decided to try my hand in UV resin.
I purchased UV resin and also UV nail polish. The UV resin can be put in the sun to cure, but I also read several accounts that this does not cure very well too and you are left with a sticky piece.
So I went ahead and purchased a UV lamp. Now, one thing about UV resin, as well as 2 part resin, it does give off a rather unpleasant smell and should not be used without ventilation. Here comes my problem. Living in South Florida is challenging for anything that needs an open window – right now with the heat index we have over 100 F – I do not open a window in that heat! So I held off on using the UV resin for now. There is supposedly UV resin that does not give off a smell so I might look into that.
But let me get back to my project. I did purchase the UV clear nail polish and that does not smell at all. So I used that to put on top of my painted stainless steel disks to create a nice domed and very hard glossy surface. But with everything that is made quickly I had some challenges. After curing under the lamp I notices some drops that were pooling around the glitter dots. Well, needless to say it did not look very nice. So I cut out the dots and applied another layer of UV nail polish and cured again. Looking at it closely it still did not look as good as I wanted it to. So back to another layer and curing.
At the end it took me 4 layers of UV resin to get it close to what I wanted. I had done several of these stainless steel pendant and earring sets before and they all just needed one application of UV nail polish. So quickly sometimes takes more time.
Once I had the disks ready I had to attach them to something. As my customer does not like French ear wires I had to create my own from Stirling Silver wire. Thankfully my training as a bench jeweler made this go rather quickly.
Here are a couple more stainless steel earring and pendant sets I made earlier:
So as you can see venturing into a new project with new materials like UV resin is fun. Just try it yourself, I am sure you will have a great time.
