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6 Tips for Making Low-Cost Resin Jewelry: DIY Tools and How to Get the Cheapest Supplies
Resin is an extremely versatile product that doesn’t need many tools in order to make beautiful jewelry; however, we often spend much more than we really need to on additional supplies and tools in order to make our resin pieces look more professional. I know that I have spent a small fortune on bezels, molds, and other supplies because I wanted my pieces to look their absolute best. Now that I have a more limited income, I have started looking for more inexpensive ways to make resin jewelry–and even found some great resources lying around the house!
The biggest expense of resin jewelry is always going to be the resin itself, but when you can cut down expenses on other tools and supplies, the cost of making a piece of resin jewelry can significantly decrease.
Tips for Saving Money with Resin:
1. Cut out as many findings/components as possible.
This may seem like a no-brainer, but the more findings you can cut out of a piece, the cheaper the piece will be to make. These include glue-on bails, jump rings, chains, clasps, etc. Some of these are necessary components to a piece, but sometimes we use more than we actually need to or overlook the fact that we can make many of these things ourselves. Things like chain can add up quickly, so if you are not using something like sterling silver, make your own chain, or at least make a few links to disrupt the chain so you don’t have to use as much. Use wrapped links, small sections of chainmail rosettes, etc. to add a little pizzazz to your piece and a few more dollars to your wallet.
Bails are also something you can make yourself, either with wire or a jeweler’s saw and sheet metal. Though the cheapest method is probably to drill a hole and use either a jump ring or a hook to connect it to the chain.
2. Online is not always cheaper.
One misconception is that craft stores are always far more overpriced than online jewelry suppliers or Amazon. While this is true in many instances, many craft stores offer sales and coupons that can bring down certain items to a few dollars below the cheapest online price. The best way to do this is to sign up for the mailing lists. Some stores will send coupons to your house while others will tell you about any sales they have going on via your email.
Hobby Lobby offers 40% off one regular-priced item all the time. If you get the app on your phone, you can bring it up any time you’re in the store–no need to worry about forgetting it at home! I use these primarily on resin and and mold making material. This of course limits you to the brands they offer, but since I use Easy Cast and Alumilite Pourable Silicone or Mold Putty (all of which they carry,) this is not an issue for me.
Joann Fabrics does not sell resin, but they do sell paper punches, bezels (the deep ones for clay and the… Vintaj or Ice Resin ones, I think… not sure on the brand, I will have to look next time I’m there,) etc. If you join their mailing list, they will send you coupons right to your house. This used to be the only way you could get the good coupons, but they have since added a printable version of all coupons to their website. Since I am terrible with remembering to bring them anyway, I let my mother keep the mailed ones and I just bring it up on my phone. It’s really handy since they can just scan the barcode from the screen. The coupons usually span a week or a weekend and you are never certain what the coupons are going to be since they vary from week to week. You can be certain of at least 40% off, but sometimes you’ll get lucky and get a 50% or 60% off one item. Just last week they had a coupon for 25% off your whole purchase–on-sale items included!
So if you have any craft stores near you, round up some friends (or your kids, as my mother used to do) to go with you and have them each ring out one item for you. That way you can use multiple coupons and get several items with a percentage off! You can always reward them for their good deed with a free piece of jewelry.
3. Make use of what you have lying around your house.
While most resin crafters know this is true for bezels (seashells, broken watches, etc. all make fantastic bezels,) many don’t realize that the same holds true for molds. This is especially true for those of us using epoxy resin, which doesn’t produce heat while curing and won’t melt any less-durable items you are using as molds. Keep an eye on plastic packaging from things you’ve bought before you throw them out. Sometimes they can produce really interesting resin pieces! Don’t worry about how many castings you’ll get from it. If it is just going to the garbage anyway, it won’t matter much if it breaks after the first time you use it.
Chances are you have one of those weekly pill organizers lying around your house. If yours is anything like mine, it collects more dust than medication, so I decided to see if it would work as a mold. And guess what… it did! I use the deep wells where the pills are supposed to go for my pendants, but I’ve read about people also using the lids. The edges of the resulting pieces will be very sharp and flat since the chambers are not graduated, and the face will also be flat since the bottom of the pill wells are not domed like many resin molds available for purchase. Don’t let this scare you off–it creates a very unique look that can be very professional if executed properly. I got my organizer at Rite Aid a few years ago with the intention of using it for it’s intended purposes, and I think it was under $2.50. You can probably find one cheaper at Dollar Tree or somewhere similar. If you are near a Giant Eagle with a pharmacy inside, they usually have little baskets of them sitting on the pharmacy counter that you can take for free.
Another great DIY mold is an ice cube tray. I got one from Rite Aid for a dollar last summer (yes, I shop at Rite Aid quite a bit, it’s the only pharmacy in town,) but if you time it just right, you can pick up a multi-pack from somewhere like Walmart for practically pennies when they put them on clearance. I’ve seen them for as little as ten cents before, so keep an eye out! I am mainly talking about the plastic ones here, though there are silicone ones available (although they are usually pretty expensive). The tray I use looks like a standard rectangular resin mold when filled shallowly. It has the rounded corners and the domed face, if that is more the look you are going for. I plan to pick up one of the more cube shaped ones the next time I go to the store so that I can make square pieces as well! Since most trays have at least 12 cavities, this makes for a great mold when you want to pour a lot of pieces at once.
4. Weigh, don’t measure. Or at least have a cheap second cup.
Those little medicine cups are a resin crafter’s best friend. If you wipe them out before the resin cures, they can usually be reused. They do get kind of sticky and gross after a few uses though, and they are something that you usually have to buy in bulk (online, since I rarely see them in any stores) to really be cost effective. Those little five-packs they sell at craft stores specifically for resin run about $2.99, which is outrageous. A few months ago, I ran out of them and had to improvise. I used super cheap little disposable cups from Walmart and an old electric kitchen scale I’ve hardly ever used. You can weigh out the resin and hardener instead of using the measuring lines on a cup; however, I wouldn’t recommend using it in the kitchen again.
If you’d rather still use the cups (which truly is the easiest method,) at least use a cheaper disposable cup for the second part of the mixing process when you need to pour it into a second cup–never use another medicine cup. It may only be a difference of a few cents, but that adds up over time.
5. Waste not a drop of resin.
One of the biggest–and easiest–mistakes to make is to mix up too much resin. It’s something that happens more as we are first starting out, but even the experienced resin crafter can find themselves with a half-full cup of resin and nothing else to pour. The trick to avoiding this is to predetermine how much resin you will need before mixing it. An easy way to do this is to fill the molds or bezels you are planning to use with rice. Once the rice is to the rim of your molds or bezels, dump it into a medicine cup and see how much it fills the cup. That is how much resin you’ll need to mix for your project. Barring this, it’s always better to mix too little than too much. And always try to have a few backup pieces in case you do over-mix. If I find myself with leftover resin, I typically pour it into one of my bezel molds and make a few bezels to use for future projects.
6. Sometimes it really is cheaper to let the professionals do it.
I love paper. I love using it in resin. I make my own collage sheets or use old book pages for the majority of my pieces because my inner graphic design hobbyist loves the fact that I can use paper to make jewelry. And when I am using my collage sheets, I want the best possible print. That means using the good glossy photo paper and putting the printer on the highest quality setting. When I had my older Canon printer, this was not much of an issue. I could get refilled ink cartridges fairly cheap and I would always hit up Staples’ back-to-school sale for a pack of $0.25 HP photo paper (Staples’ back-to-school sale is the holy grail of office supply sales. I always restock my office and my crafting areas when it comes around.) However, my printer recently broke and I was forced to invest in a new one whose cartridges are ridiculously expensive and are too new to have any cheap refill options.
So it no longer makes sense for me to print my own collage sheets when I’d have to dish out $30 for a new color cartridge. Plus, inkjet and glossy paper have a strange relationship. Sometimes if you seal the glossy side with Mod Podge, it clouds up when you pour the resin over it. Colored laserjet does not have this problem, but the printer and cartridges are extremely expensive. So I started printing my collage sheets as 4x6s and sending them to Rite Aid. If you upload them online, you can either have them sent to the nearest store for same-day pickup or you can have them shipped to your house. You can also load your collage sheets onto a flash drive and print them at the store using a kiosk. It all depends on what you prefer, although Rite Aid (not sure about other places) charges $0.19 to upload them online and pick them up later while printing them from the kiosk costs $0.29. And of course, having them sent to your home (which takes several days) is the cheapest option at $0.11 per 4×6.
The way to really save money on your collage sheets is to wait until they have a sale on prints. Rite Aid will run a really good special on photos a few times a year (they have regular promotions online that let you save a few cents a print for same-day pickup, but most of those promotions are for the larger prints like 8x10s) in which you can get around 50 or 100 4x6s for a set amount of money. Usually this requires a coupon from the sales flyer, but there is probably an online coupon as well. This brings the price per print down quite a lot and you get a lot of designs for under $5. So now I’ll work on collage sheets for a few months until a good sale comes along, then I’ll print a few copies of each sheet (plus my older designs, of course) so I have a nice stock of designs to use until the next sale comes along. I hardly ever run out, and if I do, it’s usually only one or two designs, so I only have to print a few collage sheets at regular price.
I hope you found these tips helpful. I will be making a follow-up post in the future when I think of more ways to cut down on costs! Share your own tips in the comments below.
My Etsy Overhaul Challenge
If you read my about page at all, you know that I am relatively new to the whole selling-on-Etsy thing. I’ve had my shop open for almost a year, but much of that involved a long hiatus due to finding out about my pregnancy and trying to juggle work and graduate school at the same time. I never got my shop where I wanted it before I had to take a break from it to focus on other things. Actually, before these past few weeks, I had hardly even been making jewelry.
But now the baby’s arrival is only a month away and I’m faced with the knowledge that I will likely have to at least get a part-time job after she is born. I dread the thought of going back to my previous job (a gas station / convenience store / fast food restaurant setup.) It was great for helping me through college but not so great now that I am getting older and realize how much going to a job you hate day after day can damage your psyche. So I have decided to give Etsy another try. If I just make a little extra money each month with it, that more than negates my need to find a day-job.
My shop had been doing fairly well when I was first working on it. Once I lost the time to keep transitioning (I started out with terrible product photos and the like, and I was slowly updating my listings with a better, more professional-looking setup) and to keep making and adding new products, my views and sales dipped. Even the few changes I have made in the past few days have my views go back up by quite a bit.
My main goal is to get my shop to 100 items. That amount of items should provide enough variety and exposure that I should be able to sell at least a few pieces. My goal for the next two weeks is to make seven new items and to tweak at least one section of my shop per day. That way I can have a nice large back-stock of products to add and I can tackle the changes I need to make to my shop a little at a time!
Current Musings: Part Two: All About Molds and Why You Should Use Them
As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been contemplating using molds a bit more lately. I don’t generally work with molds that much–I usually prefer to use my stash of bezels or to find objects to use as bezels (I will go into more detail on that in my next musings post,) but lately I have been trying to cut down on the amount of supplies I use. It’s also extremely heartening when you can find ways to make almost all of your components for a piece yourself. One of the easiest ways to do this is by using molds.
Having some sort of bezel cup (whether it be an actual bezel, a found object, or a metal blank rounded on a dapping block) gives a piece a certain amount of pizzaz, to be sure, but it can also become very pricey very quickly. Metal prices are higher than ever right now, so it makes sense to try to cut down on the amount of metal used in a piece, especially if you are currently crafting on a budget. Plus, I am the type of person that is always trying to make things myself rather than buy them even if buying is the cheaper option (and I know I’m not alone on this one,) so that has given me even more reason to move in the molding direction.
If you buy them, molds are usually a one time investment. They will eventually wear out, just like any other tool, but you can generally make at least ten good products out of them before that happens. That is wonderful news if you are using the relatively cheap deep-flex plastic molds. A $5 bangle mold has more than paid for itself after ten products (and most of my Yaley molds have lasted much longer than ten uses, but it’s good to low-ball these sorts of things when figuring out expenses.) This isn’t quite as true when buying a silicone mold from an Etsy seller or similar source.
People generally tend to prefer silicone over plastic molds, but each has their drawbacks. Sometimes silicone rips just as easily as plastic cracks, which is all fine and dandy until it happens while you’re using a $50 bangle mold you bought on Etsy. Ten, or even twenty, products seems like a lot less to get out of something when you paid a lot of money for it. Plus, if you really love jewelry-making, you never want to stop at just one mold. You want at least two different sizes or styles, and sometimes even more than one of the same mold.
Resin takes at least 24 hours to fully cure, which means that your mold is out of commission for that same amount of time. But how are you supposed to wait that long when you have five other designs just waiting to be brought to life? Well, you can always buy more than one of a particular mold. If it’s a plastic mold, you won’t be out too much money even if you buy two or three spares. If it’s a silicone mold, then… well, you are looking at quite the investment. And maybe you’ll make that money back after selling your first few pieces, but sometimes sales are slow or you need that money to pay for other things. This is where making your own molds really comes in handy.
Making molds for resin sounds like a daunting process, but a lot of times I find myself getting more frustrated with the resin itself than making the mold that I want to pour it in. I don’t have much experience with the pourable silicone (although I have another kit on its way since I ran out of my trial kit a few months ago.) The putty seemed more my speed when I first began looking into making my own molds; however, I have since realized that each method has it’s pros and cons.
There are three ways to make molds: using pourable silicone, using silicone putty, and using a vacuum forming machine. The last option allows you to make your own plastic molds and let me preface any comments on the subject by pointing out that I HAVE NEVER USED THIS METHOD. It is something I am currently looking into trying, but as of right now, I know about as much about it as anyone else who has looked it up on Google and YouTube. I am by no means an expert, but for the sake of providing a well-rounded article on the subject, I will touch upon the subject very briefly.
Pourable Silicone:
- Seems scarier than it actually is when you are first starting out.
- Can be expensive.
- Is similar to resin casting with inclusions.
- Can be messy, especially if something goes awry.
- Works well to make big molds.
Silicone Mold Putty:
- Looks way easier to do than the pourable kind when you are watching YouTube videos.
- Is not necessarily easier to use than the pourable kind when actually using it.
- Only good for small applications.
- Has an extremely limited working time.
- Like, I mean it when I say limited. You have mere minutes.
- Is similar to using clay.
- Can be expensive.
- You can make your own DIY mold putty, which is less expensive.
Plastic Vacuum Forming:
- Awesome news for people who prefer plastic molds over silicone.
- Can’t typically capture as much detail as silicone.
- Can’t make molds of things like globes very easily.
- Can’t make two-part molds as easily.
- Needs a special machine.
- The machine doesn’t look terribly hard to make yourself, judging from the videos on YouTube.
- Once you have the machine, supplies are cheaper than the silicone kits.
- Can be used for both small and large applications (though how large depends on the size of your machine.)
No matter which method you decide to go with, making your own molds offers up a lot of great options. You can duplicate things like found objects so that they may be used more than once, or make a working mold of practically anything you have lying around the house that you think would look awesome in your jewelry. If you are any good with clay, you can make custom molds by fabricating an object with clay and then making a mold of it. You can make your own duplicates of a mold by casting a resin object with the original mold and making molds from the resin piece.
That is not to say that you should never buy molds, especially those handmade by other jewelry artists. Sometimes they have vintage things lying around their house that they’ve made a mold from that you’ll never be able to find or recreate. So buy the mold. Make more molds from that mold if you need more than one (but please don’t start selling molds that you’ve made from someone else’s mold.) As long as you have a casting from the mold on hand, you’ll never have to buy another. Plus, they work hard on their products just like you and me, so it’s always nice to support fellow artists.
This post ended up being much longer than I intended and this is only a brief overview of my current thoughts on molds and mold-making. Oh dear. I will be sharing some additional posts that focus more intently on some of the specific issues raised in this article, like vacuum forming and making mold putty. I will also share some of my own mold-making projects when my silicone kit arrives and give you some ideas for how to use molds in your jewelry-making.
Did I leave out anything? Let me know in the comments below!
Current Musings: Part One: Doming Resin – The Poor (Wo)man’s Method to Resin Jewelry
While I love bezels and the unique look they give to a piece, they can be both expensive and limiting. Granted I still have probably 125 shiny silver bezels tucked away in my workbench, I have taken a brief hiatus from my bezel pendants in order to return to my roots of domed or molded resin jewelry.
Doming is by far the easiest (usually, unless the resin gods have decided to be stroppy with you on a particular day) and cheapest way to use resin. It of course has its advantages and disadvantages as all techniques do. Pros include the aforementioned cheapness, the relatively easy learning curve, the fact that it needs no special supplies or tools, the lightweight feel to the pieces, and the thin look of each charm. Cons include the absolute mess you’re left with if you accidentally over-pour, the thinness of the charms make them prone to bending for quite some time even after full-cure, and the fact that you do not always get an even dome.
Even with the drawbacks, doming can create some awesome pieces if used in the right context. Earrings and charm bracelets are great ways to use the doming technique since it produces such lightweight results. Plus the look of several domed charms fringing a bracelet has always appealed to me. I am using that specific approach to a tarot-inspired bracelet I am currently working on in which I will dome several miniature tarot cards and affix them to a thick chain. I will post pictures of that project in a few days when I finally get around to finishing it.
Some concluding thoughts: I mentioned above that doming needs no special tools, and this is very true. You can cut out a shape from a piece of paper with a pair of scissors and pour some resin over it. You can invest in some tools to make it a little easier and to have more consistent results, but these are still fairly inexpensive. These include paper punches that are sold at any major craft store in the scrapbooking section. Chances are you already have some circle ones lying around if you do any work with bezels. They produce perfect circles of a specific size every time. I personally can’t function without mine because my scissor-wielding skills never really evolved from my days in kindergarten.
You can also buy a resin doming tray or doming mat. They are plastic or silicone mats that have spikes protruding from the top. This is so the piece that you are doming stays elevated and any extra resin drips off onto the mat and doesn’t puddle around the piece. This is super super super super helpful for creating an even dome every time. I almost always over-pour on purpose now that I have one of these magical trays since I can pour from the middle and let gravity do its work without fear of ruining my piece.
I will also post a doming tutorial/collection of handy tips in the future, but until then, enjoy Little Windows’ fabulous video tutorial on the subject. You can see the doming tray they sell in action. It also covers using a mold, but their method is not how I usually do it.
Speaking of molds, I have also been doing a lot of work with them recently, which I will cover in more detail in my next post.
Emily E. Designs 