Resin Jewellery Class # 4

Today's the 4th session of our 5 week course and having mastered the basics, we're left pretty much to our own devices. Some of us work on casting our remaining pieces of jewellery or little bits and bobs in resin - this is the easy bit. Most of us take the chance to use the heavy duty machines available to start on polishing and refining the earlier pieces we had cast.

Gayle using the sanding machine to file the rough edges of her bangle

1/2 to 1 hour of solid elbow grease using emery paper (to smoothen the rough edge of the resin piece) and the leather polishing cloth (to give shine) takes just minutes on these machines so it's no wonder we're taking the opportunity to start the finishing process. I've cast quite a number of bangles and smaller items, all of which have not been sanded or polished. Unfortunately, I spent too much time mixing up a new batch of resin to finish off my pieces that I only manage to finishing sanding and filing one bangle (with another 4 more to go....).

Edit at the polishing machine

Part of the fun I've been having in class is checking out what everyone else has been doing since I'm the boring one, casting bangles (ha, some of you might think you're getting bangles for Christmas but not at the rate I'm progressing with the finishing process!) and small shapes with the intention of stringing them as beads (again I stress intention). Many of the other girls are thoroughly creative, particularly Edit, who's been putting in the hours at home casting new rubber moulds and resin pieces and coming to class with very interesting ideas she's managed during the week. Viliama proves to be quite thrilled with some of Edit's pieces, modelling them below in an improvised necklace (mine is the tiny little yellow triangle object).