I finally got the resin working right in these.  I managed to get some disposable graduated mixing cups from my dad, and when I scrupulously measured each part, it cured properly.

I tried very hard to make the suspended doo-dads within the resin match the background.  I particularly like the small mirror and the piece of transistor. The background of the small mirror is a wrapper from candy my husband and I bought as a souvenir while touring the Alhambra.

These bottlecaps were also thrown away because of a problem with improperly mixed resin.  Pouring new resin on top of the uncured resin does not solve the problem. At least I have plenty of bottlecaps left.

I’ve been saving these bottlecaps for some unspecified future project for so long that I have quite a collection of them. Finally my idea coalesced into these.  I cut circles of either scraps of old book covers (that I made) or pieces of decorative paper, or both.  Then I found or made small ornaments to suspend in resin.

The problem with these is that the resin has to be mixed very accurately. My strategy was to pour it into the cap and use the cap as a measuring device, but apparently that’s not a good strategy because it’s not accurate enough.  The resin never cured properly and is horribly sticky. If you touch it with your hands, your hands remain sticky even after you wash them with soap and water.  I have to throw these away.

If I were manufacturing resin for crafters, I’d include disposable mixing cups and sticks inside the package. It shows the resin being mixed in disposable cups with popsicle sticks, but as I found out during a trip to walgreens, these are not easy to find.  Fortunately, my dad is as much of a hoarder as I am and he gave me a half dozen cups such as are used with Nyquil.  My subsequent bottlecaps turned out fine.

I’ve been playing around with polymer clay, making miniature food for a shrine I’m working on. Will not be done for a couple of months, but I’ll post it here when it’s done. I wanted to do a really complex cane, something that looked like a picture, and this is the design I came up with.  Before it was reduced, it was about 5 1/2 by 7 inches, and about 3/4 inches thick. You lose some on the ends when you reduce it, but I still had enough to cut lots of thin slices of butterflies.  These have already been baked. You can tell because the translucent clay has become translucent instead of white.

I don’t really like beads and bead jewelry, but I like making them.  I made these (along with a handful of others, which my daughter used for a bracelet) to experiment with cane techniques.  The beads could stand to be a little more even, but I don’t really want to use them for anything, so I don’t care.