How to Sand and Finish Resin Jewelry

hey it's Catherine with resin obsession calm and today I'm going to show you a couple different techniques to finish your resin jewelry you may notice sometimes when you make resin jewelry that you'll get edges on the jewelry and their little sharp edges or they're a little unsightly or is in the case of these I over poured them so you can see you had some resin spillage out the side of your mold and you get these unsightly tags and maybe you're wondering how can we get rid of those well there's a couple of different techniques we can try today now these earrings you can see the outside shape of these looks really good but what the problem comes with let me zoom in a little is actually that we've got these sharp edges where the resin worked its way up the side so the way I like to get rid of these is to actually sand them down and when I sand resin I like to start with a 400 grit wet/dry sandpaper do it on a flat surface and when you sand you want to make sure that your sandpaper and your surface is wet and the reason I like to do it this way is because I want to make sure I get an even sand all the way around if you just sand one edge at a time you may stand off more than another and so when I do this I put the resin down and I just go around in a circle and kind of change my direction from time to time rotate the piece around just to make sure you stay even and then pick it up and just see how much you've sanded off so we're making a little bit of progress and just keep standing till you get what you like if you want to completely sand it back obviously take it as down as far as you would like to go if you just want to take off the edges enough so it doesn't you know hurt yourself when you're wearing your earrings then that's fine too certainly it's a personal preference so keep standing until you get what you like I'm starting here with a 400 grit sandpaper if you want to smoother finish once you get it sanded down then you can use something like a 600 or even larger number grit to get it so comparing these you can see we've we've taken off our edge just a little bit here this is the one that hasn't been andddd this is the one that has and so you can see we've made a little bit of a difference you know at this point if you wanted to stop if you're okay with this then you can otherwise you would keep going and keep standing now you're probably wondering what do we do with the ones that are overfilled and what we're going to do here is there's a couple different techniques that we can employ to get these all cleaned up so you can see right here we've got some really big pieces where we've kind of over poured well the first thing I would tell you is just take a pair of heavy-duty kitchen shears and just trim them and you want to get as close as you can without you know distorting your circle but just go ahead and trim them off and work your way around so once you've got it trimmed up some that you're ready to go then your other option too is also to use the sandpaper now when you're doing the sandpaper technique once again don't stand for a little bit and then turn and don't stand for a little bit you want to keep it moving and that's because you want to make sure you don't have like the stop sign look to your earring so as you sand kind of hold it and turn it at the same time resin is very soft so it won't take but a few swipes to start taking off some good resin so you can see right here we've already got you know starting to get a nice edge here and you just want to keep working your way around obviously until you get it the way you like it now as you can see here though we've got some pieces here on the inside and you may be wondering how are we going to get that off well same concept you can do that you can pick up your wet/dry sandpaper and try and go on the inside like that if it's just a little bit or since there's a little more that's going to take a little longer for us to get off we can do something like use a flex shaft so using a flex aft to drill off some resin is a great way to get a lot off in a hurry so before you get started using a Flex aft you want to make sure that you are wearing safety goggles and you also want to make sure that you're wearing a dust mask because you don't want to breathe the resin particles so the attachment I'm using for my flex shaft today is actually a piece that is split lengthwise and I've fed a piece of 600 grit wet/dry sandpaper onto this edge and what I'm going to do is hold the flex shaft in my palm using my thumb as a brace and I'm going to go along the inside here to take off some of these rough pieces you can see that I've got cast so there you get you can see we've already taken off some good points if I were to keep going I'd go ahead and take those off there and those there but really it's a personal preference once you get it looking the way you like it then stop now you might notice that you have some other tight cracks and crevices that you need to get some resin off of a couple of my other favorite tools are a heavy duty nail file you can get these at a beauty supply store and they're great for just taking off a little bit of resin in one spot where you just need to touch it up a little bit the other thing I really like too are these diamond needle files these are small files they have little diamonds embedded on them they can stand down stuff in a hurry and as you can see they can really get into some tight cracks and crevices so that gives you another option for getting some resin off if you have any other questions about how to finish up your resin projects leave your questions in the box below stop by the resin obsession comm blog and jewelry making forum we're happy to help you with your resin casting questions thanks for stopping by today you

Channel: ResinObsession

Views: 156,065

Keywords: resin jewelry, resin pendants, resin casting, shiny resin, resini charms, glossy finish resin, resin tutorial, how to make resin jewelry, how to make resin charms, resin molds, jewelry tutorial, resin projects, making charms, making pendants, jewelry tips, resin sanding, resin finishing, sand resin jewelry, finish resin jewelry, how to sand resin, how to finish resin

Id: fWii42EtJkM

Length: 7min 2sec (422 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2012