In crafting circles, a UFO is an Un Finished Object and they tend to be common. You may remember that some time back voyager sent me a giftbox that contained lots of pressed leaves and I wanted to do something special with them. I had bought a set of small couch tables from IKEA and wanted to turn the larger one into a resin covered table. If you look at the pictures from Ikea, you can see that they’ve got a rim around them and I didn’t want to fill that with resin during the first casings, so I carefully taped around the rim using gaffer tape.

Well, let met put it like this: there’s still resin on my kitchen floor. Also some of the leaves very stubbornly refused to take on any resin. And removing the now resin glued gaffer tape took off parts of the white coating.

Now of course I needed something else to construct a barrier around the table and I decided that I could hotglue some firm plastic round it. Once it was finished I would heat the glue with a hairdryer and remove everything. This created a resin proof barrier. To hide all the horrible things that happened to the tablerim I poured some orange there. and tried to persuade the damn leaves to please let themselves be coated. In the end, the hot glue removal involved sharp knives and took off a lot more paint and I think you can see why I lost a bit of enthusiasm. Because I don’t have a router I needed to carefully round the new sharp rim by hand. Also the orange hadn’t managed to hide the damage completely, so I decided to leave it matte, which actually does look quite nice. At this point i was so fed up that the table went into the Lego room unfinished until I took it out again this week.

I painted the sides again where the colour had parted with the wood, and looking at it in the sunlight I noticed that my top was anything but nice. now I probably only have myself to blame. When mixing resin you have to make sure it’s well mixed. There are certain amounts that mix well in a 0,2l cup. Too little and you stir in too much air. Too much and you can’t mix thoroughly anymore. If you want to do it right you mix, pour it into a different container and mix again. Usually I am too lazy for that and when working with small amounts of coloured resin it doesn’t matter, because you mix it again when you add the ink and then you see perfectly well if you need to keep mixing. This time, not so much. I tried polishing it out with chrome polish, but that didn’t work. I tried 2000 grit paper to no avail and then decided to go back to 800 grit and you know how much that hurts. I got most of the “stains” removed and it does look ok when not seen in direct sunlight. Thank goodness the window in the Lego room is quite small…

I do have ideas fro the second table in that set, now with a lot of knowledge about “how not to do it”. When I do that one I’ll probably give this one a well mixed top coat, but until then I#ll call it finished. Of course I#m less than totally happy with the result, but it’s still a pretty and unique piece of furniture.