Now, one of the good things last year was that we finally installed a “work bench”, i.e. my grandma’s old kitchen cupboards, giving me space to work on and where I can leave my stuff over night. The downside is that it’s in the unheated cellar room. Being fully underground, that’s the coolest room in the house, as it also doesn’t get any “spare heat” from that fucking huge wood pellet furnace. This makes working with epoxy resin in winter difficult. The epoxy is not really runny, and while curing you’re prone to “Kawaii sheen”: the surface gets matte and has some dots, much like the “soft, softer, do I need glasses” blurry filters you sometimes get in Mangas or animes. That’s not a problem when you cast something in silicone: the top surface is in the silicone and thus comes out shiny, but it is a problem when you want to topcoat something.

To solve the issue I dragged a gas heater we bought during renovations from the garage to the cellar and got a new gas bottle. This worked well the first time, but apparently there’s something wrong with the switch, so I can’t actually turn it to any setting apart from “starting” anymore. But I really, really, really wanted to do some resin, so I took the UV resin upstairs. You generally only work with small amounts and little stuff, so that’s ok to do in the kitchen. I just hope that the safety googles aren’t just labelled as “UV filter”, but actually are, or my eyes are fucked.

So here’s some less artsy and more cutesy projects.

A seashell shaker. The shaker form is epoxy resin. No reason to waste lots of expensive UV resin on it. Also: white UV resin doesn’t actually cure well, because the white pigment of course blocks the UV light from reaching everything below the surface.

A seashell charm. This didn’t turn out quite as well. I should have coloured the first blue layer a lot darker, but it’s still nice.

Look who didn’t mix her resin and her dye well enough… But I actually love how the dye separated from the resin. I sealed both sides well with clear resin to make sure nothing stains or sticks.

And now my favourite: the galaxy fox:

It’s got so much sparkle, and that’s sometimes the thing you really need.