Work in Progress: StarFire & BlackFire

The results from last week.

Hi everyone!

Unfortunately my Sailor Moon sewing is taking over most of my free time.  So all I've been able to work on for StarFire and BlackFire is the hand gems.

This weekend I tested some different dye methods with the epoxy resin because as I stated in my last post, the blue and yellow resin dye would not mix!  So to make green I decided to experiment a little and I found two new ways to get fun colors with resin that work!

 

 Alcholol Based Markers

I was on youtube looking for dye methods and I saw this video where the lovely cosplayer uses sharpie!  I didn't have any green sharpies laying around, but I did have some green Chromatix markers I bought on sale that were drying out anyway.  I had a hard time getting ink to come out while squeezing with pliers so I added a bit of water to the tube.  Next time I will try a little rubbing alcohol instead to see if there's a difference.

 To the left is a picture of the resin without dye.  It's just clear.  I use EasyCast Epoxy Resin.  I buy mine at Michaels Arts&Crafts with a coupon. You can also buy it on Amazon and there are other, similar products you can use.  It's a simple 1:1 ratio of resin and hardener.  It's very easy to use.

To see how much resin I would need I poured water into my mold and then back into the cup, marked it with a marker and dumped it into cup #2, refilled to that point and re-added the water I placed in cup #2 and marked it again.

 To try all three methods, I divided the resin mixture into three smaller plastic cups.

In the photo to the left you can see the cups and the marker I used for the first dye test. The color is Grass 2.  It ended up being very light as you'll see in some pictures further down.  I should have added more ink.  I only added about 2 drops and as I said above, the tube was dry so I added a bit of water. Overall the ink did mix really well with the resin and I will use this method again.  I'd like to try it with Sharpies and Copics.

 Food Coloring

I wasn't sure I would like the results of this method, but I actually like the color better than the marker method!  It's perfect for StarFire! As you can see in the photo to the right I only used about one drop for three small gems.

This is just regular food coloring you can buy at the grocery store.  I will definitely be playing more with it and try other colors, but that's a post for another day.

Castin'Craft Resin Dye

To the left is red and blue Castin'Craft resin dye which is made to work with resin and also purchased at Michaels Arts&Crafts.  I needed purple gems for Breasa's BlackFire costume so I mixed red and blue dye to make purple as those two colors will actually mix vs. blue and yellow which will not for some weird reason.

Overall I do love the purple gems I got with this method.  I won't lie, I want to play more with the other methods to see what other purples I can get, but this worked well too.  I think I did one big drop of red and two drops of blue.

Results

This is a picture of them all before they've hardened/cured.

As you can see above they all turned out really well and thankfully transparent.  I was worried after seeing a few other people's results with random dye methods that they would turn out opaque, but they're beautiful!  They're sitting on gold foil scrapbook paper right now, but I have seen people use nail polish on the back of resin gems and I'd like to try that method first.  I like how the foil looks, I used it on my Raven belt, but I want to try something different.