 Hi, this is Catherine of Reson Obsession and today I'm here to show you how to mix a poxy resin for your jewelry making projects. Now I want to stress here that I'm showing you how I like to do it. I know there's a lot of people out there who make resin jewelry and I'm sure they do it differently than what I do, but I'm just going to show you today how I like to do it because this is what has worked best for me. So first thing is a little safety. You'll notice today my purple hands as we're doing this. I always wear nitrile gloves when I'm working with resin. With epoxy is probably not as big a deal, but sometimes some of the silicone resins are a little fussy with latex and may not cure properly. Also make sure you're working in a well ventilated area where a particle mask or a respirator if needed. Always be sure that you got safety covered. And then you'll notice today we're working on a wax paper covered surface. That way if we spill any of our resin we can easily clean it up wipe it off or I can just pick up the whole wax paper and throw it away. So one of the tricks to mixing resin is to make sure that you follow the directions. Some people like to say that they'll put in a little more hardener, a little less hardener. I tell you follow follow follow the label directions. So depending on what size casting you want to make will depend on what size cup. You can see here I like to use the medicine cups. These are some of the cups that we sell in a resin obsession. You can see here that they're marked with CCs or MLs. They also do it by ounce measurements and by drums and teaspoon, tablespoon and so on This is absolutely essential especially when you're mixing small volumes because just to get like a couple of plastic cups and kind of guess just sometimes you're asking for disaster. The other thing you'll notice here is I've gone ahead and I poured my two parts of resin that we're going to be mixing here in a minute. I did that to save time but you'll notice that I poured it into two separate cups. Sometimes you'll see people pour in a certain amount of their resin and then a certain amount of their hardener on top. Well if you if you didn't measure the second part correctly and you've squirted it into the first one then you've kind of ruined your whole batch. So I always always always pour it into two separate cups. Now here's the next part where it kind of depends on how much resin I'm mixing. What you're going to see is that I'm going to pour the hardener directly into the resin cup and mix thoroughly. That's because I'm mixing less than an ounce worth of resin today. If I'm going to mix more than an ounce then I'll actually get a third cup and pour them into the third cup to get a good mix. And definitely you need to do that if you're going to work with silicone. Silicone just it's so much more viscous to begin with that that's really the only way you can get a really good mix. Okay so today I'm going to be using a toothpick to mix these. We also have the resin of session stir sticks. The stir sticks are probably just a little overkill on these small volumes but they're really great when you're mixing large volumes of resin or mixing silicone because the silicone is almost like syrup when you're trying to mix it. So I'm going to go ahead and pour and I'm going to show you how I like to pour. Now I like to take it such that I'm pouring my hardener into the resin and I kind of I close my cup to kind of make it like a stir a spout goodness. And I'll pour and I'll stir my resin at the same time. Okay and it's kind of like the I guess the cake batter method. Okay so I'm stirring here in a circle and I'm going back in a figure eight and I'll stop about midway and then just kind of stir a little bit. I never ever pick up my stick because I'm trying to do what I can not to put bubbles into the resin but I'll just go back and forth and go around and do a figure eight and then I'll go back and I'll pour in the rest of my hardener. So I make my spout again and I'm pouring like I'm doing it like a cake mix. Okay and you're just stirring and you're always going to get a little bubbles. I mean you're always going to get a little bit obviously you just try it you know the best you can not to incorporate any more than you have to but you're always going to get a few just obviously the fewer you have or the the few you have to worry about later trying to get out. Okay so I'm just stirring and I just I don't necessarily stir very fast. I just try and stir very thorough. Sometimes I've seen some people that are just literally whisking it to help it come together more quickly and I suppose you get a good mix but I just cringe at the idea of getting all this bubbles out later. So okay so I've got a medium kind of stir on it and now I'm going to scrape out the rest of my hardener out of my cup and pour it in here. Okay scrape the sides make sure to scrape off your your stir item too whether it be your toothpick or a stir stick. You want to make sure and get it all off of the sides and your toothpick as you're stirring because sometimes that's where you'll come down to while you're resident in hardened or while you'll find some pieces didn't harden. It might be that you've poured a couple pieces out of a batch of resin and the first couple hardened pretty well and then you get down to the last piece or so that you poured and it's just a sticky mess and it might be because as you get to the bottom of this you've had some of your hardener. You've got some of the resin that's stuck to the bottom or stuck to the sides that just didn't get mixed very well and that's what's going into your piece. Okay so you can see I'm just going to stir. And depending on the pot time of your resin I would say on average probably about two minutes is a good stir. Obviously if you're dealing with a really short pot time on a resin you know you're going to have to cut that down so this resin that we're using today has about a 20 to a 25 minute pot time so I would tell you whatever your pot time is playing on spending about 10% of that time stirring your resin and trying to get a good mix. Okay now as I'm stirring this I don't know if this is coming through on the video but I can see some swirls in the resin. It'll look less swirly as it gets more blended. Okay that's just a good indication that you've got your hardener and your resin going properly. Now at some point here like right now I'm going to go along the sides and take my stir stick and really make a point to scrape off the sides because I want to make sure that I'm not leaving anything on the sides that potentially won't get mixed very well. Okay so we're getting a few bubbles but we'll get those out. Okay so I'm just going and then I'm going to scrape down my stick as well to make sure I got my hardener off. Okay. Alright. Okay. Okay so that's pretty much how I do it. I'm going to go ahead and finish stirring this and make a resin project. I hope you guys enjoyed this. If you have any questions please leave it in the comment box below or certainly if you have something to add some other tips or tricks that have worked for you by all means I would love to hear them. So come on over to resnubsession.com. We can help you with all your resin project needs. Thanks for visiting.