ANZAC Poppy Resin Pendant

I have been having such a lot of fun playing with resin and applying it to jewellery. I made several resin pendants, in this week’s tutorial, I make two.

If you don’t live in New Zealand or Australia, you may not know about Anzac Day, which is the 25th of April. If you would like to know more, you can read about it here (also a gluten free ANZAC cookie recipe) and here.

Let’s get on and make this pendant.

Materials

Here's what I used to make this pendant:

Tools

‍Chain Nose pliers x2
Sharp scissors
Small plastic cup
Plastic spoon
Printer

A Note About the Resin

I bought my resin at my local emporium and it was a really good price ($19), however when I went to look for a link online for you, it was very expensive so I suggest that maybe you try one of those wonderful emporium type places that sell all manner of things.

The most important thing to remember is that you need doming resin.

Instructions

Please watch the video or read the instructions below.

Step 1 - Picture

If you would like to make the poppy pendant, then please download the image here:

Download Poppy Image

Take care when printing your image to ensure that it’s printed at 100%. It should measure 27mm across the diameter. You can experiment with different types of paper and printers to get a good print. For more on this, please watch the video.

Carefully cut around the outside of the poppy print, it doesn’t have to be perfect but you want to aim to have no white showing and to not make it significantly smaller.

Cut a piece of double sided tape about 1cm square and place it on the cabochon, then peel of the backing paper.

Place the picture onto the cabochon, ensuring that it’s the correct way up. I like my poppy with the centre petals going up and down.

Run your thumb nail around the edge, just inside the rim, so that it pushes the image right down into the cabochon.

If your picture is a little large, it will fold up when you do this giving you a line to cut just outside of. Don’t stress too much about it being perfect, you can see that I have a tiny amount of silver space showing on one side but I’m not worried, the resin will fill that.

Step 2 – Applying the Resin

Mix the resin according to the manufacturer’s instructions. For my resin, it was two parts of Part A to one part of Part B (the hardener).

Mix it with the wrong end of the spoon. Don’t whisk it, just stir it gently for three minutes. If you whisk it, you will get too many bubble. It’s very important to mix your resin properly.

When the resin is well mixed, pour a small amount onto the pendant, on top of the picture. Go slowly, pouring a little at a time – you don’t want to overfill the pendant and have it spill out everywhere. It’s better to under fill and add more than overfill. The resin will spread out evenly to the sides. If it doesn’t, add a tiny bit more until it fills the space.

Dealing With Bubbles

If there are any bubbles, wait about 5 minutes as they may just go on their own. If you still have a few bubbles left, gently blow across the top of the pendant, being super careful not to blow the resin out of the pendant. You could also use a hairdryer for this but make sure you keep it quite a distance away from the pendant.

Leave the pendant to sit for 24 hours, until the resin is dry. Do try and be patient with this. I wasn’t patient enough and I managed to crack my first attempt.

Step 3 – Adding the Chain

Once your pendant is nice and dry, you can make up the necklace. Open the 10mm jump ring using your chain nose pliers. If you’ve never used jump rings before, watch this video all about jump rings.

Thread on the loop of the cabochon pendant and close the jump ring.

Thread the chain through the 10mm jump ring.

Open one of the 6mm jump rings and thread on the last link of one end of the chain. Remember, if you are right handed, you will want your clasp on the right side and vice versa, so put the jump ring on the left hand end of the chain.

On the other end of the chain, thread the jump ring through the last link, then add the loop of the clasp to the jump ring as well. Close the jump ring.