It wouldn’t be Christmas without a crafting project. How about spending an afternoon with a DIY project of making resin Christmas ornaments? This is going to be easier than it looks — I promise!
Paint the Ornaments
First, start with something to serve as your DIY resin Christmas ornament base. In this case, I purchased unglazed ceramic ornaments. Wooden cutouts or could work, too. Pick out some holiday spray paint colors of your choice, as well.
Because I wanted to be able to paint both sides at once, I created a contraption of cardboard boxes, a milk crate, and some Moretti glass rods to hold onto the ornaments while I painted both sides.
If you aren’t in a hurry to get these painted, you could place these on wax or freezer paper, paint on one side and allow them to dry. Flip and paint the other side.
After applying two coats of paint, I found that I needed to place the ornaments on the milk crate to get the ornament sides painted completely.
Apply Resin to the First Side
After letting the ornaments dry for 24 hours, I got my resin and glitter supplies together.
Set your ornaments so that they are elevated above your crafting area. I put mine on one ounce mixing cups.
Mix resin for the first side. Since you won’t need much, the Resin Obsession crystal doming resin is a great choice.
Start by pouring resin into the center of the ornament. You want to dome this on the surface. Use your stirring utensil to draw the resin out to the edges.
Once you have the surface coated with resin, add some glitter to the top.
Your resin is likely to drip over the side. Scrape it off as necessary. You will need to do this for the next hour to an hour and a half, depending on the cure time of the resin you use.
Tip: You could put painter’s tape or masking tape on the backside, which you can peel off once the resin is cured. I likely would have done that here if these had been simple square or rectangle shapes.
If you didn’t get all the drips off your DIY resin Christmas ornaments, use a pair of pliers to pull off the big drips while the resin is still in the soft cure stage. You don’t need to get them all off, just the big ones that would push through another layer of resin.
Add the Second Resin Layer
Once the resin has cured (which takes approximately 24 hours) you can prepare for the next resin pour.
- Mix another batch of Resin Obsession crystal doming resin.
- Because I wanted the colors on the backside to match the front side, I put a burst of each of the spray paints into their own cups. (Do this outside!)
- I poured approximately 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons of resin in each of the colors.
- The remaining resin I colored with Resin Obsession opaque white pigment.
Cover the other side of each resin Christmas decoration with white resin.
Not shown: Draw the resin to the edge of each DIY resin ornament with your stirring utensil.
Tip: You don’t have to be exact here. The edges of these resin Christmas ornaments weren’t squared off, so it was sometimes hard to judge where to stop with the resin. Take the ‘icing a cookie’ approach, meaning you don’t have to get the resin exactly to the edge.
Once you have the white resin fully covering your ornaments, drop in your colored resin.
I didn’t move the resin at all but instead, let it move on its own.
The resin will likely drip off the sides. You will definitely need to babysit these for a while to wipe off drips (unless you use the tape method). Resin drips won’t peel off at the soft cure stage this time because resin loves adhering to itself.
Here are My Finished DIY Resin Christmas Ornaments
Front side:
The backside turned out great too. All I need to do now is hang them on a ribbon.
I have a little Christmas tree in my office. These resin Christmas decorations look great on it.
If you were to make this DIY resin Christmas ornaments project, you wouldn’t have to do a different design on each side. I couldn’t make up my mind on what I wanted to do, so I found a way to do both.
And by the way, apparently, if there is a cat in the room at the same time as these Christmas decorations, there is a strange gravitation force that makes them fall on the ground and break. Not sure how this happened but thought you should know.
Which one of these DIY resin Christmas ornaments is your favorite?
Interested in how I made the colors come together? You can see more of that here:
Ready to try resin but hesitant to get started because you don’t want to make a mistake?
I get it. I made a lot of them when I first started. It almost made me want to quit!
I don’t want anyone else to go through the struggle I did, so I wrote the book Resin Jewelry Making. It shares a clear path to make something amazing with resin, avoiding the mistakes and frustration in the process. Buy the PDF book today and you can have it to read in minutes!
Unpublished Blog Posts of Resin Obsession, LLC © 2021 Resin Obsession, LLC
