Make your own resin Christmas ornaments

It wouldn’t be Christmas without a crafting project.  How about a DIY resin Christmas ornaments project?  (and this is going to be easier than it looks — promise!)

First, start with something to serve as your ornament base.  In this case, I purchased unglazed ceramic ornaments.  Wooden cutouts or hollow cardboard boxes could work too.  Pick out some holiday spray paint colors 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 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 sides painted completely.

After letting the ornaments dry for 24 hours, I got my resin and glitter supplies together.  For the first pour, I’m using MasterCast resin and glitter in big pieces I picked up from the sale bin last year at Target.

Set your ornaments so that they are elevated above your crafting area.  I put mine on one ounce mixing cups.

I mixed 40 ml total of resin for the first side.  It’s a little more than what I estimated I would need, but I wanted to be sure I had plenty.

Tip:  Here’s an article that helps you with the math on how much resin you need for a project.

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 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, 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.

Once the resin has cured (approximately 12 hours for MasterCast), you can prepare for the next resin pour.

1. I mixed another 40 ml of MasterCast resin.
2. 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!)
3. I poured approximately 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons of resin in with each of the colors.
4. The remaining resin I colored with Resin Obsession opaque white pigment.

Cover the other side of each ornament with white resin.

Not shown:  Draw the resin to the edge of each ornament with your stirring utensil.

Tip:  You don’t have to be exact here.  The edges of these ornaments weren’t squared off, so it was sometimes hard to judge where to stop with the resin.  Take the ‘icing a cookie’ approach.

Once you have the white fully covering your ornaments, drop in your colored resin.

I didn’t move the resin at all.  I let it do its thing.

The resin will likely drip off the sides.  You will definitely need to babysit these for awhile 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.

Once the resin is cured, enjoy your handwork!

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.  They 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 which 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 ceramic Christmas ornaments, 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 is your favorite?

Interested in how I made the colors come together?  You can see more of that here: