Studio Saturdays

Welcome to Studio Saturday! Each week one of our contributors gives you a sneak peek into their studio, creative process or inspirations. We ask a related question of our readers and hope you'll leave comments! As an incentive we offer a free prize each week to bribe you to use that keyboard. The following week we choose a random winner. This week's winner is Devine Design! Congratulations! Please send your postal address to the ABS Suggestion Box to receive one of Cyndi's borosilicate off mandrel hearts!

Today, we take a tour into the ceramic bead studio of Jennifer Heynen....

Hey everyone, its my Studio Saturday and it's my chance to show you what I have been up too. Are you one of those people who has to keep creating and moving forward, well I am. I really like mixed media these days, and one of the others medias I am really liking is resin. Have you tried it? Oh wait... I will ask that at the end as my question of the week, but have you tried it? It's soooo much fun.

Resin has always intrigued me. When I lived in Bloomington, IN and was making mosaic tile tables, I coincidentally lived right next door to another table artist, Laura Moore. Her company was Bella Bella Arts, she makes beautiful tables from cut tissue paper and then pours resin over the top to create and shiny and deep looking surface. I have always wanted to try it. When resin started showing up in the jewelry world, I became even more interested.

The wheels in my head started turning, see when I look at anything, I translate it into clay. It is impossible for me to look at anything and not think how could I make this in clay. It was no different when I started seeing bezels being filled with resin. I immediately started thinking about ceramic bezels. I made some and tried my hand at some pendants. I learn by trial and error. This was an error that taught me a lot. It was an absolute mess. The resin was smelly, it didn't cure right, my eyes were burning, etc, etc. What I learned was I needed to take a class!

So this summer at Bead and Button I took a class. It was Susan Lenart Kazmer's resin and cold connections class. I learned a lot. I even brought some of my bezels to class to try. We used Susan's favorite resin, ICE resin. I have since found out there are many types of resin much better than what I used the first time, but I still stick with Susan's. These are my pieces from Susan's class.

After many trials and errors, below are the bezels I came up with to offer my customers. I have had so much fun filling these and making jewelry. I now look at every store for little things to put in my bezels. Etsy has some great suppliers too for fillers.




Here are a few step by step photos of making a resin filled pendant. For this Christmas pendant, I used the white sprinkle balls for snow. Yes, as I was sorting through the little things I was thinking it was a little crazy, they are so tiny. They make really great snow, though. For the tree, I used one of my Christmas tree charms and cut the wire loop off the top.

I cut a blue pieces of paper for the background and glued it in. I laid all of the little white ball on the background and put the tree on top of them.
Next, I mixed up the resin. This resin is a mixture of two equal parts. I mixed them together really well with a Popsicle stick.
Here is the finished pendant. It is still curing and I can't touch it for a day, but this is what I am thinking for finishing it into a necklace. How fun is that?!



Okay now we can get back to my question. Have you tried it? If you have tell me what you like and don't like about it. Tell me also what you've been adding to your resin, I would over to hear. And if you're the winner, I will be sending you a ceramic bezel of your own to fill.

Happy Saturday!
Jennifer