Resin is a brand-new medium for me to experiment with. I started by applying clear UV resin as a sealer and strengthener for another project that I'll be posting about in the future. I quickly got interested in making my own colored resin products and so purchased a set of transparent thin-style resin colors from Sophie and Toffee. The set didn't include white or black, so I purchased the thin-style opaque of those two colors, which bookend the transparents.
Starting with the transparent colors, their order is pink, dark red, magenta, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and violet. The naming is a bit curious - the purple is bluer and the violet is redder, making me wish the names were switched. The dark red seems light a LIGHTER red than the regular red and the orange looks to me more like an intense yellow than orange. When I need an orange, I'm going to have to try mixing red and orange to see if I can get a truer color.
The white is a gorgeous creamy white that has a milk glass-like translucency to it. I made this little compote dish and mug with the white and I love the effect. With a bit more cleaning up of the seams, these will look like great teeny tiny recreations of some of my grandma's milk glassware. The mug is only 6mm tall - working with items that small is quite a challenge!
I haven't yet made anything with the black, which is more of a semi-translucent smokey gray. I'm looking forward to experimenting with it in the near future.
For the wand itself, I coiled wire around a dowel rod, then removed the coil and started snipping up one side of the coil. This created a bunch of slightly offset rings that were easy to clamp together into perfect circles. I definitely need a different set of wire clippers in the future, to get a smooth, flat cut edge. But for the purposes of making this swatch wand, it worked!
Now that the wand is made, I can use it to eyeball which resin colors I want to use to make a project. I'm sure I'm going to make more of these wands as my collection expands; I already have several new opaque colors to swatch out. While the wand isn't perfect, and ultimately I'll probably make individual swatches to experiment with, it was a great mini project to get used to moving resin within metal cells. I also used resin tape to secure the rings and outer rim in place while I was working and THAT was a real experience - despite my best attempts not to touch it, I managed to stick myself to it over and over again. YouTube videos make it look so much easier!