Michon Jewelry Blog

The Art of Resin Jewelry: Layering, Casting, and Mixed Media Techniques for Creating Vintage to Contemporary Designs by Sherri Haab.

This book is a great introduction to working with resin. It covers the basics of resin, including tips on eliminating bubbles and other common problems that people encounter when starting to work with resin. There are a good number of projects to complete, and an overview of the jewelry techniques you will need to know to complete the projects (in other words, stuff you need to know how to do in addition to the resin stuff).

Haab recommends different resins for different projects, which was interesting to me. I don’t think this is practical for most hobby jewelry makers, since one resin kit (resin plus hardener) will last quite a while - but it was interesting to me to learn about some of the products out there that I haven’t tried.

My favorite part of the book is the section that covers making molds for casting resin. This is something I’ve been wanting to explore, and it’s nice to have clear instructions and recommended products for moldmaking. The projects in the casting section aren’t necessarily my style, but they show several different techniques that I can potentially use to create designs that are more “me” with casing resin.

I would recommend this book to people with some basic bead stringing and wireworking skills who are interested in trying resin for the first time, and also for people who have experimented a little bit with resin but want to learn more about some of the different techniques that can be used in creating resin jewelry. The photographs are very well done, and many of the projects look like they would be fun to make. The basic techniques used in the projects are more than enough to get someone with a little creativity started making up their own designs.

One side-note: you can probably do a lot of the projects in the book with just one kind of resin to start with. I’ve been using the Colores brand resin for all of my resin work, and I know that it would work for most of the projects in the book. There are a few that use a special opaque colored resin, which might be tricky to duplicate using a clear resin, but otherwise one type of resin is probably sufficient to start trying out the different techniques in the book. That way you don’t have to go broke buying six or more different kinds (unless you want to try all the different kinds - if so, please tell me which you liked best).