I’m working on some rings for my personal jewelry stash this week that requires me to do a bit of experimenting. The project is a group of miniature food rings, some of which must be made out of resin, because they are bottles with a high degree of translucency.

My plan was to sculpt the bottles first out of polymer clay, and then use the clay bottles to cast silicone molds. And then, the molds would be used to cast the final resin bottles.

Bottles are more difficult for me to sculpt because of their symmetry, something that does not often come into play with more free-form foods, and there was an added challenge of needing to add texture to some of the bottle surfaces. For example, here’s the real version of one of the pieces I’m attempting to miniaturize; you can see the raised texture on the upper portion of the bottle.

oronamin-c-bottle

In order to create the pyramid shapes, I ended up pressing a square bead corner into a piece of clay. This piece was baked, and then I was able to use the baked clay to create sections of raw clay with the necessary pattern.

These were assembled along the neck of the bottle. Then, I wrapped another piece of clay along the top of the bottle, and I used a ball-ended tool to create round depressions on the surface. Finally, I wrapped a sheet of clay around the bottom half of the bottle to make the entire bottle surface level.

This bottle, along with others that I sculpted in different shapes, were baked, and then I pressed each of them into a pad of “junk” clay at the bottom of plastic cups to prepare for pouring the mold-making material. The junk clay prevented the liquid rubber from seeping underneath the bottles, effectively encasing them in the mold, which was not what I wanted.

sculpting-miniature-Bottles

The two-part mold material was mixed together and then poured into the plastic cups (more on the mold material at the end of this post), and I left them to cure overnight. When I popped the molds out of the cups this morning, everything looked good! Now it’s just a matter of waiting to see whether the resin I’ve poured into the molds will look the way I’m hoping once it’s cured tomorrow. Fingers crossed!

making silicone molds

Normally, when I’m making molds to sell in my shop, I use a silicone mold putty that I mix by hand. It’s super strong, but it’s also pretty darn expensive, so I knew that I couldn’t use it for these much larger molds or they’d cost a fortune.

I tried a new product by a company called Smooth-On, and while I’m super happy with the level of detail that can be captured with this material, it’s not terribly strong, and it’s possible to tear some of the thinner pieces off–definitely not something I want to use for pieces I’m selling. However, it’s less expensive and it worked quite well for this project, so I’m hoping the results I get tomorrow, once I pop out the resin pieces, are satisfactory. I’ll keep you posted with more pics later this week!

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