Concrete Resin, Anyone?

My last two blog posts have been all about some of the experiments I've been doing with my resin dragon eye notebooks! (You can read about those here and here). I've been searching for ways to add some texture to the resin, first I tried adding actual stones into it and then I tried out some different sanding and painting techniques. Both helped me start to achieve the look I was going for, which has been to turn the glossy looking dragon eye notebooks into ones that look like stone.

I love experimenting with things like this, even though it can be frustrating. Its still fun to see what all is possible with something like resin, which is still a mystery to most people (even ones that work with it regularly). So amidst the trial and error, one of my sisters had a cool idea that we had to try! Maybe a year ago she had used mortar, a 3D printer, and a few other things to make a really cool rock wall/habitat for one of my other sister's big pet lizard. Well she had leftover mortar mix and coloring and we decided to see if we could mix the mortar right in with the resin before pouring it into the mold! Our thought was that if we were adding cement mix in, it would feel like cement.....

Boy were we wrong....

We used my double sided silicone dragon eye mold for this.

Basically my sister mixed up the mortar and water while I mixed up the resin. Both things had a limited window of time before they'd start to harden, so we really did need two people for it.

We mixed a terra cotta concrete coloring in with the mortar mix and then once that and the resin were both mixed separately, we added them both together. We didn't use a whole lot of resin, we needed to keep the majority of the mixture nice and thick and cement like.

Once the two were mixed, we smeared it and pressed into the dragon eye notebook mold and tried to level it out as best we could.

Then we poured a thin layer of just resin on top so that the back of the notebook would still be smooth.

Then came the hard part.... We had to wait at least 36 hours before taking it out of the mold.... Patience is not our strongest feature....

We were SHOCKED with how smooth it turned out! I mean it was probably smoother than most resin turns out...

We had left the part behind the actual eye clear, just in case the rest of it turned out rocky like we thought it would, we didn't want the eye to be rough.

It actually looked pretty cool with the clear eye. I still haven't decided exactly how I'll paint the scales or add some pizazz to it yet. And although it turned out NOTHING like what we expected, it was still a fascinating result!

PLUS, once I saw the clear glass-like eye, it immediately gave me an idea for my next experiment that I cannot wait to do! Buuuuut after this one I had to take a pause on all the experiments because a local store wanted some of my dragon eye notebooks to put on display and sell! I'm pretty excited about it, its probably the first time I've actually felt like I've entered the business world since starting my own small business a few months ago. So after this cement/resin experiment, the next week and a half pretty much all I did was make new dragon notebooks for the local store (Table and Towers) that I knew had to be top notch if they were going to be successful! I took them all over yesterday though so I'm hoping in the next few days I may have some time to try another experiment!