2 New Resin Bottlecap Pendants

I have been working on a new beadwoven bracelet for a few weeks now, and I like it - I like the colors, I like the pattern, but now that I have done one repetition of the pattern (there are about 12 repetitions in the finished bracelet), I am mind-numbingly bored with it, and just want it to be DONE WITH IT. Not the first time a tedious peyote pattern has affected me this way (I even have one in my Zombie box that is 6 years old: it is so tediously repetitive, with a really hard-to-read pattern graph, that I doubt I will ever finish it. It will probably remain 3/4 inch long forever!) Do y'all ever get this way? So attracted by a bright, shiny, new project, you have to dive right in, only to find it bores you to tears?

Anyway, I work on the new bracelet for an hour or so, and need a break. Yesterday I just couldn't even stand to work on it, so I started something new.

I had found these cute bottlecap bezels at Michael's a couple of years ago, and decided I needed to buy them and squirrel them away, because someday I'd figure out what to do with them.

I stumbled across them again when I taught the Cold Connections Workshop last month, and figured that if I'm never going to use them myself, maybe I should work them into a class, so I started thinking on some different ideas for a new class.

We already offer Ice Resin classes, so I wanted to go in a different direction - maybe with embossing powder? Who knows; give it a whirl, anyway.

So, fully and completely bored with my peyote bracelet, I put the seed beads away, and started trying to figure out what to try in my bottlecap bezels. I punched holes in each one for hanging, since they didn't come pre-punched.

resin bottlecap pendants

The bezels came in 2 colors: white (with a funky zebra design on the back) and antique copper.

The zebra one could obviously be reversible, so I decided to use black and white objects in the bezel. I played around with lots of different thing, but only 3 objects really fit in the cup at a time, and while I liked the cute brads (lower right, with the zebra pattern) - and had them in an assortment of 6 different black and white designs (another scrapbooking item I had impulsively purchased at Michael's and hoarded away) - no matter how I arranged them in the cup, they looked like a face staring back at me: 2 eyes, and an open mouth. Ugh.

I found some pink and white zebra striped scrapbook paper (you know the drill: another squirreled-away impulse buy from Michael's), and liked how it echoed the zebra print on the back of the cap, so I cut out a circle of it and placed it in the cup. I looked around for other black and white stuff; what I really wanted was a feather, but alas, I didn't have any feathers - at least, not in black - squirreled away. I finally chose a black button with a sparkly rhinestone center, and a half-drilled freshwater pearl. I carefully placed these on the paper in the cup, and filled the cup with clear embossing powder.

The antique copper cup was much easier - I had these pretty paper scrapbooking flowers, and fit them into the cup, and then added some ground-up malachite that I had made for a previous foray into resin bezels. (The pendant I made during that class, with the ground malachite, sold right away, and didn't even make it to the blog post!). The idea was for the flowers to look like a flowering tree (they were supposed to be pink dogwoods), and the malachite is the grass underneath them. When I was ready to pour the embossing powder into the cup, I noticed that I had carefully put everything into the bezel without noting the hole placement, and they were in there almost perfectly upside down. So I rearranged them, and poured in the powder.

Using my embossing gun, I heated them from the back, and they both liquefied fairly quickly:

waterlily pendant

The paper flower bezel generated a LOT of air bubbles - not sure why. I really like the end result - it looks like waterlilies on a pond to me, very Monet.

pink zebra resin pendant

My pink zebra cup didn't bubble, and once it cooled, I noticed that the scrapbooking paper had a glitter effect on it, which has given a very sparkly look to the pendant. Love it!

pink zebra pendant, reverse side

This is the back of the pink zebra pendant: The center has discolored a tiny bit from the intense heat of the embossing gun.

I think this will make a pretty fun class, and something students can easily do on their own at home, with minimal supply outlay!

And now that I have wasted 2 hours taking pics and creating this blog post, I am going to try to slog my way through another inch or so on that peyote bracelet!