This post is sponsored by Wagner and contains affiliate links for your convenience. Of course, all opinions are 100% my own!
After last week’s little resin succulent garden I’m back with another fun resin project! And while our little succulent garden might have been fake this week we’re taking the fun outside to the real garden… where we’ll make a beautiful wind chime that can float on the breeze.
This project is actually pretty easy when it comes to the resin portion… stringing the wind chimes takes a bit more time! Luckily that means even beginning resin artists can make this project.
Ready to get started? I’ll walk you through all the steps!
Supplies:
- 7 Dragonfly Cookie Cutters
- 3 Large Wind chimes & 7 Small Wind chimes
- Silicone Mat
- Baking Pan
- Freezer Paper
- Round Silicone Mold
- Environmental Technology Pour On Resin
- Nitrile Gloves
- Respirator
- Wagner HT400 Heat Gun
- Silicone Cups (1 550ml+ cup, 1 300ml+ cup, and 1 250ml+ cup)
- Stir Sticks (Popsicle or Re-usable)
- True Control Knife
- Pink Metallic Craft Paint
- Purple Metallic Craft Paint
- Pink Glitter
- Fishing Wire
- Resin Beads/Regular Beads
- Power Drill
- Tiny Drill Bit
- 8 Tiny Eye Hooks
- Hot Glue/Hot Glue Gun
- Sharpie
If you’re just starting out with resin this supply pack will give you a good head start on the basics (silicone mat, re-usable stir sticks, silicone cups etc). Of course, you can always check out my beginners guide to resin or this post that walks you through exactly what to buy to get started with resin.
Step 1: Prep your Cookie Cutters
First things first… since we’re making wind chimes I wanted to make sure that our pretty little piece would make noise. A pretty noise though… not the sound of resin clunking together.
So instead of casting resin straight into a silicone mold I decided to cast my resin into these adorable little dragonfly cookie cutters. They’re inexpensive and the metal edging will play nicely with our wind chimes… leaving only a beautiful melody (not clunky resin smacking together *shutter*).
Of course, a silicone mold is easy to cast into and cookie cutters need a little prep work. Let’s get on that.
Start by covering a large baking pan with a silicone mat. Resin won’t stick to silicone mat so the dragonflies will easily peel off of the silicone… and the baking pan is so that we can move our pieces to a safe drying place after we’ve poured our resin.
Now lay out your cookie cutters making sure that each one is on a flat portion of the pan and that there is enough room in between each piece to fit your hot glue gun.
Go ahead and grab your hot glue gun… and heat that baby up! Carefully go around each cookie cutter with of hot glue. The hot glue will form a barrier so that the resin stays in the cookie cutter but it peels off the metal fairly easily making for easy clean up.
Score!
Make sure when forming the barrier that you push the cookie cutter down to the silicone mat so that there isn’t any space for resin to seep under the cookie cutter and out the sides… and be generous with the hot glue. Any areas not covered in hot glue is a potential escape route for resin.
Which is a huge mess (trust me).
Pay special attention to the insides of the dragonflies wings… I added quite a bit of hot glue to this area and it was *ahem* a pain in the patootie to get out. I found it easier to take a small popsicle stick/spatula/tweezers and push the hot glue (when it’s still hot) into the wing crevice than to add heeps of hot hot glue.
Either way you want all of those cavities to be filled.
Since I didn’t want to waste resin (or make a mess) I did an extra bonus special step and filled each cookie cutter with a bit of water to make sure no escape routes were left. Any places that water was seeping out I plugged with hot glue.
Then I used a paper towel to soak up the water being careful not to pop the cookie cutter off the silicone mat.
Bonus Tip: Hot glue on silicone works but not perfectly (it peels off… which is why we’re using it. We don’t want it to be permanent!) but in the mean time make extra sure your pieces are sealed to the mat. Even after the water test one of mine got bumped and resin went EVERYWHERE. You want to be positive that your cookie cutters are sealed to the mat and you do that by putting hot glue down and not bumping it.
Step 2: Mix your Resin
Now it’s resin time! Set out your cups (1 550ml+ cup, 1 300ml+ cup, and 1 250ml+ cup), paint, glitter, stir sticks, gloves, respirator, and heat gun). Start by adding a bit of paint to each of your 250 ml cups.
Only a few drops… you don’t need much to color resin and we want our wind chimes to be a bit transparent. Once your cups are ready put on your protective gear. In this case gloves and respirator.
Now go ahead and mix your resin… my resin is a 1:1 ratio so I mixed 175ml of part a and 175ml of part b. Once all 550ml of resin were mixed I separated out 300ml to my purple paint cup and 250 to my pink paint cup… then I made sure to mix the paint & resin thoroughly.
Is this your first time mixing resin? You can check out my how to mix resin for beginners post for a full tutorial!
Once your resin is mixed go ahead and let it sit for about 2 minutes… that will let most of the micro bubbles rise to the surface of the resin. Then take your heat gun and pop all the bubbles! I like to use my little Wagner HT400 for all my resin projects since it’s not hot enough to ruin a silicone mold (like a torch will) but it’s still hot enough to pop all. the. bubbles.
See all the bubbles in the pink resin above? Gone.
Easy peezy lemon squeezy.
Step 3: Pour Resin into the Dragonflies
Once you’ve popped all the micro bubbles with your heat gun you can go ahead and pour the resin into your cookie cutters. I decided to make four purple dragonflies and 3 pink.
Go ahead and fill your cookie cutters all the way to the top edge with resin. Since you have multiple cookie cutters make sure to watch all of them as you pour… if your baking pan isn’t perfectly level you may have some cookie cutters with resin spilling over the sides and others that aren’t full enough. I take the easy way out and add a stir stick under an edge of my baking pan until the whole tray is level again.
Once all of your dragonflies are filled with resin go ahead and give them one last pass with your heat gun to pop any bubbles that have come to the surface… or popped up when pouring the resin.
My heat gun has a low and high setting and I like to use the high setting for popping bubbles… it’s the perfect temp. But it is definitely more powerful so make sure not to push the resin over the edge when you’re popping bubbles!
Ready for the finishing touch? After the resin has sat for a little bit (an hour or two) you can come back and add a little glitter to the wings! You don’t want to add it too soon or the glitter will simply sink to the bottom of the resin never to be seen again.
I simply sprinkled it over the edges until I was happy but you can do whatever you want… glitter the whole thing!
Bonus Tip: You may have noticed that you have a bit of resin left over at this point… that’s for your circle! Take your silicone circle mold (that will be our base for the fishing wire to pass through and support our wind chimes) and pour it with the left over resin. I simply poured pink resin into the silicone mold and then swirled the purple into it.
Then I added a bit of glitter all around the outside. I did one bit of glitter at the same time as the original pour so that the glitter would sink down and be visible on the bottom of the circle… and then I came back in 2 hours and did another ring of glitter so that it would stay on top of the circle. Boom.
Glitter on both sides.
I didn’t take a photo of this pour since it was off to the side but you’ll see the finished circle in a minute… simply pour it the same as the dragonflies and you’ll be fine!
Step 4: Remove Dragonflies from Mat
Now’s the hard part… waiting. Literally my absolute least favorite part of resin.
Once you’ve poured your resin make sure you set your baking tray in a clean dry space for it to cure. You’ll want to leave it for 24-72 hours to cure (depending on your resin). If you have a lot of air moving through your room you may want to put a box over the top of your dragonflies so dust doesn’t settle on them as well.
After they’ve cured you can (finally!) remove them from the silicone mat. The entire dragonfly (resin, hot glue, cookie cutter and all) should pop off your mat pretty easily. Just pick a spot and pull!
See the bottom of this baby? Smooth as a babies bottom. Beautiful darling!
Now start to remove the hot glue! The part around the tip of the tail was pretty easy to remove so I typically start there… push the hot glue down and away from the cookie cutter and it should pop loose.
Then you can start to pull it away from the rest of the dragonfly!
Of course, it’s not all fun and games. The section in between the wings (where I added eeeeexxxxtra hot glue?)… was my nemesis. I used a true control knife from my hoard of cricut supplies to cut this part away and it worked pretty well.
I’ll be honest… some of this portion was a little messy so I grabbed a bit of sand paper to reach the hard to reach parts and that worked too.
Step 5: Add Eye Hooks to Dragonflies
Ready for the power tools?
Now that our dragonflies are full of resin, glittered, cleaned and looking fabulous it’s time to add a few eye hooks so that we can hang them with our wind chimes.
Easy peezy.
Start by taking a small drill bit (just a tiny bit smaller than your eye hook) and drill into the top portion of the dragonflies right wing. The drill bit will want to slide around so to avoid long scratches use a bit of pressure to push down into the dragonfly… and when the drill bit starts to slide pick it up and place it back on the spot you’re drilling.
Once you start to hit resin you’ll notice the drill bit putting off bits of resin dust. You don’t need to drill into the resin (the eye hook will do that) so at this point you can back the drill bit out and move on to the next dragonfly.
When you’re done you should be able to see the spot you drilled through the wing of the dragonfly (transparent resin remember?). Looking good!
Now let’s add the eye hooks.
You can do this by hand but I use my power drill to save my fingers all that spinning… plus drilling the eye hook into the resin takes a fair amount of power and the power drill is perfect for that.
I simply add my eye hook to the mouth of my drill in the same way I would a drill bit making sure it’s secure and the teeth of the eye hook are straight.
Now… drill! Drill the eye hook straight into the hole you’ve already pre-drilled! You want to go slow with this (do NOT power that baby home… slow and stead is good for this one as the eye hook is likely to spin a little funny in the power drill and you want to direct it with the power drill).
Once you’ve got the eye hook flush with the edge of the dragonfly wing you can stop pushing the power button and simply twist the dragonfly until the eye hook is facing forward.
Then release the eye hook from the power drill and you’re good to go!
Once you’ve done all 7 dragonflies you need to add an eighth eye hook to the bottom of one of the dragonfly wings. This will be the dragon fly that sits at the very top of the wind chime and holds the entire piece so pick your absolute favorite dragonfly for the honor.
Then add a tiny eye hook to the bottom of the left wing.
On this particular cookie cutter the bottom of the left wing is where the seam of the cookie cutter is… so I placed my eye hook a bit higher than that to avoid it being damaged.
Step 6: Drill Holes in Round Base
Now it’s time for the round base!
This is the piece I was talking about earlier… it’s a simple circle made from a silicone coaster mold. Easy peezy.
Since we’re going to be stringing our entire wind chime through this piece we need to drill all holes for those strings! Instead of drilling the holes and hoping they’re spaced properly I took a sharpie and planned them out.
You want to draw 6 dots around the outside (for our 6 dragonflies), 7 dots in the middle circle (for our tiny wind chimes and beads), and 6 dots on your inner circle (for our largest wind chimes).
Bonus Tip: Since we’re using sharpie you can’t erase the dots if they aren’t quite right… but you can use a bit of paint thinner to wipe them away. Ta-Da!
Ready to drill? I put the round circle up on two dragonflies so that there was space for the drill bit to drill down into the circle. Drill straight through each dot until you’re finished drilling all the little spaces.
Each hole should be big enough to put two pieces of fishing wire through (I used the same drill bit I used for the tiny eye hooks.)
Step 7: String the Top Portion of your Wind Chime
Now it’s time to put it all together!
We’ll start at the top so that we can string all of the other sections through our little circle. Add a bit of fishing wire to the top of the dragonfly and then thread it through the top eye hook.
For the bottom eye hook we’ll take a little bit of a different approach.
Thread a long piece of fishing wire through the inner 6 holes of the circle… and every time your fishing wire comes out the top of the circle pass it through the eye hook in the bottom of the dragonfly.
This should give you a balanced hold on the circle so that it hangs straight from the dragonfly. Once you’ve threaded it through all 6 holes knot it under the circle and cut the excess fishing wire off.
Step 8: String 7 Small Wind Chime Sections
Now let’s string our 7 small wind chimes! For these babies we’ll need our smallest wind chime and a few beads. I’ve grabbed 7 large beads and a bunch of small and medium sized beads in pinks, purples… and even a few pearls.
You can use whatever beads you have but for the largest beads I grabbed a few of the resin beads I made for a different project… they have the same glitter that I used in the dragonflies! So now they match!
Once you have all your beads it’s time to string it all together!
Cut a long piece of fishing wire and add your shortest wind chime to the middle.
Then knot the fishing wire about an inch above the top of the wind chime and make sure it’s tight so that the beads don’t slip. Easy peezy.
I added 3 beads to the bottom section… a different combination to each of the 7 strands. For the bottom section I used my large bead and a mixture of small and medium beads… they look so cute!
Once you’ve done the bottom it’s time for the top. Add another knot to the string… about 2.5 inches above the bottom section. Then you can add your 3 small/medium beads to finish off the strand.
Once you’ve done all 7 strands with small wind chimes and beads it’s time to move on!
Step 9: Add All Pieces to your Wind Chime
Now that we’ve got all the pieces ready to rock it’s time to add them to our circle base! This is the tricky part because it tends to get lopsided until all the pieces are added… don’t get discouraged just keep going.
Start by adding your three biggest wind chimes to the middle. These babies are easy since you have 3 wind chimes and 6 holes… simply thread one long piece of fishing wire through the wind chime then up through the hole in the circle, down through the next hole in the inner most circle… through the next wind chime etc etc until you’ve made your way around the entire inner most circle. Then knot your thread!
For the small wind chime strands (the ones with the beads) you’ll add each strand to one of the 7 holes in the middle ring… threading the end of the fishing wire up through the circle and knotting the string above the circle so that they all hang at the same height (the bottoms should be even with the bigger wind chimes in the middle).
Then add your dragon flies around the outer most circle! I hung my dragon flies so that they cascaded around from shortest to tallest but you can hang them randomly or all even with the bottom wind chime as well… whatever you prefer.
Step 10: Enjoy your new Wind Chime!
Now you’re set! Simply hang and enjoy!
I absolutely love how this baby turned out… and since I used two different sized wind chimes and the metal cookie cutters there are 3 different sounds whenever the wind blows… which I think makes it even prettier!
Just one last note… this baby is heavy! The resin dragonflies are definitely not light as a feather so make sure you hang it on a sturdy branch. You also want to make sure you give your resin circle a full 7 days to cure before hanging all that weight from it… otherwise it will buckle and bend under the weight.
I cannot wait to sit outside and listen to this little guy all summer long… it’s right beside the patio we’re building in our backyard so we’ll be able to listen to it every time the wind blows!
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