DIY Tiny Personalized Resin Dog Ornaments

If you’ve been here a minute you know I have a few dogs (after all they were all lined up on my bed during last week’s Christmas Home Tour… well 4 of the 5 were!). What you may not know is that I come by it easily enough… my mom has 6 dogs and my dad has 5. Dogs EVERYWHERE! So buying a cute personalized dog ornament is a little difficult as most will only let you pick a few pups.

I need a bunch of pups!

So I set out to whip up a few tiny little resin dog ornaments that I could personalize with my Cricut. This way I can make as many as I need! Plus they’ll make adorable presents for my mama (and her dogs) and my daddy (and his dogs!). So whether your family has a normal amount of dogs (say 1 or 2) or even more than my family (can you imagine?) you’ll be able to make adorable ornaments for everyone!

We’re going to use a silicone mold to pour a few resin dog bones and then once they’re cured we’ll add permanent vinyl with our Cricut Joy. If you don’t want to do the resin portion of the project you cold always grab a few adorable dog bone ornaments (like any of these) and skip to the cricut portion of the project! (That would be step 4… FYI).

Let’s get started.

Resin Supplies:

Cricut Supplies:

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Step 1: Mix Your Resin

First things first… before we start mixing we need to prep our work station. That means freezer paper for our workbench, gloves for our hands and a respirator for our face! Seriously y’all… I know this is a small project but put a respirator on your face.

I work outside (since you need a well ventilated space for resin and this is my easiest solution!) so I grab a baking pan and silicone sheet to easily transport my piece once it’s cured. You do not want to carry a tiny dog bone ornament mold full of liquid resin over your living room rug to find a place to cure…. a baking pan with edges is your friend here.

Once you have on your safety gear and are in your well ventilated space we’ll start mixing!

You’ll need about 5ml of resin per dog bone and my mold has 6 spots so that’s about 30ml of resin… I mixed 50 to make sure I had enough (plus I wanted to do a few of the matching dogs). MakerPoxy is a 1:1 ratio so you’ll need equal parts of a and b… mathematically that’s 25ml of part A and 25ml of part B. Go ahead and add both to your mixing cup and then mix those together slowly and thoroughly for 3 minutes, pop any bubbles that have come to the top and we’re good to go!

I’m making these little guys clear so I didn’t add any colorant but if you’d like glitter dog ornaments… or red and green paw prints you’ll want to add your colorant now. You only need a few drops (10% colorant to 90% resin) of colorant… then mix until each container looks consistent!

Perfect, darling!

Bonus Tip: If you’ve never mixed resin before it’s not nearly as intimidating as you’d think! I’ll walk you through all the steps here in my How to Mix Resin for Beginners Tutorial.

Step 2: Pour your Resin into your Silicone Mold

Ready for the next step?

Pouring resin into such a small mold is super easy! You’ll hold your resin high above your mold and pour it in a thin stream ton minimize bubbles. These little babies aren’t huge so there aren’t any fun little spots to trap bubbles.

Which definitely helps!

Go ahead and fill each of the molds up to the top and then use your heat gun to pop any bubbles that rise to the top.

Easy peezy lemon squeezy!

Then go ahead and set these babies aside for 24 hours to cure. Make sure to place something over the top so that no dust, dog hair, gross bugs or yuck ends up falling into the resin and curing as part of the ornament. That’s never good!

Step 3: Un-Mold your Piece

After 24 hours it’s time to pop these babies out… go ahead and start by pulling the silicone away from the resin. It won’t take long until the dog bone starts can be pulled free from the mold!

You can un-mold every last dog bone and then we’ll move on to the next step… writing out all the dog names we need in Cricut Design Space.

Just a note… there are a few dog bone silicone molds that already have holes for ornament hooks but we’ll have to add eye hooks in order to hang these babies. I just screwed the eye hooks directly into the top of the dog bone. Only took a few seconds!

Step 4: Design your Cut Files

Okay… designing is a bit of a generous term here. We’re basically going to open Cricut Design Space and type all of our names. If you need a little refresher you can check out my full overview of the entire Design Space Dashboard here… in the meantime let’s get started.

Go ahead and type one of your doggo’s names. I started with “Daisy” and then picked a font that would be easy to cut on a small scale. Bebas Neue. I re-sized it to .25 of an inch high (so that it will fit on our little dog bone) and then double checked the length.

From here you can copy and paste your name and re-write it until you have allllll the pups you’re working with named. I decided to make 6 for Mom and 5 for me. We’ll have to make a few more for Dad once I grab a bit of black vinyl! For today I’m making Mom’s in gold vinyl and mine in pink vinyl.

Since we’re cutting two different vinyls we’ll need to change the color from black to gold and pink… to coordinate with the vinyl we’re cutting. Then we can select “Cricut Joy” on the machine drop down menu and hit go!

Step 5: Cut your vinyl with your Cricut Joy

Now we’re cooking with gas! Since we re-colored our text to coordinate with our actual smart vinyl we know to load the gold vinyl with the gold mat and the pink vinyl with the pink mat.

Easy peezy.

Go ahead and select “without mat”, permanant smart vinyl and more pressure! At this point you’ll be able to load the first color of smart vinyl directly into your Joy. The Joy will pull it through the machine and make sure you have enough material to cut the entire design.

Of course in this case we have a tiny design and a new roll of vinyl so that’s a little *ahem* extra but whatever. Easy enough.

Once this is done you’ll have a green “go” button in Cricut Design Space (in the bottom right corner)… when you hit that button the Joy will start to cut your dog’s names!

Step 6: Slice your Vinyl and Put it Away

Remember when I pointed out that we had way more vinyl than we needed? Let’s go ahead and cut that off! I started by slicing off the rest of the roll… easy enough first step.

You can do this with scissors but since we want that edge to be extra straight the next time we feed it into the Joy (it is smart vinyl after all) the slicer typically works better.

Then cut off the excess vinyl above the cuts and store it for another small project… we won’t be able to use it as smart vinyl but you can always add it to a cutting mat and use it that way. That’s good enough for me!

Last but not least go ahead and cut each of your names apart… Design Space will put them really close together when it cuts them out (so that no vinyl is wasted). That’s great when it comes to preserving material but it’s easier to weed each name if it’s not one long line of letters.

Step 7: Weed your Vinyl

Speaking of weeding… let’s do that.

Now that all of our names are separate go ahead and weed any negative vinyl away from the names. We’ll remove the background and then use our weeding tool to remove all the little pieces.

The inside of the o, the middle of the d, the tiny loop of a lower case e.

Once we have just the names we can move on to the transfer tape. Wahoo!

Step 8: Use Transfer Tape to Personalize your Dog Ornaments!

We are soooo close to done!

Grab a tiny piece of transfer tape and place it over one of the names… use the scraping tool and push down really hard. Scrape, scrape, scrape… then turn it over and scrape from the back. Then you can peel up the transfer tape (with the letters!) and place them on your little doggy bone.

If you use the grid of the transfer tape to mark the center of your name it makes lining everything up easy peezy.

Then use your scraping tool to push the vinyl down onto the bone… and remove the transfer tape leaving the letters behind!

Volia! Personalized Dog Ornament!

Step 9: Enjoy!

Is that not the cutest thing you’ve ever seen?! I love how they turned out… and I can’t wait to make more.

I have soooo many ideas on how I could use this little mold (besides Christmas ornaments!) but in the meantime let’s take a look at how these little cuties turned out.

Enjoy!