Resin Decorations: North Pole Postage Stamp Sign

A few years ago I made this adorable “Letter to Santa” sign with my Cricut and it’s been my all time favorite Christmas sign ever since. I put it up every year… and last year I even added this cute little resin Merry Christmas sign I made to the display. But when I saw this silicone Christmas postage stamp mold I knew it was time for an upgrade.

Resin postage stamps to go with my letter to Santa sign?

How is that not the cutest idea you’ve ever heard?

Of course, you could make them and use them as ornaments, or paper weights. Slap them on top of a Christmas present and they’d be adorable with wrapping paper (like these resin light bulbs I made last year!). But I’m super excited to make mine into a little sign that’s perfect for my Letters to Santa display (especially since I went over board and made a physical ” Letters to Santa Mailbox” to go in the display as well!

Let’s get started!

Supplies:

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Step 1: Prep your Station

Ready to mix a little resin? Before we jump right into the project let’s make sure we’re all set. I mean there’s nothing like dripping resin on the front porch because I forgot to cover my work table with freezer paper to remind you that prep work is important. Instead let’s take a moment to gather all of our supplies, cover all the surfaces with freezer paper, and place all of our molds on silicone (in baking trays) so they can be easily transported into a safe space to cure overnight.

You need a really well ventilated space to work with resin and since I have 5 dogs and a cat inside (without a workspace and air ventilation system) that place (for me) is my front porch. More specifically right next to my front door (so that I can plug in my heat gun). That means a little extra prep work but it’s totally worth it to be able to turn out resin projects like these. Don’t let a lack of work space keep you from creating!

Once you have your space set up make sure you have all of your paints, glitters, gloves and respirator. You don’t want to be mid pour and have to go riffling through your glitter collection… make sure you have all your supplies before you start to mix your resin!

Then it’s time to grab your resin and get started. Resin needs to be room temperature (not too hot or too cold) so I like to leave it inside while I’m setting up so that it doesn’t change temperatures while I’m prepping my space. Resin that’s too hot will cure too quickly and resin that’s too cold will have lots of bubbles… so keep that in mind when gathering your supplies.

You’ll also want to keep that in mind when picking a day to work on your resin creations… a super cold or rainy day won’t let your pieces cure as quickly while a scorching hot day will cook the pieces faster. You want nice weather for a resin work day!

Now that we have everything in one space let’s jump in (before it gets too cold… after all it is almost Christmas at the moment!)

Step 2: Mix your Resin

Start by pouring your resin in equal parts (a and b) into your mixing cup. I like to pour my projects in large groups to minimize the amount of times I have to turn my front porch into a resin workshop so I actually made about 300ml but this particular postage stamp mold used about 30ml of resin… so that’s 15ml of part a and 15ml of part b.

Don’t forget that as soon as you open that resin bottle you need to have on all of your personal protection equipment: gloves, respirator and even eye protection if you have it.

Now make sure to stir slowly for 3-5 minutes until the resin is thoroughly mixed. Scrape the sides and the bottom of the cup often to make sure alllll of the resin is incorporated into the mixture but try not to lift your stir stick out of the resin. You want to minimize the amount of bubbles in the mixture and the easiest way to make bubbles is to a) mix really quickly or b) lift your stir stick out of the cup over and over.

Once everything is thoroughly mixed go ahead and add your colorant… in this case that’s our craft paint. I ended up making a few of these but in this tutorial I used about 10 drops of rose gold metallic paint. Basically you don’t want to add more than 10% of paint to your resin so that it will still cure properly. But keep in mind that the less paint you add the more transparent your resin will be so if you want a really solid looking resin piece you’ll need to add drops of paint until the mixture appears more solid.

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 3: Pour Resin into your Silicone Mold

Ready for the fun part? Go ahead and double check that your mold is clean of all dust and dirt and then it’s time to pour!

I always always always try to pour from high up in a thin stream. The thinner the stream of bubbles the less bubbles make it into the mold… and minimizing bubbles is always the name of the game but it’s especially important when your mold has lots of little ridges and corners where bubbles can settle and get stuck.

Make sure to cover the entire bottom of the mold slowly and carefully (this is the front of your actual resin piece so you want the bubbles on the surface to be as minimal as possible). I find the best way to achieve this is to slowly pour a thin stream of resin onto each letter and into each corner. Then use your heat gun to pop as many bubbles on the surface before filling the rest of the mold.

Easy peezy!

Once the entire piece is filled you can use a toothpick to push any small bubbles to the surface. I try to check all the corners and around any words/design for bubbles and pop them with my heat gun as soon as they get to the surface with my toothpick!

It can take a minute but it’s so worth it for a bubble free surface on your piece. Especially when the front of your piece has sooo many cute details! We want to be able to read all of those words and see all the details on that little snowflake after all!

Once you’ve popped all the bubbles set your entire cooking tray in a cool (temperature controlled) location to harden. Honestly? I like to set mine in my guest bathroom so that they’re inside, no one messes with them and I don’t have to smell the cooling resin. It definitely still smells like resin as it hardens (and no one wants to wear a respirator for 24 hours) so you’ll want it to be somewhere out of the way (with a door).

Another tip? Cover the tray so that no dust or dirt (or dog hair) can settle in the resin as it cools. Then leave the entire piece for about 24 hours. Once the resin has cured we’ll move on to de-molding!

Step 4: De-mold your Resin Piece!

Once it’s been about 24 hours we can go ahead and de-mold these little postage stamps. Start from the outside and carefully pull the edges of the silicone away from your piece. The silicone will stretch realllllly far if you need it to but you don’t want to stretch it to far out of shape… once you have the edges all pulled back (so that you can actually grab the resin piece) you’ll want to pull the resin piece free from the mold.

Volia! De-molding finished!

This really is the most satisfying part of the process… not only do you get your first look at how the piece turned out but something about pulling resin free from the silicone is like popping the bubbles on bubble wrap or peeling that factory sheet of plastic off a new phone screen.

Spine tingling good.

And this particular mold has really thick silicone sides so it’s an extra awesome de-molding pop… the resin comes out beautifully without a lot of effort!

Make sure your silicone mold is clean and you can put it away for the next project (or make another piece… it’s ready to go right away!). If possible try to store all of your silicone molds flat in a temperature controlled place so that they don’t distort and warp over time. Perfect!

Step 5: Paint the Indention’s

At this point you could be finished… but do you see the difference in the resin pieces above? How when the sun hits them the surface is shiny and the words are clearly visible? That’s great but we can’t rely on the sun alllll the time. Plus I kind of want to be able to read my little postage stamps without needing to tilt them this way and that way.

So instead of relying on the sun we’re going to use a little paint to highlight those indention’s.

Luckily this is a pretty easy process.

Basically we’re going to add a bit of craft paint to our piece and then use our paper towel to wipe the paint off. This will leave the paint in the indention’s while the surface is super shiny smooth.

Perfect!

A few tips? The paint wipes off super easy while it’s wet so work in small sections… paint, wipe, paint, wipe. Another tip is that if you’re having trouble removing paint from small areas a q-tip comes in handy!

Ready for the last tip? When you’re painting try not to put paint alllll over the sides of your piece. It will wipe off but I find it way harder to remove paint from the sides v.s. the front (go figure) and honestly it’s much easier to just avoid painting the sides in the first place.

At this point our little resin pieces are finished! You could easily add a ribbon to these bad boys and hang them on your Christmas tree… but I wanted to make mine into a sign instead!

That way I could hang them on the wall with my little Dear Santa sign that I made with my Cricut and the cute Resin Merry Christmas I already hung! A little wall grouping!

Unfortunately these specific resin pieces were a little too small to hang directly on the wall… so are you ready to put these babies on a few tree slices?

Optional Step 6: Add Backing for Dimension

Backing is my fancy way of saying tree slices in case you were wondering… I’m very fancy over here.

Start by adding your postage stamps to the tree slices and playing around with the composition until you like both the tree rings and the postage stamps. I ended up with a layered pair of tree rings with my rectangular postage stamp on the larger tree ring and the round postage stamp on a round tree ring that was just a tad bigger than the actual stamp.

This looked really good but I felt like the rectangular stamp was still a little small… so I popped it up by layering another resin postage stamp in a lighter shade underneath.

Once I had my layout the rest was easy… I painted the back of the tree rings white so the postage stamps would pop off the front and then hot glued everything together!

Perfect!

Now I’m ready to hang these bad boys on the wall!