Amber Resin Jewellery Making

How do you make a faux amber necklace?

Resin jewellery making is fun. For months I tried to replicate faux amber jewellery and found my greatest difficulty was in matching the colour. Because that is the secret you must get the colour right to make it difficult to detect from the genuine article.

My wife is good at mixing colour but I must confess I find it very difficult. So it was with great relief that I came across a product that provided a perfect colour match to natural amber. Called Castin’Craft Amber transparent Dye that is a premixed natural amber liquid colour that can be used to make the most common honey colour found in amber resin. It is easy to modify this dye to darken or lighten and add other tones to provide the full range of colours for your resin jewellery making found in nature.

Amber is actually a fossilized resin formed over millennia from ancient trees similar to our modern pines and spruce trees. A great part of the beauty of natural amber is that organic matter such as insects, plants and other foreign material has been trapped in the resin.

Due to the irregular shape of natural amber this is a good time to use silicone putty as the mould material to make an amber necklace.Use some DAS air drying clay or Kato polymer clay to make some irregular shaped nugget like beads at the size you require.

1) Mix a small amount of Part A silicone Putty with an equal, amount of Part B by kneading the ball in your fingers until the colour is uniform.

2) Press the putty around the uneven shaped bead leaving an opening at the top sufficiently large to enable you to remove the bead and later to pour in the resin.

3) Continue making additional moulds from a variety of originals to provide diversity of shapes in your necklace or jewellery piece.

4) Remove the beads after about 30 minutes and set the moulds aside for a day or so to fully mature.

Amber effects using dyes with your resin jewellery making.

5) Mix 15ml of Part A with 15ml of Part B Crystal Craft add a few drops of Castin’Craft Amber Dye and pour into the prepared silicone bead moulds.

6) Any air bubbles that come to the top may be removed by waving a heat gun or hair drier gently over the top of the moulds.

7) Leave overnight for the resin to cure thoroughly and then remove the cast beads from the moulds. Gently flex the moulds and the beads will pop out.

8) Clean off any rough edges with a piece of wet and dry sandpaper. Buff gently with some Johnson’s floor wax polish to give the beads a nice gloss.

9) Drill a hole through the beads so that they can be strung using beading wire.

To add variety you should experiment and add inclusions and additional tonal colour variations to the resin. As this is fascinating in itself we will look around, for what we can find and provide an additional article on amber resin jewellery making later this year.