How to Make Resin Jewelry - Make a Pendant!

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Last Updated on November 26, 2021 by Katherine

Working with resin can seem daunting if you have never taken the leap before, but I promise you that with a bit of prep and understanding, you can easily learn how to make resin jewelry for yourself (and as gifts for others).

In this post, I will show you how to make a beautiful necklace pendant with epoxy resin. This tutorial will include creating a multi-piece pendant, which means it contains more than one piece of resin, as I wanted to show you how you can use resin in a variety of ways. With eye screws, you can accomplish anything!

Curious? Let’s get started!

What You Will Need:

To learn how to make glitter resin jewelry, you need a few things, glitter being one of them!

So what exactly do you need to make a glitter resin necklace pendant? I recommend the following items:

Craft Resin (Sometimes called Epoxy Resin);
Resin Molds (The ring molds I found are in this kit from Amazon);
Eye screws (the kit above includes silver and gold ones);
Eye pin and some beads (optional);
Pliers (Round nose is probably all you need – read more about pliers here);
Jewelry chain (I went with silver);
Glitter (You can find most types at the dollar store or places like Wal-mart);
Alcohol Inks or other objects to cast into your resin (optional); and,
Resin measuring cups (You can also use plastic cups that you can just toss out later).

Planning crafting projects can be time-consuming and frustrating. Snag a copy of my printable crafting project workbook (Details below!):

Prepare Your Resin Workspace

Resin can be a messy project, so I recommend starting by taking a few minutes to set aside an area that you can work. If you don’t have a workbench type area that you don’t mind getting a little messy, I recommend working with a cardboard box.

Make sure it’s sealed up, so there are no resin leaks once you start working. Packing tape works fine to do this.

I like the box idea because you can then cover up your resin while it cures. The last thing you want is dust or bugs to gum up your project.

Prepare Your Molds

Once you've chosen a resin mold, you'll need to glitter that puppy up!

First step: prepare your jewelry molds with some glitter!

I like to prepare my molds first before mixing the resin, as once you’ve combined the resin; you have around 45 minutes of working time, depending on the product you use. So if you prep your molds before mixing the resin, you can immediately start pouring it.

If you’re just using glitter, just sprinkle it in as liberally as you like. I used a few different colors and sizes for some texture because I wanted to put the “glitter” in glitter resin jewelry!

If you are planning to use any alcohol inks or paint, you’ll use those later on.

Measure and Mix your Resin

Once your resin molds are ready to go, it's time to mix your resin!

I highly recommend reading the instructions in full before proceeding! These instructions will also tell you how much working time you have once you mix everything–super important! They’ll also tell you what ratio to mix (usually 1:1).

I recommend wearing gloves, and you will use your measuring cup or plastic cup and pour your resin and hardener in and stir for the time in the instructions (usually about 3 minutes).

Check out this quick hack from Hirst Arts if you are using a plastic cup!

Pour That Resin!

Once it’s mixed, it’s time to pour! Carefully and slowly pour your resin into your glitter prepped mold. A little spillage is fine, but you’ll pour until you have a nice even line on the top of your resin mold. If it’s not precise, don’t worry. You can sand any rough edges of your resin once it’s cured.

If you’d like to add alcohol ink, now is the time. You can use a toothpick to stir the color in or let gravity create a pattern as the resin cures.

Check for bubbles periodically throughout the “working period of the resin.” For my product, it was 45 minutes. You can use a toothpick for popping any large bubbles that form. You will also want to cover your work at this point and only uncover when you’re checking for bubbles to pop.

Once you've poured your resin in the mold, cover your work!

Wait For A Cure

Depending on your resin product, a full cure can take about 72 hours. It will also depend on the size of your resin mold too, smaller rings like in my project were ready after about a day. Once your pieces cure, your glitter resin jewelry piece will take shape!

You can sand off any “tags” that you find on your resin once it has hardened. I always use wet/dry sandpaper and wet the paper as it will keep the dust down.

You can check out some more finishing techniques on the Resin Obsession YouTube Channel.

How To Use Eye Screws

Your next step is to start working with your eye screws!

Once you have your glitter resin jewelry pieces, I recommend taking a minute to map out where you want them to connect. That’s where you’ll want to screw in an eye screw. You can either mark that with a chalk marker or eyeball it, and it’s entirely up to you. It will probably depend on the shape of your piece. In my case, I had two rings, so it didn’t matter where on the ring I had the connection.

Once you've got some eye screws into your resin pieces, you can connect them all!

Once you know where you want to secure an eye screw into your piece, grab one and start screwing it into the hardened resin. You can be fairly rough with your resin, depending on the width, it should withstand some pretty good wrenching forces.

If you’re working with rings, like I am in this project, you may wish to “stagger” the location of the top screw and inside screw. It depends on how much space you have on your ring-both screws will need room to dig in!

Connecting It All

I did a lovely little eye pin with some metal beads to add something more to the glitter resin pendant. The eye pin then connected both rings together.

Once you have some connection points, you can connect your rings together with an eye pin and some metal beads!

Your pendant is now all ready to be strung on a simple jewelry chain, and then it’s ready to wear.

You may need to remove the end split ring on the chain to get it on the loop on the top of the ring. It’s easy to reattach it once the chain is on!

Glitter Resin Jewelry – Final Thoughts

Once you have your chain connected, you can wear this necklace and you've now learned how to make resin jewelry!

Resin can seem scary at first, but if you can follow instructions, you can create some beautiful projects that have multiple pieces of resin attached. You can do earrings, bracelets, and necklaces as I showed you here.

Spending time figuring out how you want these pieces to connect is the best tip for these projects. Once your resin is hard, it is more challenging to put holes in it and adjust it, so save yourself the time and energy and just map it out to yourself ahead of time.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and if you did, I would love to hear from you! Drop me a comment down below, share this project to your favorite social media platform, or pin this to Pinterest!