Bubble Trouble

Hi, thank all of you for the great response for my first two blogs. I am greatly encouraged! Sometimes I feel like I am a tiny invisible mite in a huge sea of resin workers, bloggers,  and, especially, jewelry sellers.

 One of the biggest difficulties I have in working with resin and flowers is with the resin molds, which I call reverse molds, because the face of the piece is at the bottom of the mold. (I get my molds at Michaels, or online at Resin Obsession or other craft sites.)
  After I spray the mold with mold release (available wherever the molds are sold--ooh, sorry, it rhymes!), I set the mold upside down on a newspaper to dry, at least a couple of hours; then I respray it and again let it dry.  I'm finding that spraying it twice results in very shiny pieces.) Then I set the flower  face down in the mold; pour in enough resin to just cover the flower and then press gently on the flower with a sponge makeup stick to press the air bubbles out. The problem comes either with obstinate bubbles as in the piece above, or in very delicate flowers which bruise:

so if I push on them the petals either show darkened, or eaten out. Sometimes the flower is full enough that I can moisten it first with resin or pull it into the resin with plastic flat tweezers, thereby avoiding the bubbles, but most flowers tear or fold if I try that.
   

 Basically, it's come down to patience: small taps or pushing gently on the flowers to walk the bubbles out to the side  and  avoiding using the most bruisable flowers in the reverse molds.

Now just a small mention about the bubbles you get on the surface: these are pretty easily taken care of by gently blowing on them with a straw; or passing a heat gun over them, or in the case of more obstinate resins that really don't want to let go of those bubbles, I've used a little butane torch to pass the flame over. Since I mostly use Colores Doming Resin or Colores general resin, I can get the surface bubbles off with a straw.

Thank you again for your encouragement!  Next blog I'll show you a few pieces by other resin-flower artists which I absolutely love. Also, I'll discuss  the  few of the tools I find absolutely essential in working with resin.  Chris