The weekend came and I took a break from blogging. I know…I just posted about how I was back to blogging. I am but also, I still need to prioritize family and self care. The weekend was spent playing video games with my husband and son.We also headed out to watch Shazam( fun film, by the way. It provided some much needed light heartedness). Now the week is back which means back to homeschool. We continue to count down the days to graduation and finish off a few bits of work. Which brings me back to talking about self care. One of the things I have done over the last school term is to spend some time outside the house with a few creative friends. I feel so lucky to have a found a group of ladies who want to create, craft and learn new things. One of these friends introduced me to a lady who creates resin art. She asked if we wanted to learn more. We all said yes! Our first project would be a set of resin coasters.

I have a love/hate relationship with resin. For a long time now, that relationship has mostly leaned to the hate side. Resin can be a pricey material to work with. No one in our home (especially my husband) is fond of art materials with a strong odor. Our curious cats make it difficult to find a safe place for the project to cure. We have not lived in a home with a garage in over a decade which translates to us not having a somewhat ventilated area outside the main home for projects to dry.Historically, we have always lived in a very dusty area. Between the cat hair and the dust, there always seems to be a risk of debris getting in the project. Some day, I hope to have a professional baker’s rack ( the kind bakeries use for storing lots of bread or big sheets of doughnuts) to place my projects on. Meanwhile, I am always just making do and with my circumstances and working with resin always seemed to have more negatives than positives. I was assured though that some of the new art resins didn’t have strong odor. It also helped that one of my friends volunteered her home as the central meeting location. The resin would stay at her home to cure. Seemed like I had a reason to try resin again.

Whenever I start something new, I stick to a color palette I love. It takes one more variable out of the mix while also ( usually) ensuring I will like the end result. I also wanted something to match my living room and that my husband would like. He has been wanting a heavier set of coasters. So green and blue were obvious color choices.

I chose to keep parts of the black stone showing. The end result with my chosen color palette, and a liberal sprinkling of glitter, are these galaxy style coasters. I was very happy with the results.

Though we did take a lot of photos, we didn’t bother worrying with how good they were. This day wasn’t about lighting or instagram worthy pictures. We lived in the moment and just had fun creating. That was as it should be. Each of us took a turn creating a set of coasters. One project, starting from the same place but with many results. 

We ended up making it a full day of creating. In between trying new things, we stopped for a wonderful lunch consisting of a shawarma sampler plate and leftovers from our croissant and pastry breakfast. I think I forgot to mention that we started our morning with lattes and pastries. After breakfast, we started two vitrai ( glass painting) projects. These are still works in progress but don’t worry, I will be sharing those in another post.

If you would like to join in with the Artfully Wild Blog Along challenge, hop over to Effy Wild’s Blog for more information. Her post for day 2 is here.