Life in Your Hand: Tiny Foetus in 9 Mm Pearl

In the world of jewelry, everything must be downsized to be wearable.

I created new life in a sphere of 9mm diameter which kan be used as a pearl in jewelry.

Therefore I combined 2 materials: shrinkles and liquid resin.

Equipment:

• Printer
• Heating tool
• Pencil
• (Nail)Scissors
• Led light torch
• Pair of tweezers
• Microfibre Cloth

Materials:

• Shrink paper
• Padico Sun drop liquid resin
• Toothpaste
• Sandpaper (400-800-1000-1200- 2000 grid)

First search the world wide web to find an image of a foetus (or any other figure you would like to insert into a pearl) Copy it in Microsoft Word and adjust it's size.(You can find this command by right clicking and choosing "size and position") To end up with a tiny baby of approximately 8 mm in lenght after shrinking, I resized the image until the lenght was 1,8 cm.

Print this document.

Then take a sheet of shrink paper ( I used the Artemia transparent shrink paper).

Place this paper on top of your printed images and trace the outer lining of the image with a pencil or marker and color it in.

Make sure you draw on the rougher side of the paper, not the smooth side.

Cut out the design with a small scissor or knife for the details. I used a nail scissor.

For the shrink proces I used a heating tool but you can also use an oven.

Heating tool: just heat up the cut out on a sheet of parchment paper until it is fully shrunk.

If it tends to curl up, you can use a spatula to flatten it again.

Oven :Preheat the oven to 250- 400 F/ 120- 200°C.

Place the cut outs on a medium weight cardboard, teflon sheet or parchment paper.

Bake for 2-3 minutes, do not remove until the piece is flat.

Use gloves to remove the shrinkles out of the oven.

Making babies was never easier ;)

You wil need a silicon sphere mould with a diameter of 9mm. I ordered mine on Shein.

First I used a cheaper kind of transparent resin but it looked a bit yellow. After reading some reviews I ordered the Padico Sun drop.

First pour a small amount of resin into to mould, just enough to cover the bottom of the sphere.

Use your led light to cure it, this take approximately 30 seconds.

If you don't have led torch, you can also use an UV light or sunlight. Just check ou this website for the correct curing times.

Now pick up your tiny baby with the tweezers and put a very small amount of resin on the bottom of the baby.

Place it into the sphere mould so that the resin on the baby is touching the resin on the bottom of the mould. Hold it in this position while you cure the resin by lighting with your torch inside the mould for 30 seconds.

Now fill the rest of the mould with the resin so that it bulges out a little but on the top of the mould. You can adjust this later with a file.

To get rid off the bubbles in the resin you can heat the mould with the heating tool en the bubbles will pop.

Now cure it again with the led torch.

When it is fully cured you can remove the mould en behold the result!

To finish the sphere you can sand the top with sanding paper or emery stick, form rough to soft.

The last step is polishing the pearl to get a nice shiny result : herefore I used a microfibre cloth end some toothpaste.

Good luck making your own personalised pearls!

Thank you for reading