Welcome to our blog! In this post I am introducing my new coasters series in the theme of colorful leaves of Fall.
This is the time of year that Canadian nature looks gorgeous with so many magnificent trees showing off their leaves of various autumn hues and tones including golden, honey, crimson, orange, and various shades of brown and green.
In this blog article, I want to share with you how I made a new coaster set with the theme of colorful leaves of fall season.
Although I had a lot of fun making coasters with the previous theme of “Ginkgo Leaves”, it was time for me to move on and let the inspirations of the beautiful natural colors of September in Canada guide me to create a new series. I think the fall season in Canada is really a wonderful season and the trees look absolutely beautiful with a fantastic color palette.
The Craft-Making Process
The craft making process to make a new set of resin coasters with the autumn theme, started with forming individual miniature leaf shapes with modeling clay. I then painted each leaf with pastel dust in colors of fall such as ocher, honey, green, brick red, orange, and brown. Afterwards, I glazed each individual leaf with Liquitex high gloss varnish and let the pieces to dry fully in the sun in front of the window. Here is how they looked like before placing them in the molds with resin.
In my previous posts, I have shared with you how I prepare the resin to cast in silicone molds. For those of you who are new to this blog, I go over the resin preparation again here for your convenience. However, if you are already familiar with this technique, you can skip the paragraph below that explains the resin preparation step.
This next step in my coaster making process includes preparing the resin using a 1:1 ratio of epoxy resin and hardener. that are fully mixed to reach a homogenous cloudy mix that will clear later. I used the Clear Cast Epoxy brand that I purchased from the Michaels Arts and Crafts store. The amount of resin to cast depends on how many molds you want to fill, or in other words, how many coasters or tiles you are planning to make.
After portioning the fully mixed epoxy resin for each of the molds and pouring them, I carefully placed the dried clay leaves upside down in each mold. I gently topped up the molds with more mixed liquid epoxy resin to make sure that the clay pieces are fully inside the liquid resin. This is because they were very fragile and I wanted their structures to be preserved and shielded with the resin.
I waited for a few hours for the resin to fully solidify in each mold. Before removing the molds, I applied a relatively thick layer of acrylic paint (peach orange hue) and waited for this layer to fully dry as well.
Once the resin cures completely, I applied a high-quality clear silicone adhesive to attach a custom-cut, 3mm-thick vinyl foam layer. To ensure the final piece is perfectly gentle on your furniture, I add a premium backing of self-adhesive cork sheet. We typically source these reliable materials locally from Home Hardware or Canadian Tire, though excellent rolls of foam and adhesive cork are widely available at most hardware suppliers regardless of your location.
Here you can see the results after removing the pieces out of the molds and completing the finishing steps including trimming, assembling the backing vinyl and cork layers, and cleaning touch ups. This result was very rewarding for all the efforts and hard work that I put into making these coasters.
I really like the natural forms of earth color tones of the leaves. And I think the peachy orange color of the background boosts the joyful energy of the coaster pieces significantly. Here is another photo that highlights the 3D effect of the clay leaves in the resin.
Making these coasters made me very happy and I felt great when having my morning coffee the next day using them. Also, the photography with some craft decor accents that I had in my kitchen such as the dried pine fruits and paper flowers with matching colors was a lot of fun.
These coaster make me feel very comforted and cozy. I think of pumpkin spice latte when I see these coasters.
The set that you can see in the images consist of coasters that despite similarities in design are unique and one of a kind.
Here are also some charming keyrings that I filled up with leftover resin and clay pieces after enough of these material filled up all the silicone molds. After the resin solidified, they look really cute.
The coasters and keyrings that I shared with you in this blog posts are available for sales as also advertised on my Etsy shop. If you are interested in them please send me a message (info@dobroandvita.com) and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post. I will update this post with more images of coasters made in the theme of Maple leaves soon. Cheers!
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