Holiday Wood Slice Garland

Some of you may remember that last year I created a wood slice garland for my holiday decorations. I cut some branches off one of the many Osage Orange trees in my backyard, cut it up into these pieces, and added letters using silver paint and a stencil. I absolutely loved it, but it occurred to me that it would look so much nicer with some resin coating it and giving it a beautiful shine! Today I am going to show you how to coat wooden pieces in resin, and how I made this beautiful Holiday Wood Slice Garland. Just a note: you can use this coating technique with many different types of projects!

This project was sponsored by ETI Technologies and it first appeared last year on Resin Crafts Blog. All the opinions and wording is mine alone. To see more information on sponsored posts please see my Disclosures page. There are also many affiliate links in this post which means if you click through and purchase something through those links I get a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks for reading!

SUPPLIES:

• Ultra-Seal Multipurpose Glue Sealer 
• 2 Disposable measuring cups
• Acid brush
• Wooden stir sticks
• Envirotex Lite Pour-On High Gloss Finish
• Wood Slices with designs (or whatever item you want to coat with resin)
• Optional: micro butane torch

Seal the wood slices:

Coat the top of the wood slices with Ultra Seal or ModPodge.

I finished all of the sealing before the first one even dried, so this is a quick and easy step. Let this dry until it is completely clear.

Mixing Resin:

Next, you will need to mix the resin. As always, you want to wear latex gloves or something to protect your hands, and you want to make sure you have a work surface that will not get ruined. Since we are not pouring the resin, I just used a plastic craft mat underneath my wood slices. I had a few that leaked a little off the sides, but I was able to easily remove them from my mat because it was plastic. One thing you may want to consider is elevating them and putting cardboard under them so that if you do have drips the resin will not adhere your pieces to your work surface.

Mix equal amounts of Part A and B in one of your disposable cups. I used 1.5 oz of each, making a total of 3 oz. It was plenty for this project.

Mix these two parts together thoroughly for about a minute or two. Pour the mixture into a second cup so that you can ensure all of the resin you put on your piece is thoroughly mixed and there are no soft spots. Mix for another minute, then you’re ready to apply the resin.

Applying the Resin:

Use one of the acid brushes to basically paint the resin onto the wood slices. I was careful not to get too close to the edge and not to add too much resin. The resin will pour off the sides if you are not careful enough.

With this many pieces, you do need to move fairly quickly because you only have about half an hour before the resin starts to thicken up and cure.

One step you don’t want to miss is to pop all of the bubbles you see in the resin. Since these were small pieces, it was easy to just pick one up and exhale over it to pop the bubbles. They are popped by carbon dioxide. If you would rather, you could also use a micro-butane torch, which is what I use for my larger projects.

In this picture you can see the bubbles.

I simply exhaled over it and now you can see that they are all popped. It worked perfectly.

Here are all of the pieces covered in the resin! Let them cure for about 24 hours.

Making the Garland:

I used some green ornament hooks to hang my resin coated wood slices on twine. This worked really great, but there are many ways you can do this step to your style preference. My decor is fairly rustic so this worked for me.

Here is a closeup shot. You can see how shiny the resin makes these! It just gives is such a beautiful polished look.

I couldn’t be happier with the result.

I also took the larger snowflake pieces and hung them on the tree! Gorgeous ornaments!

So what do you think? Do you like this project? Was it helpful to you as a guide for coating small pieces with resin? Let me know! And please share via social media!

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Thanks!

~~Sheri