hey it's Catherine with resident session comm and I'm here today to show you a quick and easy way on how to finish your resin castings with a shiny top gloss now if you've done resin castings for a while I know most people do it where you start with your mold and the first thing in it will be the last thing out so for example this piece that I just cast when you turn it out this side will be your pendant side however what I'm going to do is just have you do it a little backwards and we're going to finish with a glossy shine so this is a pendant that I've already cast here this is mold 403 and what I've done is I I did my first layer as this green and then the second layer I did was the clear with my inclusions now if you've ever done castings and noticed here on the edge you've got a little bit of a lip and that's because your resin wants to right up the side of your resin mold okay now what we're going to do today is just use that lip to our advantage so if you've got a really big lip or if you've got a lot of extra crumbs or just a big piece that comes off what I want you to do is just sand a little bit of it off with a bit of a coarse nail file or you can use some coarse sandpaper and you'll just kind of go over the edge like that this edge looks pretty good and pretty even when you do this you just want to take off the the big pieces you don't want to sand it even because that's what we're going to be working with today so I'm going to do this on our resin obsession drying mat this mat is really nice because it's got these little nubs to kind of help keep your casting in place and what we're going to do is just put a little bit of clear resin on top and that lip is going to help you keep your resin in place so use a toothpick or something similar and just dab it in there and then you can actually use the toothpick to help draw it to the edge so just dot some on there I'm going to go ahead and finish doing that and then I'm going to cover it with a dome and allow it to cure and we'll come back and check it in about 24 hours so it's been a couple of days and let's see how our pendant did so you can see we got a nice shiny glossy finish and the edge helped keep our resin from dripping over the side so there we go that's an easy way to get a gloss finish on your resin charms at this point now you can finish out however you want you can try and drill through you can try and put a ring at the top but you've got yourself a super nice pendant if you have any questions please leave them in the box below or stop by the resin obsession blog and jewelry making forum we're happy to help happy casting you