Hey pet lovers! Today I’ll show you something we’ve been making while locked indoors for the past few months (Or at least Nat has.. I just help from time to time). Nat wanted to try and do resin pet tags and eventually start selling them. These could be used for dogs and cats since we have quite a few different molds. What was a fun experiment at first turned into our house filled with resin tags, tools and materials in no time.
Designs
Nat tried quite a bit of different designs, using powder paints, dried flowers and other materials. It was hard to replicate some of the designs a second time so we may not use all of the ones we currently have. However here are a bunch of the ideas so far and there are still more to come.
How do we make these
It is time consuming and pretty hot while doing these. Have to wear a mask since we’re working with resin and turn off the aircon while at it, since we get bubbles inside it otherwise. Needless to say, doing this in Thailand gets you sweaty pretty quickly.
The resin is a liquid mixture that we pour in multiple small pots and mix with the paints. Nat bought quite a few different molds to fill in different shapes and sizes. Usually 1 batch consists of about 2 designs in every shape and size. After all is mixed and arranged inside the mold, we have to use fire to blow the air bubbles and repeat this every few hours. It usually takes around 24 hours for the resin to cure and be ready to take out of the mold.
After this is done we have to print out the sticker for the pet’s name. We bought a printer that cuts stickers in order to do that. It’s fairly easy to stick these onto the mold but that’s not the end of it. The stickers can very easily be damaged so we put another layer of resin on top to seal it. That’s another 20ish hours of curing before the tag is ready.
The last part is to put a ring on the tag so it can be attached to a collar. This one was hard to get right because small rings were tough to fit and hurt our hands, while bigger ones were sometimes too big. We finally got the hang of it using some tools to stretch the rings out before putting them on.
The process isn’t too hard, it mostly needs some creativity to make the designs interesting. It’s just time consuming and needs a bit of patience but hey.. we've been locked home for months now so patience is all we have.
And here's another photo of our Casper testing one of Nats favourite tag designs - Loki.
If anyone is interested I could probably take a step by step process of how we make these and post that. This is still a pretty new venture and nothing is dead on final so I assume things will only look better with time. We are also coming close to starting our dog food business soon so I'm excited to share how that is going on once we are all set. Thanks for reading, hope you liked the photos and designs and see you again soon!