Holiday Present Idea #1 – Resin Ashtrays

    Hello! This is the first post of a few that I am going to describe my different present ideas for this year, some of which I will actually be creating and following through on and some of which I will not. This is one of the ideas that I will actually be doing, and you can see the process of all of this on my Instagram for my art. 

    This post will be about how I want to make resin ashtrays. I want to make these because I know a lot of people who smoke, and my friends who do not smoke would still think that this is a cool present. I was trying to buy two of these off of a girl I know, but at some point she just stopped responding to me, so here we are. I decided to make my own because it was easier than trying to get her to make them. I just realized that I could make my own resin ashtrays exactly how I want them in the beginning of December, so it was pretty recent. 

    Resin has always been something that I was interested in watching people do, and it has always looked really intriguing to me, but I never really thought that I would be actually making things with resin myself. This is actually the case with a lot of different things that I have ended up wanting to do recently. 

    After I finally decided to make these ashtrays myself, I had to do some research. I did not even know what resin to get or anything about that, so I did some research about that. It was not very hard to find a good resin for beginners on Amazon, so I bought some of that. I also found out that in order to dye the resin, you should use a certain pigment, which I also researched and ended up buying.

     I also had to think about what else I wanted to put into these ashtrays. I didn’t think that were that many options, but I was wrong about that.

     I already had a lot of glitter, so I did not need to buy any more of that. I also decided that I wanted to put pressed and dried flowers into them, and it just so happened to be perfect timing because both me and my mother had just recently received flowers from family members. Another thing I want to put into these ashtrays is pictures. I can do pictures of me and people, or anything really, but the one thing that I am most looking forward to is vintage Playboy magazine pictures. I think that this is such a cool idea and I think it is going to turn out really well. My inspiration for both of these things came from the original girl I wanted to buy these ashtrays from, because these were things that she was going to put into them. 

    Since a lot of the people I am making ashtrays for either smoke or think having an ashtray is cool, making those will not be that difficult. For almost everyone, I have both a color scheme, flowers, and picture already picked out in my head. However, one of the people I am making it for does not want it to really look like an ashtray. He wants me to put some gears and stuff into it, and magnets into the bottom so he can use it at work to store metal things that he has lying around such as nuts and bolts. I am honeslty really excited for the challenge that all of this will present me with, since I have never worked with resin before. 

    If everything goes well and according to plan, I bought enough resin to have a few leftover that I could sell on my website or my depop later so I can make some of my money back. If that goes well and people like those, then maybe I will end up making and selling more depending on the demand and how much I enjoy making them. 

    Thank you so much for reading my blog post, and for supporting me through my journey!

If you are interested in more holiday gift ideas, here are some other posts I have made about them:

Holiday Present Idea #4 – Coupon Books

Holiday Present Idea #3 – Sun Phase Cards

Holiday Present Idea #2 – Memory Notecards