#well the surface underneath the mat had a lot of resin and it was also sealed and resin doesn't compress (as much?)

[artificer-dice]

Guys I messed up 😅

One of the number one rules with working with silicone and molds and resin in a pressure pot is you don't seal in a pocket of air.

Guess what I accidentally did in the stupidest way possible 😅 on the cute d6s I was super excited about too!

I was able to remove them by hacking at the bumps with some wire cutters until they lost adhesion with the face (which I realize is something I need to fix in the process) and I was able to peel them off, which took the paint with it but it should be easy to fix now.

They have hearts for the 6 faces and I love them so I'm going to fix them but it's a learning moment I didn't necessarily want to have today but at least it was salvageable!

#it's been a rough day #it's not even noon yet and i already want to just go back to sleep #it's been raining all morning which means I've been in pain since last night #and it's been fairly intense today #so i was hoping for a win with these cute d6s because the set is a rainbow and they have hearts as the 6s #and then this happened #and i knew immediately what had happened when i saw it #to explain the pocket of air thing: this final step is casting them after inking them in a mold with no numbers so the 6 face disappears #and that mold happens to be open-faced and when I've used it previously I've gotten raised faces so i tried to use a little silicone mat #this mat happens to be longer than that mold but also thin and stretchy which is important #i used a mold weight to keep it from lifting in the center. this particular mold weight was a failed 6d6 mold #for some reason i used it with the d6 cavities facing down which meant there were cavities of air touching the mat #which maybe would have been fine if there wasnt resin in between them for some reason #this resin sealed the space between the mat and the weight which meant those cavities were sealed #again a big no-no in this situation because a pressure pot compresses air #which means that space has no choice but to get smaller because that air inside can't normalize pressure with things outside of it #so it pulled the very thin and very stretchy mat up in an attempt to normalize #well the surface underneath the mat had a lot of resin and it was also sealed and resin doesn't compress (as much?) #so the mat being lifted created this vacuum of sorts that pulled the resin into it like how drawing up a syringe works #and then it cured like that #thankfully the resin is still flexible enough at this stage that once i broke the seal between the two layers it peeled off #which tells me taht in the future i should sand the faces before doing this step to help adhesion so they cant separate #usually separating is bad but in this case it saved me literal hours of sanding because that's what it would have took to fix this #i am good at making dice i promise #this is still in development so I'm still figuring out the fine details within the process #there's no catch-all course you can take to learn these things so I'm kinda just winging it anyway #these are meant to be examples of a method to be used to make custom-faced dice without them being custom-molded #because making one-off designs this way saves on silicone and making the masters in the first place #not something i thought I'd be doing as much but working on this process is why I'm waiting to open commissions again #because this was a majority of the requests i got