Best Mixing Cups and Sticks for Resin
It sounds like the least important decision in resin — a cup's a cup, a stick's a stick. But the wrong cup makes your ratio drift and the wrong stick leaves unmixed gunk in the corners, and both show up later as soft spots or a wonky pour. You don't need anything fancy. You just need the right cheap things, and to skip a couple of common mistakes.
Here's what I actually keep on the bench.
Cups: straight-sided and graduated
The single best upgrade is a sleeve of straight-sided graduated plastic cups with ml and ounce lines printed on them. Straight sides matter because a tapered cup distorts the volume reading — the same height of liquid is a different amount near the narrow bottom — so your ratio drifts without you noticing. The printed lines mean you can measure by volume with no scale at all.
Get a couple of sizes. I use 1 oz cups for single earrings and 3 oz for small batches, and a bigger one for coasters. Buy them by the sleeve — they're a few cents each, and a fresh dry cup every time beats trying to clean one mid-project.
Silicone cups, if you want reusable
There's a nice middle path: flexible silicone mixing cups. Cured resin peels right out of them (same reason it peels out of silicone molds), so you can reuse one indefinitely — pop the hardened leftover out and go again. Great for waste and for your wallet over time.
The catch is they're usually not graduated, so you measure in a marked cup or with syringes first, then mix in the silicone one. Honestly I use both: disposable graduated cups when I want a precise printed line, silicone when I'm doing a quick repeat pour of a known amount.
Sticks: flat wood beats round
For stirring, plain flat wooden craft sticks — the wide popsicle-stick kind — are hard to beat. The flat edge scrapes the bottom and corners of the cup, which is exactly where unmixed hardener hides and cures into soft patches.
Skip round coffee stirrers. They can't get into the corner where the wall meets the base, so they leave a ring of under-mixed resin no matter how long you stir. I learned that early — kept getting a gummy edge against the cup until I switched from a round stirrer to a flat stick and the problem just vanished. Different tool, same technique.
Reusable silicone spatulas work too and clean up like the cups do; for fine detail work a wooden skewer or toothpick is handy for nudging bubbles and placing inclusions.
What to avoid
A couple of cups look convenient and aren't. Waxed paper cups can shed a little wax film into your resin, and foam cups can react with it — both can mess up your finish, so stick to sturdy plastic or silicone. And anything damp is out: a cup straight from the dishwasher or a stick with moisture on it can haze the whole batch cloudy.
That's really the whole kit: straight-sided graduated cups (or silicone ones), flat wooden sticks, maybe a couple of labelled syringes for tiny pours. Cheap, boring, and it removes a surprising number of "why did this go wrong" moments.
Browse my handmade silicone molds to pour into.
Putting together your first kit and not sure what sizes to grab? Tell me what you're making and I'll suggest a sensible starter set of cups and sticks.
— Nikolai