How to Add Foil, Flakes, and Inclusions to Resin
A pinch of gold leaf turns a plain resin pendant into something that looks like it came from a jeweler's case instead of a craft table. Inclusions — foil, flakes, botanicals, paper — are the fastest upgrade in this whole hobby, and the markup they justify is real: the gold-flake pieces on my table outsell the plain ones two to one at a couple dollars higher price.
They're also the fastest way to fill a piece with bubbles and floating debris if you skip the prep. Here's the technique side, material by material.
Gold leaf and metal flakes
Imitation gold leaf — the $10-per-book kind from Michaels or Amazon — is what nearly everyone uses, including makers charging premium prices. Real gold leaf exists and behaves the same in resin; the untrained eye can't tell them apart through cured resin, so save the money.
Two handling rules. Tear, don't cut: scissors give straight edges that read as "craft supply," torn edges read as organic veins of metal. And place with a dry toothpick or tweezers, never fingers — leaf is thinner than tissue and dissolves into crumbs at skin contact. It also sticks to any hint of moisture.
About winter: I pour in a spare-room studio in Canada, and in February the air is desert-dry. Static turns gold leaf into a poltergeist — I've had a sheet leap off the table and plaster itself across my sweater like it was magnetized. A humidifier helps; slightly damp fingertips on the non-working hand help; mostly you learn to move slowly around the leaf book in winter.
Timing matters more than placement. Flakes dropped into fresh thin resin float up and cluster at the surface. Add them at gel stage — 20–40 minutes in, when the resin is honey-thick (same timing as glitter) — and they hang where you put them.
Dried flowers and botanicals
The rule that overrides everything: seal them first. Petals and leaves are full of air, and resin warming during cure pulls that air out as streams of bubbles — each flower wearing a halo of them. Brush with Mod Podge or spray with Krylon Crystal Clear, let dry fully, then pour. I covered the outgassing mechanics in the bubbles article; flowers are the #1 offender.
Also: only properly dried botanicals. Anything with moisture left — fresh petals, "mostly dry" flowers — will brown and rot inside the resin over weeks. It's heartbreaking in slow motion. Silica-gel dried flowers keep their color dramatically better than air-dried; the flower embedding guide goes deep on that.
Paper, photos, and fabric
Resin turns raw paper translucent — a photo poured without sealing becomes a ghostly window into its own backside. Seal both sides with Mod Podge, edges especially, two thin coats, fully dry. Then it pours beautifully.
I learned the edge part specifically: a tiny photo pendant where I'd sealed both faces but missed the cut edges. Resin wicked in from the sides overnight, and by morning the photo had a translucent border creeping inward, like the picture was dissolving at its frame. Sealed edges since, no repeats.
Fabric behaves like paper — seal or accept translucency. Sometimes translucent lace in resin is exactly the look, honestly. Test a scrap first.
The layered build
Everything above works ten times better in layers than in one deep pour.
Thin base layer first — 1/8 inch (3 mm), your background color or clear. Let it gel. Place inclusions on that firm-ish surface, exactly where you want them, with no risk of sinking or drifting. Then the top pour locks them in like objects in glass, positioned instead of scattered.
This is also how you get composition — a flower here, leaf flakes arcing there — rather than "stuff suspended randomly." One layer boundary, invisible in the cured piece, gives you complete placement control. Deep pendant and cabochon molds with 3/8 inch (10 mm) or more of depth give the layers room to breathe.
Small things that go in, and one that shouldn't
Crushed glass, seashell bits, coffee beans (sealed — they outgas), watch parts, thread, sand from a specific beach: all wonderful. The one category to refuse: anything alive or formerly soft-bodied. Insects need professional preservation first; a market-table shortcut there ends in a cloudy, decomposing centerpiece. Some materials earn their place in resin, some just haunt it.
What's the strangest thing you've embedded — or wanted to but chickened out? Someone once asked me to cast their wisdom tooth, and I did it, and it sold as a custom piece I still think about. No regrets. Mostly.
— Nikolai