Tissue Paper Night Light!
The process for making this is part craft project and part woodworking. To start, we’ll channel your inner preschooler and break out the food coloring!
I just grabbed some ordinary Kleenex Tissue Paper, and a box of food coloring from the grocery store! To help the coloring wick through the material I sprinkled the tissue paper with some denatured alcohol. In my original tissue I used water. Both worked well, but the thinking was, with the alcohol was that it would dry faster and could then be cast in resin sooner! Any moisture in the tissue at the time of adding epoxy would ruin the casting, so a dry tissue is important!
I add the color in random patterns, then just fold the tissue over on and added some pressure. In a minute or so, it had saturated all the white areas and made a very colorful medium to work with.
The mold is made from melamine. I buy it at the Home Depot in the shelving isle. I should have checked out a home depot promo code before I went to see if I could have got some money off! There will always be a next time ?. This one measured 3″x 6″ x 1″ and was put together with screws and taped around the outside. This also the first time I use a mold release agent. It worked well, and allows me to use this mold again in the future.
The epoxy resin used here is West System 105 resin with the 207 (clear) hardener. It didn’t take much to put a small layer over the tissue
paper.
paper.
Once poured you will have some bubbles in the resin that you will need to pop. Applying a bit of heat with a heat gun will do the trick.
For the light portion, I simply used a dollar store night light. It was an easy process of cutting off the clip from the back, that we will later adhere to our tissue paper casting. Watch your fingers!!
Once the epoxy had cured, I removed it from the mold and cut out a shape at the band saw.
This one was a simple dome, but you could make it as elaborate as you please.
Next step is to polish it up. Honestly, you can skip this if you want.
The polishing took about 20 minuted to run through the grits and give you a high shine.
All that was left is to glue on your clip with a dab of epoxy, and attach it to your dollar store night light!
Now you’ve elevated such meager material as tissue paper into something you can actually call art.
Love this idea! I wonder if you had a bigger mold, and used a bunch of blue tissue paper, if you could make something that would look like the sky? How amazing would that be to use for a drop ceiling instead of the traditional light panels??