How to Make a Butterfly (Almost) “Live” Forever: A Poorly Illustrated Guide

 Tools and Supplies Needed to Make a Butterfly Pendant:

-Butterfly

-Exacto knife

– Chains and charms and other jewelery paraphernalia to make a necklace

-Resin (where do they even sell that stuff?)

– Something to make a mold out of that will preferably not stick to the resin

Tools That You will Realize You Need When The First Set are Not Enough:

– Drill

-Dremel

– E6000

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1. Find a butterfly that is already dead, because even though you are not and animal rights person, the idea of driving a pin into the head of a pretty creature does not seem that appealing.

2.Give yourself a very short time frame in which to complete your project. Your instructions say that it takes 72 hours for the resin to dry. Good, in 72 hours, you are going to give this project as a gift.

3. Cut the body off of the the wings(Whoops, you forgot to bring an Exacto knife. A box cutting knife will have to work.) The body of a butterfly deteriorates faster than the wings and so it might just collapse into dust. This retrogression is also aided by the several maggots you find crawling in the corpse.

4. You want to make a mold and you decide that resin probably won’t stick to the wax on a Dixie cup. You never had any experience working with resin before, but you know that sticky things and wax usually don’t mix.

5. Trace around the severed wing on the bottom of the Dixie cup. Cut it out and make a mold. Gosh dangit, I can’t explain in writing. You can look at this blurry picture that I stole off the internet.

http://www.macted.ro/butterfly-wing-necklace/

6. The only tape that you have to hold your mold together is Scotch tape. As stated before, sticky things usually don’t stick to wax. Scotch tape does not stick to wax.

7. Pour a thin layer of resin into the bottom of your mold and delicately set the wing on top. The instructions say to wait 20 minutes before pouring on the top layer of resin so that there is time for it to set. Since you are on a tight schedule, you only wait 10 minutes to pour the top layer ( Uh Oh! The Scotch tape didn’t hold for the right wing mold. Resin is pooling out onto the table. Just keep pouring more resin into this one and hope that the hole will clog itself up.)

8. Wait about 48 hours for the resin to harden. It will still be a bit bendy at this point. Look at your molds. This is interesting. The mold that had leaked has a wing that looks like this:

Stolen picture. Actual wing varies in color.

And the mold that didn’t leak has a wing that looks like this:

Stolen picture. This is a moth wing.

There is less than a day to finish the project. There is no time to pour more resin onto the almost resinless wing.

8.5. Brainstorm. You could use nail polish to add more thickness to the empty wing. You could give the necklace in pieces as a present and say that it is still in the chrysalis. You could just give one wing.

9. You decide that the best course of action is to cut the bugsicle wing down to the thinness of the resin empty wing and try to fatten up the thin wing with polyurethane. An Exacto knife works ok here to cut down the overdoused resin wing.

10. The hours tick by and it approaches 11pm. You have an early morning the next day. An Exacto knife is not working fast enough. Time to bring out the power tools.

Matt is tired, but he is filled with joy, because he knows that his love, Rebecca, will be ecstatic over this present.

11. A dremel takes down the resin very quickly and sends particles into the air. Too bad you didn’t wear a dust mask. I hope you enjoy the feeling of chemical dust in your lungs. The cough only lasts for a day.

12. Now your 2 wings are almost the same size. They look very beautiful, almost like stained glass windows. You dance around in delight. The hardships were overcome. Time to sleep.

13. The polyurethane coating, that you painted onto each wing the night before, is not yet dry. You need to drill a small hole at the tip of each wing so that you can insert the necklace rings of the chain. Who cares about the fingerprints you leave in the sticky finish? You drill the holes anyway and add on another layer of polyurethane to fill in the scratches and cracks that you inevitably made while drilling.

14. You pry the rings of the necklace open with pliers and insert them into the holes. They fit perfectly. You glue the body of the butterfly charm onto the wings with some E6000. Bonded!! That glue is the bee’s knees. Sooo tacky!

15. You sing praises to God. It is a miracle that this actually worked.

A natural stained glass window.

Johanna enjoyed working on this project so much that she made a box for the gift as well.