Amazing Casting Products: Jewelry Inspired by Fossils Frozen in Time... AMAZING Inspiration by Tracy Alden

Some of the best inspiration I have had lately is to bring along Amazing Mold Putty on hikes and walks to capture interesting textures and shapes. Now it might seem odd at first but I have been able to make all kinds of interesting molds!

I was given the opportunity to take a hike in an area rich with fossils. Once an ancient sea floor, this area over millions of years became a dry and arid desert. I didn’t want to take any fossils, since removing these fossils could destroy valuable scientific data, but I did bring Amazing Mold Putty to take molds of interesting pieces. Some areas were covered with loose fossils while others were buried in rock but one fossil caught my eye, an Ammonite.

Ammonites are an extinct group of marine invertebrate animals. These mollusks are related to modern day octopuses, squid, cuttlefish and nautilus. This fossil was very old, flat and cracked but to me it was beautiful. I dusted it off and made two molds, the warm sun helping the Amazing Mold Putty cure quickly. For millions of years this little shell laid in the rocky soil, back it went, laying next to other broken shells, to wait many more years.

When I got home I washed the dirt off my molds. While these are not the prettiest molds I have ever made, they captured the beautiful detail and textures of the fossil!

Using Amazing Casting Resin, I made several versions of the fossil. From tinting the resin with Alumilite Dyes to using the Alumilite Metallic Powders, I got so many wonderful looks. However I wanted to go a step further, making them into pendants. Ammonites were a squid-like creature that lived inside coil-shaped shells with beak-like jaws inside a ring of tentacles that extended from their shells, I wanted to recreate the look of these tentacles with wire and beads. I poured two resin castings and quickly pushed beading wire into the curing resin where the Ammonites would have had their tentacles.