Swirly Dice

I've long been delighted to see the many hand-made dice people are doing with resin these days, so naturally I had to try my hand at it myself when I discovered that there were silicon dice molds at long last available for affordable prices. So far, it's mostly been playing around with very basic technique, figuring out how to use the molds, tint resin, and so on, and I'm only now getting to the point of things being really interesting. First up, dice with internal motion.

Perhaps you've seen some of these before, dice with a glitter-filled liquid reservoir at the core, so you get a swirling, sparkling effect when you roll them. There are a number of Youtube videos outlining the basic technique: Start with hollow glass spheres used for jewelry. Fill them with water or mineral oil and a little glitter or other suitable sparkly substance. Seal them up and pour epoxy around them in the mold. 

Here, for example, are a couple of spheres full but still open:

I found that water works just fine and never even experimented with mineral oil. The glitter I had didn't work well because it tended to float to the top; the color is a mica-based pigment for things like soap and epoxy

And here they are sealed up:

 The videos I watched built up the seals by drawing rings of UV resin around the open mouth and curing them, slowly closing them up after making several concentric layers. What I did was to take some old drips of cured epoxy cleaned up from work surfaces, cut them up into small bits, dipped them in a little UV resin, put them in place with tweezers, and cured that for a single layer solution which recycled what would otherwise be waste resin.

And how do they work? Here are a couple of unpolished, uninked dice:

At rest, the pigment sinks to the bottom. But shake them up and roll them, and you get that swirl effect:

 And since still photography doesn't do the trick, here's video:

Fun and nifty, and I'll probably do more of these at some point.