If you've enquired about resin preservation and been surprised by the timeline or the price, this post is for you. Not as an apology, because the work costs what it costs and takes as long as it takes, but because understanding what's actually involved changes the conversation entirely.
Resin preservation is not a craft project. It's a technical process that requires controlled conditions, specialized materials, significant experience and a tolerance for the fact that sometimes things go wrong, and there's only one way to learn how to fix them.
Resin is a hazardous chemical
This is the starting point most people miss. Epoxy resin comes with a Safety Data Sheet. It requires personal protective equipment: nitrile gloves, eye protection and, in many cases, respiratory protection. The uncured components are skin sensitizers, meaning repeated unprotected exposure can turn into a permanent allergy. The fumes are not benign.
This is not a hobby supply you pick up at a craft store and use at the kitchen table. Anyone offering preservation work is working with a chemical system that demands respect and proper handling. The price reflects that.
The environment has to be exactly right
Resin is extremely sensitive to its working environment. Temperature and humidity are not suggestions. They're requirements.
Resin needs warmth to cure correctly. The ideal working temperature is around 22 to 24°C. Too cold and the resin cures slowly, incompletely or with a cloudy finish. In winter I run a space heater in the preservation area to hold the temperature. In summer, air conditioning can drop the room below where resin cures well, which creates its own set of problems. There's a window in the shoulder seasons where conditions are naturally cooperative. Outside that window, it takes management.
Humidity is the bigger challenge. Moisture is the enemy of resin work. High humidity causes cloudiness, fisheyes and adhesion failures, so in summer I run a dehumidifier continuously in the preservation space. The space also has to be kept free of animals, because pet dander and hair will embed in the surface of curing resin, and dust is a constant concern. You can't leave a piece unattended during the critical early hours of a pour. Bubbles form, particles settle, and the surface needs watching and intervention.
The flowers have to be completely dry
Before any flower goes into resin, it has to be completely free of moisture. Fresh flowers can't go straight into resin. The water in their cells will cloud the resin or cause the flowers to decompose inside the cast. Flowers have to be dried or freeze-dried first, which is its own timeline. Rushing this stage ruins the piece.
Even after drying, flowers need careful handling. A piece that looks dry may still hold moisture in the stem tissue or in densely packed petals, and that moisture, once sealed inside resin, has nowhere to go.
The work happens in layers
A finished resin piece is not a single pour. It's built up in layers (base pours, positioning pours and top coats) with curing time between each stage. Depending on the resin system, each layer can take 24 to 48 hours before the next can go on. A piece with multiple layers and detailed positioning can take the better part of two weeks to build, not counting the drying time beforehand.
Each pour has to be watched. Bubbles can be coaxed out with gentle heat early in the cure, but once the resin sets past a certain point, they're permanent. Dust that settles on a partly cured surface will cure in. Flowers that shift before the resin stabilizes will cure in. The window for intervention is narrow and requires being there.
Experience is the only teacher for troubleshooting
Every resin system has its quirks. Yellowing over time, surface tackiness, amine blush, layers separating, fisheyes, cloudiness: these are all real problems with real causes, and the solutions aren't always obvious. You learn them by making mistakes on pieces that matter, which is an expensive and time-consuming education.
When a preservation piece has a flaw, and sometimes they do despite everything, the question is whether it's repairable, whether the repair will be visible, and whether the client needs to know. There is no starting over. The flowers are one of a kind and the resin encasing them is permanent. The skill is learning to work within that constraint.
What this means for your expectations
A realistic timeline for a resin preservation piece is several weeks from when the flowers arrive, minimum. The quoted timeline assumes everything goes right. When it doesn't, fixing it properly takes extra time, and fixing it improperly is worse than waiting.
The price reflects the chemical cost, the equipment, the controlled environment, the labour and the years of experience it takes to do it well. It also reflects the reality that there's no assembly line. Each piece is handled individually, from the first drying stage to the final polish.
If you're considering preservation, the most useful thing you can do is enquire early, ideally before the event so the logistics can be planned properly, and approach the timeline with patience. The work deserves it.