Stage Lighting And Effects Equipment

I'm doing a LED light project for my computer desk and I found a whole bunch of LED's to use, I noticed some of them had a lower voltage rating than 3.2 so I got some resistors and measured the voltage of my AA battery pack with a series of resistors I had, and I realized none of them blocked anything. So I got out a nine volt to see if that might help and again the volt meter showed no difference with a 1k Olm .5 Watt resistor, so does that mean the resistor will have no effect on the power readings or what's going on? I tried 2 of the same type and they did nothing at all to the power readings.