Week 23: Part 2- Fun with Pewter

So...today was my first day with pewter. ::big sigh:: All told, it could have been worse and I feel like I learned a lot in my hours of melting and pouring and mold making. over and over and over again.

The molds: My past experience with casting has all been silver lost-wax-casting. I currently do not have any wax (ordered some) so I had to play around with other types of molds. Ideally, I'll like to cast nature pieces- specifically leaves, because I find that kind of detail hard to fake in carving. Naturally, all the molds I made today were of leaves. I had a few sculpey molds (imprinted with real leaves), severals molds where i made a base and border around a real leaf (in case you were curious, no they do not in fact burst into flames) and a couple of silicone molds. I do have a leaf in some plaster, but it needs drying time.

The pouring: From the get go I had issues with pouring. I was heating the metal for as long as it said to, but it was just pouring thick- way thicker than i wanted. The first sculpey mold i filled came out ok with decent detail, but was almost a quarter of an inch thick. At the end of the day, i can honestly say that basically the given time for heating was wrong because eventually i got the metal to pour just fine, if not always in the direction i wanted.

The results: I would say I spent a good 4-6 hours melting and pouring and mold making today. I give you 1 photo:

This is the only leaf I was happy enough with to photograph. It took many many tries to get a thin pour that covered the entire mold (leaves make shallow molds). I might have been happy with it if not for the fact that the mold was blemished- which i knew before i ever used it though i'm not sure how it got that way (if you're looking for the mark it's the little round spot mid left). In the whole day, i probably only managed about 5 leaves in general- one was too thick, several were surface damaged (from the water boiling out of the leaves when the metal touched them), many were incomplete (the metal didn't cover the whole pattern). I certainly would never sell this one though i might keep it (rather than remelt it) as a sort of first day token. I haven't melted down that first pour of a quarter inch leaf either. Can't wait to see how it goes with wax...