Casting Flower Necklace

I have a brand new casting pot of my very own!  Over the last week I also picked up various supplies such as leather gloves and soapstone.  Dick Blick had some nice rectangular stone blocks, so I got two. 🙂

I’m working on putting together a 1530s outfit.  This is my current inspiration: Peter de Kempeneer Portrait of a Woman (previously addtributed to Girolamo da Carpi.  How is this related to casting?  Well, I’m going to attempt to make the flower necklace.  I’m going to cast the flowers out of pewter, and then look into some enamel options to get the color.  I might opt for green flowers so it can serve as my apprentice belt… but I decide on that when I get there. A nice close up of the necklace can be found here.

 

So, back to the casting…

 

To start, I needed to cut the stone into workable pieces for carving. Its a softer stone than I’ve used previously and I was able to cut out two pieces with a hand with relatively little arm strain.  Dick Blick lists it as Sea Mist Soap Stone, and see what a nice shaped block it is?   The wood block is there to make sure I don’t saw into the plastic table.

Having cut out my mould blocks, I got to sketching and then carving.  Again, this is much softer than the pyrophyllite I had used previously.  Carving is therefore a bit easier, but I’m noticing more imperfections in the stone, lines and channels and deposits of harder spots that tend to chip off unexpectedly.   Regardless, I think I’ve got a good carving and I tested it with play-dough to see how it would look.

In the photo you can see one of the stone imperfections running from the bottom right, through my carving.  Its fairly shallow though and didn’t seem to effect the casting later.  The discoloration around the carving is from the moisture of the play-dough when I pressed it.  It looked like a pretty good start so I added the spru to give it a go.

So then I put a 1lb block of pewter into my brand new melting pot and turned on the heat.  The pewter was a gift from Sir  Thomas and Countess Elisenda about a year ago so I’m not sure about the specifics of the metal.  I got the melting pot from Midsouth Shooters.  It’s designed for casting bullets, but the price was much more reasonable that jewelry type melting pots.  The instructions that came with say it heats up to 900F.  Depending on the exact composition, pewter melts about 400F, so it should work well.  I kept the nob turned to “7” (out of 9) and seemed to be getting a good pour.  I’ve got the whole set up on a porcelain tile I picked up from Home Depot.  This makes me feel better than playing with molten metal on a plastic table.  I also got the pouring ladle from Midsouth Shooters.

 

 

 

 

 

After some tweaking (I think the carving was originally too shallow) and I had forgotten to add vents.. I finally got a nice poor!  And the flowers started coming out looking great!  I got about 40 of them to play with.  Then my hand started hurting from squeezing the moulds together and my fingers were getting hot, even through the lined leather gloves.  Ah well.  I’ve seem some that use clamps instead of holding the mould.  But then for every pour you have to unclamp, remove the piece and then re-clamp… I guess I’m just not that patient.

I got the excess cut off and remelted.  And I’m quite happy with the results!

Each flower is about 3/4 of an inch.   I will need to drill out the center pieces later to put the necklace together.

Updated: October 15, 2012 — 2:04 pm

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