Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Adventures in Casting

Just wanted to share a few pictures with you from the casting class I took at Jewel Envy last fall. (Yes, it took me THAT long to get the pictures up here. I'm a busy girl!) We learned the technique of lost wax casting, where you carve your piece in wax, make a mold, and then use a spinny thing to shoot molten silver into your mold. I believe the technical term would be centrifugal caster? Not so sure... but the process completely freaked me out. It involved holding a flaming torch in one hand and releasing the spinny thing with the other, being careful that the spinny thing did not knock the torch out of your hand. Surely there must be a better way! Luckily our teacher Ellen (Chia-Chien Tsai) was kind enough to deal with making the spinny thing spin, so we could have two hands firmly gripped on the torch. (phew!)












Our first project was a ring, which I modelled after a ring that I really wanted to buy when I was still a student, but it cost something like $200? WAY out of the question for a girl whose lunch budget at the time was $3. (I could afford a slice of pizza, nothing more...) It turned out looking nothing like that ring at all, but it wasn't bad for my first shot!












The next project was to make a pendant that "showed texture". (I was pretty much set on making a bow-tie pendant, and so I just scratched in a few lines to fulfill the requirement of "showing texture".) Anyway, I love this necklace because it makes you look like you're wearing a bow-tie! So cute!












And lastly was our final project, meaning we could make anything we wanted :) So I decided to make an orchid pendant, modelled after the one I drew for my Purple Orchid Pillow. This flower was a bit tricky, because I had to carve each petal in wax separately, and then use hot wax to join them together (with nothing more high tech than a candle).

And so concluded my casting adventures at Jewel Envy. I'm just finishing up my "Introduction to Fabrication" classes now, so I'll have new pics to put up shortly!

No comments:

Post a Comment