Another Vessel

For my next vessel, I wanted it to be mixed media, rather than just metal. I tried to keep with the idea of repairing something, so before I could do that, I had to break something. That 'something' ended up being the pottery bowl I made in the exploratory stage. I decided to drop it onto my kitchen floor, and this broke it into quite large shards. It would have been possible to carefully glue the pieces all together again, without much difficulty, but I wanted to make the repairs more obvious than that, I wanted to use parts that didn't originally come from the pot.

I decided to cast two of the smaller shards in pewter, and used small strips of masking tape to stick two of the larger pottery pieces together. I then only had one other piece, which I decided to make out of felt, because felt is something nobody would use for a vessel, something that would make the bowl useless, so it now has no function except decoration. I used wire to hold the felt piece to the rest of the bowl, and glue to hold in the metal pieces.

For the felt piece, I used merino tops, and needle felted them to make it the same shape as the gap in the bowl. I sewed a piece of wire across the piece so It would keep its curved shape.

The glue was quite difficult to control, and came out of the joins, but instead of taking it off the surface, I decided to leave it, to make it very obvious that this object had been changed, broken and repaired.

Metalwork: Casting.

 One part mold:
First, I filled a cardboard ring with casting sand, and pressed it down with a mallet. I pressed in my small objects, which I chose to relate to archaeology, things people have left behind.

I melted some pewter in a small crucible, and poured it on to my mold. I quite like the outcome of this, but there wasnt enough pewter to cover all of the mold, because so much of it does not go into the imprints of the items, but stays in the gaps on the surface of the sand.

I think this gave good detail, but only half of the object comes out, because if it was pushed more than halfway into the sand, it couldn't be taken out of the sand without damaging the mold.

Two part mold:
Similar to the one part mold, the first step was to fill a ring with sand and press the object in half way. Then, to make the other half, I covered the visible sand with talc, and put another metal ring on top, making sure the notches on the edge lined up. I then filled the second ring with sand, then separated the two (the talc stopped the two halves sticking together). I took the pick axe out, and drilled a hole through the sand so there was a channel for the metal to go through to get into the mold when the two halves were put back together.

 I poured the pewter into the mold, then separated the two parts. I dug the sand out and cooled the metal in water. I then cut of the sprue where the metal went in (and put it back into the crucible to be melted down again, Then used files and wet and dry paper to smooth the surface of the metal axe.

I used the same technique to make a shovel, and found this worked well because the two part mold allowed there to be the hole in the handle.

I really enjoyed the casting process, so decided to try with brass. Brass has a higher melting point than pewter, so it took a long time to heat it to a liquid. Instead of filing it smooth, this time I left the texture from the sand, so instead of being a small shovel, it is easy to tell it is a cast shovel.