THE CRAFT OF FIRE

I'm quite behind in these posts, so allow me to catch you up on our work from summer 2016 to now... In order to cast pewter, we followed the lost-wax process, using plaster molds. Lost wax is an ancient process that goes back to perhaps the 3rd millennium BCE, with the oldest known examples coming from the Cave of the Treasure hoard in southern Israel. So if you're doing this work, you're in good company. (Here's a nice paper on the history of lost wax. ) You first make a wax object, either by casting wax into a mold or sculpting something in wax directly (which would require some artistic talent, so we skipped that.) It's always a lovely sight and smell, mixing up beeswax in the kitchen. I tossed a Venus back in the pot for remelting, and she started to glow. Once you have your wax object, you have to make the plaster mold of it. Fix it well in a container, mix up your plaster, and pour. Next, you need to burn that wax figure out of the mold...

Well, here's a post I meant to publish over a year ago, and it got lost somehow... It's about making a new batch of  homemade iron oxide  for use in making glazes and other colourings for our ceramics (although now we've sort of moved on to metal casting, as you'll soon see): The photo above is the iron oxide flakes sitting in a plastic container. They were produced with a new recipe, the instant and  deadly version using bleach and vinegar . You put steel wool in a container and then cover it with vinegar: and then when you pour in a small amount of bleach, everything instantly turns rusty: BUT NOTE! Seriously harmful  chlorine gas  is also produced, so I did this outside, held my breath the whole time, dropped some bleach in and then moved faaaaar away.  BE WARNED : it's highly toxic, poisonous, noxious, pernicious, damaging, dangerous, evil, bad-for-you, and even after all the liquid evaporates away days later the material could sti...