Pewter Molds and Deadly Iron Oxide!

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 still be nasty to deal with. It's best to rinse it with water and let it dry out again before grinding down to fine powder. And wear a suitable respirator.

Or better yet, don't even do this. While the process makes rust instantly, I'm not sure why you'd ever really need rust in a rush. If it's iron oxide you want, stick with the old recipe. (Or just look around because it's everywhere.)

On a second front, we've been preparing some lost-wax molds for pewter casting. First we had to make the wax pieces, and then make the plaster molds:

These molds should now be ready for +400° molten pewter, as soon as we source the metals we need to mix it up.