THE CRAFT OF FIRE

I love this trick! It's an amazing way to reconstitute rock-hard dry clay.  The old way involved various steps of adding water and siphoning off water and spreading out the wet clay on plaster or concrete surfaces so it would dry faster, etc. But this procedure takes a lot of time and work. Especially Time - like months!   Try this instead. Take your old, dry clay. (This here block was like a brick.)     Put the clay in a bag. The bag must be water-tight, because you are going to put a bit of water in the bag with that clay. So check for holes - very important! Right, so add some water into the bag along with your clay. The amount will depend on how much clay you have - I used a scant 1/2 cup for that giant block.  Place the bagged clay into a bucket full of water and as you push it down into the water, try to let as much of the air from the bag out as you can. Don't get any extra water in the bag, though. When it's nearly all submerged, seal it tight....

My idea this time was to make a mold for three Venuses and a basin where the aluminum would melt, so it would melt and flow in all at once. (And I had one more separate Venus as well.) I made the mold with plaster and sand in a 1:3 ratio, but it could be even higher next time. The three-in-one Venus (a 'Threenus'?) was a good idea but it remained in the realm of ideas, supplanted primarily because of a chance conversation with my sculptor neighbour Alex  (who has joined in with us before). I was walking my dog Laika and ran into him in the lane behind his house, and I asked him about the knee-less Venus ('Kneelus'?) I had cast before. Did I really need to vent such a small figure? He asked me if perhaps the metal had cooled too much in the tin-can crucible before this pour, and also suggested we wrap some ceramic fibre around the crucible to keep the material hotter longer. old style new style He also told me that plaster molds aren't typicall...