September 27, 2015

Challenging motivations

This Clearcast works so good, it's difficult to shape the shuttles. I would literally  have to watch the resin for a few hours to make sure it's solid enough to maintain shape but still malleable enough to form the blades. For straight-forward pieces, it is heaven because it finishes curing in about 14 hours. I mean rock hard for me where I live. I still have not reached that "aha!" moment with this resin. Here are a few examples of pieces that either were too hard to shape or not mixed correctly and ended up bendy.



I can most likely save two shuttles out of these blades only because the casting was thick and it did cure semi-proper. The one most disappointing that it didn't work out is the blue and white one.
She is too bendy to be saved. I may be able to make a cabochon or two and dip it in more resin to create a hard shell out of it. The color play is so gorgeous that I'm willing to try even if past experiences say it's a waste of time. Fortunately, the painted fish shuttle fared better. They both have posts attached to them on the backside. The bottom had a "shaped mold" with the ends covered to create the bend to the blades as the resin cured. The top was a flat piece that I had to sand down to create the arch.
On the bottom you can see where the mold covered the top of the blade because all coloring abruptly stops. It looks like I took an eraser to the paint. I'm going to have to make a vacuum former to make some more reusable molds. My Oyumaru is just starting to wear out. Which is saying a lot since I've been using it for a few years now.
This new batch is curing resin is the result of a contest. It's Autumn themed. Autumn to me means golds and browns. The smaller round ones are going to be cabochons. When they pop out of the mold they'll have a recess for me to add inclusions to them.
I used the bottom to my gold leaf flake bottles to make them.
Originally I had used the bottom of my paint pallet. They turned out to be too domed shaped. I did want them coin type.

They also trapped air bubbles too easily. Those were incredibly difficult to remove. They also had a very cloudy appearance to them when they popped out of the mold. That was a surprise, because all previous castings with Oyumaru gave the shiny finish.


I did add some more resin to the pieces to bring back the shine. The hazy look dispersed quickly.
Unfortunately, there were only two I was happy with. The first was the pumpkin sticker in the upper right. The other the orange to brown leaf in the bottom left corner. The original idea was to create a series of leaves going from green to dark brown. The lighter green faded too much to be noticeable with the orange glitter and the brown darkened to black in the resin. I hope to do better with the pieces curing right now. This contest ends on the 29th so I only have two days to finish the pieces.

2 comments:

  1. Hey to remove the bubbles a trick of the trade is to take a heat source and go over top, before hardening it will draw the bubbles out and pop them but safe me a shuttle when it works out, this is Carollyn from Carollyn's tatting blog :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey to remove the bubbles a trick of the trade is to take a heat source and go over top, before hardening it will draw the bubbles out and pop them but safe me a shuttle when it works out, this is Carollyn from Carollyn's tatting blog :)

    ReplyDelete