She`s been in the business for a while now, she even worked with another artist that I`ve already worked with, if you remember a while ago I worked with dawn Turner who works with glass. It turns out they both worked together on the Stanton project and both took Huge takes on the project. Both of them are really different artists but are really inspirational, they both have their own business and both of them do craft workshops where they show off their skills and let others learn the techniques that they use. Anna uses a lot of recycled plastic to then turn into jewellery and then sell on, so nearly everything in her shop is based around recycled plastic; she isn`t teaching us how to turn recycled plastic into little pieces of jewellery yet, but at the moment we`re doing metal casting which is something I`ve never tried out before. She`ll be at our sixth form for a few more weeks which means that I`ll be able to get some more metal casting samples done.
Due to health and safety reasons aswell, we wasn`t aloud to do any of this up in the art rooms and we instead had to go down to the freezing cold and empty gallery to do it all. It wasn`t too dangerous so I don`t see why it was such a big deal, it was only a blowtorch.
Unfortunately, a lot of the girls in my class didn`t want to come down and participate in this, and doing this with Anna could be the only time we ever get to do this... So I`m just going to do as many as I can!
The actual process can take a while... Well, that`s if you`re me and you can`t even make a small pile of sand. There are two metal rings, and you have to compress one of them with sand so it`s really packed together tightly, then press an item into the sand. Then get the other ring and place it on top, then compress more sand around the object that's still on the first ring. My wording for this is probably terrible, I do apologize. Then when the top ring has been compacted with the sand, separate them both slowly and take out the object that was in-between them.
This leaves an area for the melted metal to fall into and then it will take the shape of the object you`ve chosen. But before that, you have to use the rung that has the back of the object indented into it, and make three holes. One hole will be the pour in hole where the metal will go through, and then other two will be air holes, so the air in the area where the metal needs to be can escape so everything forms correctly.
The metal that we used was Led free Pewter rods, we placed it in small pans (which you can see in the image above) and melted it all with a blow torch. It melts at a really low temperature so that part didn`t take to long, then you just pour it into the pour in hole slowly and it dries in about 3 minutes or so. Then you just take it apart and remove your metal cast, but then you have to snip some pieces of metal at the back, one is from the remaining metal in the pour in hole and the other two are from the air holes where the metal pushes itself out. The only problem that had with my piece is that I then struggled to get the sand out of the tiny gaps because I chose something a bit more detailed than everyone else. Mine was also one of the biggest and the chunkiest casts that we did, so I still need to get rid of some bits f metal that I couldn`t file off of my little sample. The only problem that I have with the process is that It`s quite lengthy and it takes a long time to prepare the mould for the metal, but then you can only use it once, and you can`t mould a bunch of small items at the same time since the molten metal would disperse and form a flat sheet of metal.
I do like the final look of some of the samples that everyone else has done, I`m not sure how many more samples I want to work on though since it can take a while to get them all done. I know I want some more done and I can get some more done to fit my new project brief... Yes, I`ve finally been given the new project! I`ll be updating later on the Live Diary blog to tell you all about it.
but for now, I`m going to design some more moulds for some more metal casting and I can hopefully get them made within the next two weeks... As I`m still busy at the moment.
I`ve also been through all of my sketchbooks, I`ve got all of the empty ones labelled up and I`m gong to be doing some designs quite soon!
Here`s the Link to Annas website and shop! Be sure to check them both out, The bags2riches link will take you to all of her currently selling recycled jewellery pieces!
https://themakinghouse.org , and, https://bags2riches.bigcartel.com
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