I am still pouring porcelain, by tomorrow I’ll be into my second week of it. I took a photograph of what I’d achieved the day before yesterday
not very impressive is it? The moulds waiting to be poured are at the front of the picture, the pourings are in the trays at the back.
It doesn’t look like a lot of work for a week but it is. At the top of the picture are the horses, which I think I’m going to chuck. I only remembered, after I had poured all of those, the method by which I’d planned to fasten the head to the rest of the horse, which, cleverly, requires two holes which I cannot make, now the castings have dried out
Making internally jointed, miniature, multi-part porcelain artefacts anyway, is a work of engineering as much as anything. Although thirty-one years of experience is helpful, I still have to learn how to pour each mould, where the sticking places are, how fast to pour out and how soon I can demould the castings. The last two are variable, depending on the temperature of the room and the dampness of the mould. The mould absorbs water from the casting and gets wetter as you work, so the drying time varies. Pouring in a heatwave is a different experience from pouring in the depths of winter. In general, once you’ve worked out how to do it, you can only get four pours a day from a mould before it becomes too wet to use and has to dry out overnight. In the tray at the bottom of the picture you can count three men’s torsos, and all the bits to go with them, which was all that could be done in a day. I would love to say that I will get three men out of that tray, but with breakages in rubbing down, sometimes caused by thin bits, not apparent from the outside, sometimes caused by the tiredness of the rubber, one man and some spare legs are a more likely outcome. If you are good at counting you will notice that he has two heads.
At the pouring stage I also have to devise stringing hooks. Here they are
You can see the rolls of wire, a special type to withstand the heat in the kiln without melting or distorting. You can see, in the space in the middle, a couple of loops I have made with a pair of pliers in either hand. Long before I did porcelain, I made jewellery and got quite good, then, at working two-handed with pliers, which is a required skill for the job, that would never occur to anyone looking at a pretty dressed porcelain doll. Quite a lot of the making is fairly industrial in nature.
There are two rolls of wire in the picture, but I have numerous sizes to use.
Here you can see the loops for the twelfth scale man in the round jar lid and the loops for a twelfth scale child in the rectangular plastic box. The twirly ends of the loops are plunged into the just demoulded, damp, feet or hands but the circular parts that carry the stringing elastic protrude and have to fit inside the fired hollow calf or lower arm and move, otherwise he can’t walk off doing a hand jive.
I haven’t even got into the twenty-fourth scale children yet, for which the moulds are awaiting. I am also having a go at a twenty-fourth scale baby. I have done one previously but it was visibly jointed with wire which had not been in the kiln, going through holes in the torso and upper limbs. Now I’m going to see if I can do internal joints, which will require awfully small wire loops, at which point I will be getting into the area of miniature manufacture where unplanned sneezing can cost hours of work.
I actually enjoy this.
I’m a bit strange.
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