Success in Failure

I woke up this morning excited to check on my invested flask. I took off the aluminum foil. Hmm, something doesn't look right. Wait a minute, which way is up with this thing? Huh? Why do both ends look white? One of them is suppose to be yellow. Oh ya, there was that leak! Maybe I just mildly covered the yellow clay with some investment? Scratch, scratch...umm, maybe this is the wrong end? Scratch, scratch...ok, this isn't the end either? What the? Yes, that's when pure terror set in! What the heck happened? Where is the clay sprue button? This wasn't suppose to be a disappearing magic trick! Turns out, I didn't attach the clay sprue button to the aluminum foil and the whole thing, all the clay and wax, had a nice trip to the middle of my flask. There was no way it was going to work! I am not happy! So much for casting today!



I went over to Miss. D's house and gave her the bad news, but I told her I would still teach her how to cast cuttlebone. We worked on that for about four hours. We tried to smooth out the melted borax in her crucible. Disaster! I don't know what the heck was going on. We did the best we could and left it at that. Next, I showed her cuttlebone casting.


She designed a small pendant. We decided to try the crazy crucible. She had some leftover scrap silver she wanted to use. We put the scraps in the crucible, heated it, heated it, heated it, heated it. . .get the picture? There were chunks of it that just wouldn't melt! We finally gave up on it. I think the metal she was trying to use was in some way contaminated. I decided to get one of my charcoal blocks out and told her to get me some silver that had never been melted. I carved out a little crucible, like Larry from Otto Frei suggested, and melted down a little silver, in the charcoal crucible, to see what would happen. It worked! The silver melted in no time and looked great! This was good news because the charcoal crucible was my back up plan if the real crucible didn't work out. Thank God I knew something was going to work!
We collected a some more of her silver scraps and prepared to cast her cuttlebone. The silver melted smoothly and we were on track for a good casting. As she poured the silver in the cuttlebone she got nervous and poured half the silver in the wrong place. We were so close! Well, she learned the process and I know in the future she'll get it! I had to go home, I had to re-invest again.

Look familiar? I did everything over and made sure the clay was STUCK to the bottom!

I went through the whole process again. This time I made the investment a little too soupy! I was trying to avoid the previous clumps. In the end, the investment started to cure. I waited about an hour, I had to check if there was yellow clay at the bottom of the flask. I was never so happy to see the color yellow! It seemed like I got it right this time. I hope everything else is still attached!

Tomorrow I cast. Well, unless some other sneaky surprise happens!