Mouldy Bread

Take four unused cellphones and add to the cake tin.

Make a classic quick bread recipe.

Stuff bread mixture into the cake tin.

 Cook for 40-60 minutes at 200 degrees C
  

Enjoy, your cellphone indented bread!

I had an idea of using bread as a cast. I would cook the bread so that it rises around an object, then when I want a replica of that object I just mould it in the bread.

I could make all of the jokes about mouldy bread...

!Warning; do not try to eat bread that has been cooked with cellphones and their resulting fumes!

Play dough

I thought that as we are to be making moulds and casting different shapes that play dough would be perfect for making quick and effective casts.

Play dough without any added colour

 I made it all by myself!

Now to see what I can cast with it.

Plaster and twins.

During the last week of the mid-tri break I got quite involved with plaster, I was trying to make an easy yet interesting mould that would produce at least two nearly identical objects; twins.

First I needed plaster. I bought 5KG of the stuff from Bunnings for $10 brilliant! Then I needed water. Mix it up and you have wet plaster ready to pour into your pre made mould.

 









Left: I made a small box out of ply wood offcuts. I hammered nails through one side of the ply to indent the plaster cast. Using more nails I set the box in place. My first 'twin' used normal plaster and came out as a nice cube with four holes through it. The second 'twin' was made by mixing plaster and red dye to make its overall appearance pink. 

 
 



 Right: I wanted to make a mould out of plaster, to do this I set four small pieces of ply into a similar ply box. The plaster set perfectly but I couldn't release the ply from the plaster. It ended up smashing and being a lesson in what plaster sets to but doesn't let go of.

  

 

As I was working with balloons a natural progression to see what else I could use as a mould was condoms. The condom is much more stretch than a balloon. Instead of the shape I thought it would take the plaster formed a shape I can only describe as breast-like. As the pink of the plaster suited its form well.

 I made a mess at times with plaster becoming dried on the work bench.

 Left: My second 'twin' made with pink plaster.

 

I began
experiments with balloons. First filling the balloons with plaster, then squeezing the balloons in different ways.

 The purple balloon had a ribbon tied around its middle, this made a shape similar to that of a pear.

The aqua balloon was held in place using two clamps. Each positioned in a different direction. The result is a very unnatural shape.

 The colourless plaster appears fairly lifeless in comparison to the brilliant shapes that were produced.

In another material exploration  I filled a rubber glove with plaster. I placed a hammer on it as weight so that as it dried the fingers were full.

 

Here is my photo for the weekly task, on small plinths are my two twins and the breast shaped cast. The most interesting shape I made.

First plaster experiments.

Working with plaster to make casts of different shapes is going to be exciting, so I grabbed the first thing I could and cast some plaster into it. An old ice tray.

 After a few hours I could get the icicle shapes out of the tray.

They are mostly good, there is a clean break in the weakest point of all of them. Maybe they needed a release agent. I Have been told that vaseline or any other lubricant can help get things out when you are casting certain materials. I'll hopefully be making some better moulds too.

Next I fill a container with plaster and make impressions in the plaster by pushing objects into it.

 Scrape the bucket clean.

 I used a golf ball.

 A pine cone; this could be tricky to remove as the plsater will have seeped into all of the small grooves on its underside.

As seen here the pinecone mould did break, it could have been a lot worse though.

The golf ball mould is pretty good. If I had two of these I could cast something inside of each side and then stick them together to get a replica golf ball.

A brilliant idea found its way to me. Using lego bricks to set into the plaster.

Most of these came out pretty easily. The long yellow piece was slightly more difficult to manuevre out.
My next step is to fill the moulds with a casting resin to produce replica lego/duplo bricks.

Ultimately most of my plaster moulds broke.

Broken Pinecone Mould.



The lego moulds broke as I tried to force the yellow piece out, and when I tried to cast anything with Resin I managed to mix the resin incorrectly so it wouldn't set and just made a mess instead.

 The ice cube tray strikes back, this time with poorly mixed resin.