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hollyann — Fun With Pewter Kelpies
Published: 2007-09-04 21:11:23 +0000 UTC; Views: 1075; Favourites: 11; Downloads: 0
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My SCA* shire has a Collegium** coming up and I volunteered to make little pewter charms that people can wear, to show they've paid to attend the collegium. I've never worked with pewter before but...well, this didn't turn out too bad
I made the mould out of soapstone (which you can see in the bottom photo), carved it "backwards", so that when I poured the pewter in, it came out facing the way I wanted it. Even while I was carving the soapstone, I'd use PlayDoh to test it out every so often, to make sure it looked good or if something needed changing.
Melted the pewter in a stainless steel pan on my stove and used a spoon to scoop up a little bit of it and poured it in the mould.
It still needs some work because the charms are still on the thick side. But still, not a bad attempt
Now...just to figure out how to cut around the figure! O.o;;
*SCA - Society for Creative Anachronism - re-creating history for the fun of it!
To read up more about it, go here: [link] **Collegium is a bunch of classes based on SCA hobbies and interests
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Comments: 13
Oh my goodness I am working on almost the same project. LOL I have been trying to cast pewter medallions made into the symbol of my "ship," we are a pirate ship that is a part of a mercenary house hold in the SCA. I have carved the medallion out of soap stone like you, but I was attempting to use a different method to poor the pewter in to it. I clamped a flat piece of stone to my carved one, which had a poring channel cut into it, but the pewter just got to cold too fast. It didn't even make it into the carving.
Did you ruin you pan and spoon by putting the pewter on them?
By the way these look really nice.
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Thanks!
Well, I definately won't be using that pan for cooking 
I haven't tried doing doing the two slabs of stones together with a pouring channel, although I only thought of doing that AFTER all of them were made! 
I'm just going to take a wild guess about this, but maybe one of the reasons the pewter got too cold too fast when casting was that the soapstone was at room temperature. I noticed that when I made my kelpies, after about 10 minutes, the soapstone was starting to heat up so much, that I had to use an oven mitt in order to pick it up and take the pewter kelpie out. Maybe try getting the stone warm or hot first? Like, make a bunch of medallions without the backing (flat) stone, just to get it warmed up so the pewter won't cool down as fast, making it cast a lot easier. Then you can just put the "warm-up" pewter medallions back into the pan to re-melt them down so you don't have rejects
Or, how long is your is your pouring channel? It's too long to get to the medallion, maybe it just cools while it's trying to get to it?
But that's my guess at it, it might be something completely different, I'm not sure. Probably wouldn't hurt to give it a try, anyways
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Thanks for the suggestions. I was thinking the same things. I thought that if I heated up the stone in the over first then it would keep the pewter hotter as it set. That should allow me to have more time to manipulate the liquid pewter. Any way thanks again for answering my questions.
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No problem
Also, I'm on a Yahoo Mailling Group called "Metalcasting". They deal with anything from pewter to gold, and I'm sure if you ask the people there - who are undoubtly more knowledgeable then I am with pewter - they can probably pin-point what you would need to do to make the medallions successful, as well as give you more suggestions about it too
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Sweet. I actually like the random background of the kelpie.
Carving the soapstone mold is tricky... you have to keep thinking "backward".
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Thanks!
Yeah, I actually ended up "trimming" the edges around the kelpies by re-heading the pewter in my pan and just dipping the edges back into the molten pewter...whatever sharp edges I had, I sanded them down so they wouldn't be dangerous
Carving in the soapstone wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I just kept thinking to myself that whatever part of the kelpie that I wanted to be raised, I needed to carve deeper.
Eventually, once I get a little better, I want to make pewter buttons...as soon as I can figure out how to use my new dremmel tool!
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Oh wow they turned out just great!!!!!!! I'm so excited for you.
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*nods* I"m really happy they've turned ou so far
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Those are cute! Where'd you get the pewter though?
I'm making something with fabric since I CAN'T find what I'm looking for in something I could buy (or if I can find it online, it's not really what I'm after to feel right putting money down on something mediocre and expensive to boot), and one of the things I was looking for was this creature in pewter.
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See, those are some of the cool site tokens, not just a chicken shaped woodsie with sharpie on it or something.
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Absolutely adorable hon. ... I envy that. I'd never have the skill to do that ever.
They turned out fantastic
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It was barely nothing, actually O.o The only thing I think would take the most time is making the mould...and even then, I didn't even know what I was doing
The pewter part was the easy part...take a stainless steel pan, put it on the stove, put a hunk of pewter in there, melt it, scrape off the scum at the top and take a spoon to scoop some pewter in it and pour it in the mould
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