... onwards.

So, I'm pretending that we aren't in fact moving house anytime soon, and have decided to Get On With It. I'm feeling better already. The studio is vacuumed (it was disgraceful, the floor had been almost obscured by shredded paper and plaster dust for months. There were a few alarming rattles up the vacuum hose but I guess I'll figure out what they were when I go looking for that tool and can't find it.) and the room is feeling again like a productive workspace rather than a niggling job on my cleaning list.

To celebrate, I've been making some more mess! I've been meaning to expand on my seedpod wall hanging range ever since, a while back, I found a tiny sweet pine cone among my grandmother Mard's seedpods, which she collected on her travels around Australia with my grandfather. Followers of Kuberstore on Instagram will start to see the emergence of a pine cone theme.

Along with the pine cone, which I thought might mould up nicely, I recently found a handsome and suitable gumnut that I thought might also work. This morning I busted out some Pinkysil and went for it. I'm still in love with Pinkysil as a mouldmaking material - it sets so fast that you can go from 'no mould' to 'removing first casting' within an hour. Suits my impatient soul!

Inbuilt mould identification for the first time ever! I wish I'd thought of this before now, because I often find myself squinting into similarly-shaped moulds to try and figure out which one I want. This time I wrote (backwards) into the base layer of plasticene with a sharp pencil before pouring the silicone. Yay!

It's so exciting to crack open a mould for the first time and see the cast result. Double joy for me this morning!

 Pine cones and gumnuts... and wall hangings to come. Progress! AT LAST!

... on a seedpod adventure.

At the end of the market last weekend, my stall neighbour Brenda gave me a seedpod that had been part of her table decoration. I had noticed it earlier, and we'd talked about how it was most likely the 'nut' version of the same macrocarpa eucalyptus that I used (in bud form) for my most recent seedpod wall hanging. When we were packing up she gave it to me.

We had both wondered whether I would be able to make a mould from it. It had some fairly deep openings, but Pinkysil is very forgiving and I thought it might just work.

It did work... that is, until it didn't any more. Pinkysil IS very forgiving but it can only handle being stretched to billy-oh for so long. Even though I cut down through both sides of the mould to gain access, the interior voids of the nut were quite intricate, and extricating the plaster cast required some degree of force. After only a couple of casts, pop!

The mould broke. Bugger!

Still, I did manage to get three decent casts from it before it busted. Never mind.. this is one of the perils of mould making. Sometimes you make it one way only to realise it would have worked better another way. For example, this one would probably work better as a two-part mould, but even so, interior spaces are difficult to deal with, and it still might not have worked.

Always learning.