Amélie moule: janvier

18 février 2014

Mesdames et messieurs, voici les dernières nouvelles d'Amélie en moulage!

"How have you been?

You know when you look at your schedule, and every day and every evening is booked for weeks and weeks to come, and your to-do lists just keep getting longer and longer (yes, lists with an "s"...  I am a compulsive list-maker).
And then something gets cancelled last minute, and you suddenly find yourself with an accidental free evening ahead of you.

... Ahhhhhhhhhhh.

Pajamas, fleece, big woolen socks, couch, music, chocolate, hot tea.

The perfect setting to reflect back on January and send you my little update...

So as to perpetuate the tradition, let's start with a bit of music to set the mood :

So, January...
January has been... tentacular, if you know what I mean!
I spent most of the month working on casting my wax sculpture of the lady with 2 octopuses.  A challenging project for sure, which has taught me some very valuable life lessons.  Such as :

  - a good, solid formwork is a very reassuring thing indeed

  - GOD does plaster set fast (... but you know that story already)

  - panic is futile

  - 25kg is heavy, ask for help

  - plaster: hard ; plaster after firing: extra hard ; glass: breakable ; tentacle: gone ; ....... damn.

  - unbeveled glass chips, really easily (and irreversibly, for that matter)

Oh well... you learn!  And isn't it interesting how mistakes often bring about new ideas?  (Well, with a little help from you guys.)

Here are a few pictures of the piece as it is right now.

It still needs quite a bit of cleaning and coldworking, but so far I have to say I am very, very pleased with the result (especially considering the plaster pouring incident).  The piece has beautiful luminosity, it didn't devitrify, there are almost no bubbles (?!!) and not a single draw...
Now all I need to do is remember to be that extra careful while handling and coldworking it, and everything should be fine.

... Or maybe more like extra extra careful.

And while my sculpture was being cast, I made garlic bulbs (for the piece I sold to the city of Montreal).  Fifty of them.  F-i-f-t-y.  From A to Z.

Ask me how fed up I am with making those...
Still, better than working in an office hey!

I also made a few quick test-moulds to blow into, which I used last week actually.  It's something I'd wanted to try for ages, and it turned out to be great fun!  I am definitely going to try that again.  I don't have any pictures of the blown pieces, but here's what the wax models looked like.  (And I'd never realized I had such big feet.  Couldn't fill the mold all the way to the top when I blew into it, with 3 gathers!)

It's been interesting working on a big piece and on small "just-for-fun" projects all in the same month.  Very Yin-Yang.  I found it to be a good balance for me actually.
You learn a lot through both, but on different scales and in different ways.

So, note to self :  the fun stuff is important too, girl (on top of being fun!), remember that.

Well, I guess that's it for now!

Until April...

Take care,

Amélie"