Ceramic Molds

I once had a customer who carved faces into natural wood. His problem was that too many people were asking for his artwork and he couldn't produce it fast enough. So he got the idea of having me make of mold of his wooden piece, so that he could pour the design in hydrastone.

When he was finished, these hydrastone pieces, looked just like the wood. Give you any ideas?

There are rubber compounds, designed to take high heat, like molten metals and paraffin. You could design your own candles and make a mold of it. You wouldn't even have to use paraffin for the design. You could use sulphur free modeling clay to make the design then pour your wax into the mold.

I see no reason not to make salt n pepper shakers out of hydrastone, using rubber molds. They don't have to be glazed inside, just dry and safe. Hydrastone being a very hard plaster, does not dust off.

Once you've formed something out of anything rigid (wood, pottery, plaster), you can make a mold of it and reproduce it in hydrastone. Then you can paint it to look like anything you wish: wood, porcelain, whatever.

My daughter has an idea for a soap mold and is just waiting for me to mix too much rubber.:) I had a favorite lamp that kept breaking in the same place. It was a plastic part and I didn't want to replace the lamp so I made a rubber mold of the part and poured all the extra pieces, I wanted, using resin. Small plastic parts can be so easily replaced, if you just happen to have some rubber compound and some resin.

Of course, there's always molds for ceramics and some of those molds are of suitable shape to pour slushed plaster. Things like small vases, figurines, etc. It all depends on whether or not, your plaster piece will remove from the mold, easily. All you need to do is soak the inside of your ceramic molds with shellac, add some mold release and pour in your hydrastone or plaster.

You can create incense burners with hydrastone, simply by making a rubber mold for the outside of the design, as well as the inside. The inside piece would actually be a plug. Again, remember that all plasters swell and then shrink slightly so the plug needs to not be solid, to make it easy to remove.