Whats up everybody. I know there are thousands of you reading through this blog right now just dying to know what I’ve been up to for the past week. Well this week we had to mold and then cast our fingers to learn a little more about how a mold works, and how to cast different objects. While we didn’t end up casting multiple versions using the same mold, we learned a lot about molding materials and methods.

Since I’m all about going that extra mile, I decided that I wanted to cast my entire hand instead of just one finger. Why have just a lonely finger sticking out of your wall when you could have your entire hand reaching out? I know the assignment says to just do your fingers, but I really wanted something that I might actually use, and I didn’t want random fingers sticking out of my wall this summer lol.

So to start the process I first had to mix up a batch of alginate that I would then mold my hand with. In order to mix this stuff, you had to do it fast since it would set rather quickly. So I used a hand drill with a hole saw attached to get the job done. Additionally I also used a lower ratio of alginate to water in order to try to soak up all the possible water in order to get a firmer, more accurate mold. My mold was pretty firm and set well, but I didn’t really notice an increase in quality from my hand to someone who used a higher ratio of alginate to water.

In order to make sure its easy to get your hand out of the mold, you are supposed to rub mold release all over your hand, but I completely forgot to do that so it was pretty difficult to get my hand out, but eventually I did.

Now that I had my mold, it was time to cast this bad boy. As you can see from above, my idea with this hand was for it to hold my keys or wallet or something after I walk into my room. However, this orientation made it pretty damn difficult to get the cast hand out of the mold. Eventually I had to rip the mold in half in order to get out my pasty, white, plastic hand… RIP mold.

Yet even though I sent my mold to the great beyond, I had a fully cast white hand with a screw in the back of it to help mount it to anything I wanted to (except for my dorm, where for some reason H&D refuse to let us hang anything up with anything but command strips…).

BAM, I had a hand. Now I just needed to clean it up and make it look like I didn’t have a deadly skin condition. Since there were a ton of bumps all over it, I decided to just sand it down to make it look a little more uniform. Word of advice, don’t use red sand paper on a white object. There were a ton of red marks all over my beautiful helping hand, but I was able to get most of them off using an air hose.

And Viola! You have a 3rd hand.