I started working on this project on Friday 11/11. Unfortunately, my finger from the class demo broke whenever I tried to remove it from the mold, so I couldn’t use it for one of my submissions.
I started from scratch and decided to make 2 castings of the same finger one after another to save some time. In my rapid measuring and reading, I made the plaster of paris ratio 2:1 water to plaster, so I was very confused whenever I kept mixing for 5 minutes and it wasn’t looking plaster-y. After a quick re-read of the instructions, I made the correct consistency of plaster and poured it. I waited an hour and came back to a perfect finger replica and an iffy one.
The iffy finger seemed to have dents in the tip – I was thinking this is from me pulling my finger out too harshly or early before it’s ready. So, I decided to just re-use the mold from the near-exact finger. I poured some plaster in and left it outside overnight with some other classmates’ cups.
Whenever I came back on Saturday morning and pulled out the finger, it had a pretty bad break in the nail. I figured this was from the humidity since it rained really hard all of Friday afternoon; it also could be from me pulling it out too harsh – I could start snipping away the alginate instead to keep my molds safe.
This was pretty frustrating, so I decided to try one more time, all from scratch. Whenever I came back in an hour, I started to cut and peel away the alginate over the trash can… and then the whole thing fell into the full trash can. So, I no longer had that finger. ):
After that, I already had 3 decent fingers, and there were a handful of students still making their first fingers, so I decided to work with what I have. I kept the better of the 2 iffy ones and began post processing. I made sure to shave down some of the excess plaster so they have pretty equal bases and I sprayed 2 coats of the clear polyurethane.
gang’s all here
Overall, I really enjoyed this project and liked the silliness of seeing a bunch of random fingers around the ENGI210 table. I would definitely use molding and casting for random projects and knick-knacks – I’m excited to take my 3 new ring holders home (-:
Cost Calculations:
Labor: 2.5 hours @ $15/hr
Total: $52.50
