While the Metallic Ideas are Incubating ... WOOL !!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch ... 

Okay, not the ranch (dangit anyhow).

I'm taking a break from metallurgy here and going back to the wool jacket I got at the frip shop the other day.

Here's the sleeve I'm going to experiment with by boiling the heck out of it to see if it will felt. I just cut the one sleeve off for the time being. It turns out to have been two pieces. I want to see how much it will shrink, hence the measuring tape.

While I'm waiting for the water to boil the sleeve sections are sitting on the old cutting board I use for clay sculpting projects. I'll have one of those coming up here shortly so hauled it into my old kitchen from my studio. Not that it took extreme effort to haul it, being as it's just a cutting board.

# Into the water they go! I'm just using my big old coffee pot to boil them up in - it was handiest.

While they're busy doing whatever wool does in boiling water, my mind can turn to what I might want to do with these pieces when they're done. 

I'm assuming they'll be somewhat smaller than they started out, so am thinking about possibly making myself another belt-bag to go with some of my Sidhelagh clothes. I'm hoping they'll turn out the same color they were - which I don't see why they wouldn't - because I already know that I'm going to want to use the 3" copper brooch my sister made (using the design from an ancient shield, totally awesome!) with it.



While I'm waiting for those sleeve pieces to boil themselves into felt (I have to agitate them every few minutes) I can do a little more homework on the metal casting thing.

I found out that I can make my own ceramic crucible and it will be better than most of the ones I've seen and read about other people using.

Ha.

I can make it any size I want. I can give it whatever shape I want. I can design handles that will exactly accommodate my tongs. I can build in a pour spout that will deliver the molten metal where I want it to go. And if I don't like it I can try a different design (yep - and grind up my first one to mix into my sculpting clay - it's called grog believe it or not.

Someone was talking about how they can fire thick clay sculptures by adding grog to the clay when everyone else was saying no no no no you have to make your sculptures thin-walled or they'll explode all over the place. So I was happy when this guy spoke up because I had already been thinking why not just fire it low and slow ... and that's exactly what he said ... then he threw in the bit about adding grog and I'm going, 'Grog? What? Isn't grog something you drink? Like beer or some such?'

Me being me, I had to look it up, thinking my vocabulary can't be that far off in its automatic assigning of meanings to words.

No, I'm fine (whew). Grog is a kind of weak alcoholic beverage akin to beer.

It is also ground up bisque (fired ceramics) that you add to your sculpting clay so you can make your pieces thicker than what would normally be okay for firing.

*smug self-satisfied smile*

So now we know.

I also found out that I'm not making 'felt' exactly; I'm making 'boiled wool' and can stop boiling it any time now even though it surely doesn't seem to have shrunk any. You're supposed to give it a dunk in cold water to prevent it from shrinking any more - but I'm not exactly worried about that. So onto a towel with the two pieces of that sleeve. And there they'll stay until they're dry.

Then we'll see if the boiling made any difference. Frankly I was expecting something a little more impressive, but what the heck. The tag said it was 100% wool in three or four different languages so ... 

Anyway, the rest of the jacket is across the top of these pieces, for comparison. *chuckling* All you can really see is that the jacket is dry and the sleeve pieces are wet. For this procedure you're supposed to squeeze (not wring) excess water out and then put the fabric between towels to dry instead of using a dryer. So that's what I've done.

Found out some interesting things about boiled wool. It's making a come-back in the fashion world, apparently; not that it matters to me but it's nice to know so I can play at being fashion-conscious in case anyone asks me about it.

It's also supposed to be really weather-proof and warm - and there are places that it's never ever gone out of fashion. Cold places in the mountains of our world from what I gather. Which tells me that it might just be all it's cracked up to be.

In a few short hours we'll find out how all that hot water affected the pieces of lightweight jacket fabric we used here.

And if you think I'm going to stay up all night watching those pieces of wool dry, you'd best think again.

Next time I do something like this it will be in the daytime so I can use the drying time to sculpt myself a crucible or something.

Instead, I'm going to sleep.