On the Baronial Sunday of March of the SCA – being a market
day in which people sold gear – it was also attempted by various craft workshops.
I’d long been curious about finding a way to make better
pendants for my Anne Boleyn / Ugly Betty style necklaces, so I was keen to give
pewter making a go.
This particular class taught you how to make pewter ‘tokens’
– basically tiny decorative pendants that have a design on one side and is
completely flat on the other.
Due to the fact we were making one-off designs, it was
better for us to use soapstone rather than plaster of paris or silicon. This is
more to do with the fact that the stone is easier to shape…
Soapstone turned out to be ridiculously easy to carve,
basically to make more detailed things, it just required hours of gently
scraping the stone. I pretty much just went right in with heavily chiseling
into it with the tools – informed by the teacher as being basic clay carving
tools…
I decided to start off with a basic heart shape, then added
dolphins on the sides (as wings are just too overdone!). My dolphins didn’t
really look like dolphins at all as I was too hasty in my carving, so I decided
to turn them into fish instead. Initially, I’d wanted to create a mini crown
above the heart with the loop to hang the token from just above it. The crown
design turned out to be a little too tricky for me to carve at such limited
time (we were getting close to 8pm) that I decided to just have it as 3 lines
instead. Most of my time in the end was spent deepening the main heart shape
due to the fact that it wasn’t ‘sucking’ the molten pewter into the mold enough
to reach the other parts of the design. The main heart part was seeming rather 'empty' to me, so I decided to carve the ancient Greek word 'kalos' (beautiful) in mirror style (so the word comes out the right way) across the middle. Most of the design was 'drawn' using this mini needle-like file with a very sharp point (which was also very handy for deepening thin lines (like the 'crown' and the loop). I also know now that it is very
important to make sure that the design is pretty deep (say 2 – 4 mm opposed to
the suggested 1 mm) in order to make sure that the molten pewter runs into the
mold enough.
It is also important for every carved mold to include a funnel
to give the molten pewter something to run into to reach the hollowed-out parts
of the stone in order to create the design. To help the pewter cool in the
right way, it was also important to include mini ‘air-vents’.
The creation of the tokens was pretty easy for the molten
pewter part, where the flat side of a thick block of wood was pressed against
the mold, and then the molten pewter was poured in. The excess pewter formed by
the funnel was simply cut off using jewellery cutters…
I think overall my design turned out pretty crude, but not
too bad for a first-time pewter token maker…
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