Sunday, September 15, 2013

Casting resin: Feet with ankle joints

When I was ordering resin, I didn't realize that the bottles I got for my first try were 100 ml and the ones I ordered now were 250 ml. That's 0.5 liters of resin and it's a lot when making as small castings as doll shoe soles. So, I decided to make several castings of doll feet now that I found out I can use latex moulds. I've only got 500 g of silicone and that doesn't make many moulds, because you need so much of it around the master. 300 ml of latex, on the other hand, is enough for a bunch of moulds.

I wanted to find a better way of making castings of feet with ankle joints. The first time I tried it, I used saran wrap to protect the ankles and the resulting castings weren't very pretty, even though they were perfectly usable.


This time I was wondering if flower tape would do the job. It's stretchy and slightly adhesive, but not so much that it would leave glue stains to the doll's feet.


Monster High Deuce got to be the guinea pig for this experiment. I wrapped flower tape tightly around his ankles and then applied a few layers of latex.


The moulds weren't too hard to remove, even though flower tape has matte surface. You just need to make sure there are no open seams for the latex to go into and everything should work fine. Below are the finished moulds with some supports and ready for casting.


This is what the castings look like. Much neater than when using saran wrap. These are for making shoes with low heels, so that's the reason for the angle of the ankle.


1 comment:

Unknown said...

That's really neat to know. I might have to get some flower tape just to sturdy up some loose joints. Thanks for the info :)