Friday, April 18, 2014

Back to pottery and Foam Cuts

Back in February, I had cut a foam template with built in texture but got distracted making stencils and silkscreens.  Now I am back trying to use these fun tools.  Started with this design in Silhouette:
Then I put two pieces of my thin foam together with paper tape (won't stick to clay) on my 12"x12" mat and cut out the design.  Then applying packing tape to the foam before removing it from the mat, then removed whole double sheet before weeding, and applied packing tape to the other side, then weeded out design, with positive on one side with packing tape backing and negative on the other side:

I had seen a neat idea to give bowls a nice shape using foam wreath, but couldn't find any cheap enough, and then saw another idea using foam pip insulation to achieve same thing.  My DH picked some up at hardware store and I found that trying to bend it into smooth shape with no kinks was difficult.  So I stuffed the foam piece with plastic grocery bag until very firm, then cut and taped into circular shape.  Here is a pic of the foam shape. --still had a slight kink, but was fine
Then I slabbed out some clay and while slab was flat, I pressed the negative foam cut, (see top picture, one at top is negative onto the clay using my hands and a credit card.  You can see the process in this video (please mute speaker, I didn't realize there was so much annoying background noise:


Then cut around the scalloped edge and placed on top of the foam rings dropping on concrete floor to get them to slump  (made two in very short order).




  Here they are drying:





2 comments:

angie said...

Pauline, this is so beautiful! I finally had some time to play with my new blades and they are wonderful. And they cut the heavy stencil plastic like I was hoping they would.

Now to learn to design my own stencils--similar to the one you are using here.

Could you possible do a tutorial on how you do these--or point me in the direction of another tutorial?

Thanks,

Angie

Pauline said...

Angie, this is the easiest one, I sometimes do quite a bit of design work, but in this case, I just used a design I purchased from Silhouette America store: Design ID #9624
and simply enlarged it to the size I wanted, in this case 11.106". I used two pieces of foam, one cut in half lengthwise, and taped together with paper tape. Ran through machine, and before taking off mat, used packing tape to keep it all together, then carefully rolling it off mat, removed it, added packing tape to the other side. Cheap tape is best, the good stuff sticks too uch and is harder to separate the positive from the negative, then I
carefully separated the two sides, being mindful of which bits go with the positive and which bits go with the negative, and there you have it. To use on clay, I sprinkle with baby powder (or cornstarch), so the sticky tape will not pull on the clay as I impress it.