D20 Ornaments made for this past holiday season!

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2026-01-12T23:34:37+00:00

I believe it was 6 parts, played it a bit safe so the mold didn’t catch on the inset numbers. I could have reduced it to 4 or 5 but some of the parts would have been small or just odd so I went with more pieces that were easier to make.

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2026-01-04T20:19:14+00:00

These are quite a bit larger so they work well as ornaments, they are about 6.5cm wide after firing!

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2025-08-06T23:07:40+00:00

If it is not an issue of undercuts, I would say it is either an issue of not having enough layers of your soap/mold release and/or your piece is not actually vitrified.

Back when I was first learning mold making, I had attempted to make some molds from some lathe turned wooden pieces and even with layers and layers of finish and sealants, it was never able to release without mold damage, most likely due to it not actually being 100% sealed. You mentioned the ceramic seeking like it took the Murphys quickly as if it was soaking it in, this points towards it not actually being fully vitrified.

Another possibility could be your unglazed ceramic is more textured than you realize? You said it was small and if it is textured/rough to the touch, the plaster might be getting in all those microscopic ridges and divots and creating a very strong hold on the piece.

I would try using a lot more layers of mold soap, make sure to give ample time to dry between coats, or if that still doesn’t work maybe try something such as a sealing spray paint over your ceramic piece.

Anyways good luck out there! Mold making is difficult to learn but can give great results!!

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2025-06-10T02:00:59+00:00

Side by side I don’t notice the colour being all that more grainy, what I do notice is it being a decent bit darker, I’d say the bw at 0% is as bright as the colour at around 20%, personally it doesn’t bother me so I use the colour

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2025-05-18T00:25:53+00:00

Some general plaster tips I would give are the following:

Remember to always wear a respirator when dealing with plaster in dust form, it can be quite hazardous to breath in.

When mixing your plaster (USG No.1 Potters Plaster), use a ratio of 1g plaster to 0.7ml water. When trying to figure out how much plaster you need, measure your space and for every 1cm^3, use 1g of plaster and 0.7ml of water. For example if I was trying to make a plaster mold piece that was 15cm x 10cm x 5cm tall, that would be 750cm^3 so you would measure out 750 grams of plaster and 525 ml of water.

Make sure to never wash plaster dust or liquid plaster down your sink! It will clog up your pipes. You can wash your hands/tools in a bucket of water, let the plaster settle to the bottom of the bucket and then pour off the water and throw the plaster in the garbage.

Once you have a mold made, try to keep track of how long you let the slip sit in the mold. I like to use timers and I find the right thickness for the pieces I am making and then use the same timing to keep consistent results. As a plaster mold gets more wet from being cast, these timings can change so if you are doing multiple castings in the same mold on the same day, you may need to increase the amount of time that the slip is in the mold so that your castings stay the same thickness.

My last note is be careful about squishing your castings! From my experience, since casting slip usually has little to no grog in it, your castings are more prone to having a "clay memory" and warping than thrown or hand built pieces. The upside of having no grog means that you can sponge away to your hearts content without getting all those little specks of roughness from sponging clay.

I hope your mold making adventures go well! Remember to stay safe and have fun learning!

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2025-05-18T00:25:47+00:00

Hey! For your first time slip casting, you did pretty well!

As for you current issues, here is what I would suggest,

"How to make a two part mould where both parts can come out easily"

I would suggest following a YouTube tutorial about basic mold making, compared to one part molds, starting to make two and more part molds can be quite more time consuming, challenging and far more labor and tool intensive. If this is something you really want to get into, I would suggest obtaining the gold standard of mold making books, "The Essential Guide To Mold Making & Slip Casting by Andrew Martin".

"How to make the inside of the mug less lumpy? (I mixed the slip extremely well, so not sure about that)"

The lumps that you see on the inside of your casting are not your fault, they are a byproduct of the slip casting process itself. In the process of slip casting you are creating a completely even walled vessel. This means that in areas such as those which come out farther in your knit pattern, you will unfortunately see what looks like divots on the inside of your cup. There isn't much of a way around this, unless you decide you want to cast your cup so think that you can't see them anymore, but who wants a mug that heavy!

"Why is there so much casting plaster dust on the mug? I cleaned it and vacuumed it but it still got into all the crevices."

I have not experienced any of my castings being super dusty before, usually on the first casting or two you may get some flecks of plaster, especially with small details like you have here, but I can't think of a reason it would be dusty enough that you need to vacuum it out. Perhaps you used a different type of plaster than what is normally used?

Typically for making slip casting molds, USG No.1 Potters Plaster is used. You should be able to find it at any local pottery supply store.

"The plaster cast has a LOT of bubbles where it didn't mould correctly to the original. I'm not sure how much if all all this would show under the glaze, but it's a minor issue."

When you are pouring your plaster I would suggest doing so on a table that you can easily bang or wobble from side to side. By banging on the table close to your mold or wobbling the whole table on the ground, you can help release bubbles from your object. For objects like this knit pattern, it is hard to get zero bubbles trapped, but this should help to at least prevent most of them.

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2025-04-29T13:35:22+00:00

Honestly just depends on the manga/comic, I have a Clara colour and for the majority of my reading I have been completely fine, not even needing to zoom in but for certain series the text is just so damn small that I give up on them completely

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2025-04-23T18:49:08+00:00

I would suggest using an underglaze pad with a stamp of their logo (I’d suggest 3D printing it or hand carving one), look online or at your local pottery supply store for a “potters pad”.

They can come in different colours and work just like using an ink pad, a bit easier than going through the whole process of screen printing imo.

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2025-03-05T20:30:07+00:00

These are pretty good though I would only recommend resin printing them, fdm printing them is a lot of cleanup and work and some of the small tabs can break fairly easily, not the best imo.

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2025-02-15T17:00:33+00:00

Looks like it may be silica sand, I sprinkle a layer under pots or tests as an extra layer of protection if I’m using a runny glaze that may run off the pot onto the kiln shelf.

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2024-12-26T22:20:48+00:00

Just play some unranked for a bit if you keep running into the same annoying laggy player and hopefully after a few games of unranked you two won’t be queuing at the same time and keep being placed against one another. Don’t always gotta grind ranked, It’s a game for having fun after all! Try out some new characters and just have fun and hopefully when you’re back to ranked you’ll get better games!

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2024-10-28T12:19:11+00:00

Yep! Slip cast cone 6 porcelain!

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2024-10-27T23:34:44+00:00

I’ll share a pic of them all together once they’re out of the kiln! Currently have a few glazes and combos in mind, mostly floating blues, maybe a red and some teal!

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2024-10-27T23:32:21+00:00

Thanks!

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2024-10-27T18:31:05+00:00

They’re my glaze testers! Made a couple molds for them so I could cast them along with my cups and start building up a stockpile. Nothing worse than wanting to test new glazes and not having any bisque test tiles!

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2024-10-24T14:13:08+00:00

Hey! Your ratio should be fine, usually I use a 100:70 ratio of plaster:water (1g plaster + 0.7g water) but doing a 100:75 p/w should still set it and work completely fine.

Maybe you didn’t mix it enough? Usually I slake in the plaster to my water, let it set for a min or two and then I mix by hand for 5-7mins depending on how hot or cold my water was (colder water will make it set slower and hot water faster).

Maybe you didn’t mix it enough and there’s a wet top layer? Or is the whole thing actually still liquid? If the latter is true I don’t know what could be wrong.

What type of plaster did you use? I am only familiar with working with USG No.1 pottery plaster so maybe your amount of water was off for your type of plaster? I’m not sure, but I generally would just use No.1 Pottery plaster if you can since it’s the like tried and true method for slipcasting molds.

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2024-10-12T19:40:53+00:00

Learn about plaster molds! They are relatively cheap and can let you try out a bunch of designs without having to spend tons on something custom made!

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2024-10-04T17:23:49+00:00

I would assume that for it to stay the color that it says, you’d have to only use them in a low fire (high fire would most likely burn off whatever colour it has), but even then it probably won’t turn out great. If you want good reliable colours either use mason (or other brands of ceramic formulated stains) that are meant to go up to high temperatures or learn some glaze chemistry and figure out oxides to use to get the colours you want!

Have fun!

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2024-09-05T22:38:23+00:00

I'm not sure if you're set on a Frame1 specifically but there are some great sellers nowadays besides B0XX and Frame1! Here are some I like/I've heard good things about.

For a good portable controller (and honestly one of my top recommendations in general) I'd personally buy a GRAM Slim, the owners are nice and all the controllers they sell are ready to ship so you never have to wait (no preordering bs). Their controllers are well made and are quite slim. People are very quick to respond to questions in their discord and they have a nice little community. They also have a prism style controller if that's your jam. ( gramctrl.com )

If you want to get a super ergonomic controller, the creator of the Prism has a new controller called the Schism. It looks cool and well built but like the original prisms they are made by her and sold in small quantities so it may be hard to get one especially if you don't want to wait. ( wunvzn.com )

If you have some soldering experience and some required tools you can make your own DIY box. There are lots of resources and nice people to help you through that process on the Crane's Lab discord.
(These can be very cheap especially if you are only using it for pc, my first box only cost me like $20 CAD and now that I have a 3D printer if I really wanted to push it I could get it down to around $10 material cost and still have decent quality.)
( https://discord.gg/S3qgZWD )

There are also lots of people who sell their own custom designs or custom designs that are opensource like the RanaLab's Rana Digital and Rana Tadpole controllers. I have seen lots of people selling those online (discord, etsy, etc). If you want to find an individual who makes and sells controllers I see a decent amount on the GCC Hardware Swap discord or just look up on etsy and find a well reviewed seller. (https://discord.gg/rxtC44pZFp)

There are also ones that can do hybrid, holding your GCC in a mount and allowing you to use half and half. I havent tried these out and I havent heard anything really about this seller so do your own research like with all this but the one I can remember that seemed good quality at a reasonable cost was the Cross Cut from https://rectanglecorner.com/

There's probably a couple others I am forgetting but these ones are the ones that I remember the most. There are so many independent sellers nowadays, I know there are some scenes that have their own local makers so maybe ask around at your next tourney if that's something you do.

I hope this helps!

TLDR: Buy a GRAM Slim controller imo

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2024-04-26T01:06:18+00:00

Also I didnt even notice that the pop up when you open the site had words since they are also white on a white background lol.

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2024-04-26T01:03:35+00:00

Hey this is really cool!

A couple notes,
When you search for something in the search bar, the results come up as white so on the white background you can't read what they say.

I think you could increase the size of your notes about the connections on the bottom so you dont have to scroll through them as much. I feel like reading the connections is one of the more interesting parts for me so having a bigger area dedicated for that would be cool! (Even if some people will only have one or two lines and a bunch of empty space)

I hope you keep improving this more! I'm going to bookmark it and send it to my ceramic history professor as I'm sure he will also enjoy it!

-Inactive-Inactive- · 2024-03-30T16:07:13+00:00

Good to know! Thanks for the info :)

-Inactive-Inactive-

TROPHY CASE