> One at least!

Hi Shawn,

I never thought that working with plaster could be such a long thread - you can do lots with it though.

Plaster, by it's self doesn't have enough "body" to stand there - it will just form a puddle, making a frame contains the puddle and you can copy a pattern under the plaster or a pattern being floated (suspended) in the plaster. That is how to make a copy of a 3D pattern. This is a bit limiting for what we wanted to do.

My mold worked because the stiff mortar mix that I used for my seat had enough body that I could form it inside the frame and it didn't slump.

The ideas with the foam, cloth etc. are attempts to "contain" the plaster in such a way that you could copy the kayak and the butt at the same time. These approaches could work. As I said, might be fun to try - you learn a lot about the material by playing around with it.

I would like to try carving a bit of foam, saturating it with plaster just to see if the foam could hold the weight of the plaster without deforming and/or if the viscosity of the plaster was high enough that it would not ooze out of the foam before it set. This might be a quick & easy way to make patterns.

I think that the plastic bag approach would be the most likley to work. It would contain the plaster and conform to the kayak and the butt all at once. I have some mortar mix left over. If I get a chance I will try this idea using the mortar. The bag idea has an advantage over my first mold because it does both top and bottom - mine only does the top and you have to fit the seat to the bottom manually. The other advantage is that there is no frame to make - gotta like that.

> Again, would cloth or burlap hold enough plaster? I might have to try this
> out.

To answer your question directly, the cloth might work OK for fine details but the burlap, with the coarser weave would probably be better, stronger, more bulk - quicker. By all means - get a box of plaster and try it out. Let us know what you find out.

This built-up style does have lot of applications where framing is not practical - say you wanted to duplicate a car fender in fiberglass. Been there - Done that with plaster and burlap (the guy whose fender we copied didn't even know ;-))and my friend's car look good as new.

For our seat project you could build up a mold by stacking and packing plaster saturated bits of burlap to make a plaster frame inside a kayak, then add some plaster to the cavity and sit in it. Might be the hard way though.

Plaster is an interesting material - you can do a lot of things with it. As a kid I had a whole collection of plaster animal tracks - donated the collection to the school. Did the track thing with my kids, kept them busy for hours. Used to make molds of fishing weights and jigs and cast them in lead.

> I remember having a plaster mask of my face done when I was at church camp
> many years ago!

Might try the plaster face mask - halloween is coming up!!

Hope this helps.

Hank