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Welcome To Living Ceramics

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 Living ceramics  produces  individual hand-painted signed porcelain animals and now precious  metal, enameled animals. Specializing in domesticated and wild animals.  They are all designed,  modeled , cast and hand-painted by Clare McFarlane.  Clare is currently working on producing designs for glass, bronze, soap and chocolate. Clare is happy to except commissions. Please email to discuss any animals you would like Clare to model for you.

You can also  have any of the designs (shaped most like your pet) in Clare''s range,  painted to look like your pet. Post or email me photos of your pet.  This service is an extra £20 on the design''s normal price.

 Please email before ordering as only have limited stock left of designs I made before I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Hope to get going again in the new year

Free postage and packing on all orders over £100.

This applies only to the UK and the Channel Islands

 

  

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 Finished glass dachshund on cushion

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Cleopatra  pug is one of my latest designs .

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  New Chihuahua design in glass Tinkerbell

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Glass Japanese Chin on a cushion.

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Carved this cat's head out of soapstone and african opal. I have given this one real sapphire eyes and handmade silver wire bail ,

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soapstone pug
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Soapstone carved chameleon
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New techniques in glass casting

 For the last couple of years I have been making a lot of designs in glass clay. I have found it limiting in the fact that you cannot produce transparent work.

 So last year I embarked into kiln casting glass . I made some wax models of small designs for pendants and made rubber moulds of these so I could produce many wax models for making moulds using the lost wax process.
    My first attempts were not good, the surfaces were rough and parts did not cast at all. I tried many different firing programs, but nothing really worked.  The heat seemed to reach into the top of the mould, but not into the more encased areas. Also the surface of the casting was never smooth.. I had to spend hours grinding and polishing the glass on the pieces that did come out whole. I noticed pictures of others work before cold-working  was also rough.
 I joined many forums, but the conclusion from these, was that small pieces take as long to cast as big pieces.
 I started to think was it the plaster , after all it is an insulator and above 830C it starts to interact with the glass preventing it from flowing properly. It must also be heated slowly to prevent cracking.
 
Why is it plaster been used at all for glass casting, I began to ask myself?

When I was making peices in glass clay I found a material that did not seem to stick to glass.  So I made some into a putty and pressed this around one of my wax models.  I melted the wax out and was able to see it had picked up all the detail. A good sign, so I heated up the mould to burn out the binder. 
 After the firing it remained as strong as a plaster mould and I was able to drill small holes in it by hand with a small drill bit to allow air to escape.
 I reheated the mould to melt the glass frit. I was able to blast this up as fast as I  could without the mould been effected. I fired around 800 C for a long time to melt the glass. After firing I was able to break open the mould and the glass had not stuck to the mould . Great, so I did some more testes. These I fired higher to speed up the process. The higher I fired the more successful the casts , the more he moulds glowed, the more detail was in the cast and the stronger the mould became. 
     However the higher I fired the more of a residue was left on the surface of the mould. This took time to clean off as with the polishing the casts from the plaster moulds .
So although I ended up with a much higher success rate in terms of complete castings with more detail, there was still a lot of time being spent cold-working.

 I started to search for a releasing agent used in the manufacture of glass. I found one that applied thickly prevented the glass from sticking to the moulds I was using. However it would come off and would  go into the glass .
 It did not prevent the glass from sticking unless it was applied very thickly . Applied thinly there was some sort of interaction between my mould putty and the releasing agent. It seems to fuse to the putty and the glass. There by making it difficult to remove.
 So with two new problems , I firstly found a binder to prevent it coming off into the glass, which I am still tweaking.  Then because the  releasing agent is fairly pricy , I thought can I put some sort of thin layer between the releasing agent and my putty moulding material.  This  last process is not necessary if you are not worried about the cost. However if you are making a very large object then you might what to consider this.  
 I have gone back to the plaster for this , but just a very thin layer .
 My first experiments have been very successful, please see pictures below of two similar sized objects of about 1.5 cm in size. The pictures are not very good, but you can see the rough surface of the item cast in plaster and the one cast by my new technique. Which by the way need no real firing schedule, just to go up slow to burn out the binder , and then to blast it up and down a few times before maintaining a constant temperature for a hour or two to allow bubbles to come to the surface and the top to even out.
  

Cast head using new techniques

                This cats head has had just five minutes  of polishing with soft brush and green tripoli used in jewelry making.

                                                                              Note the smooth surface 

Cast using plaster mould

  Kiln cast Glass Crested gecko

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