A is for alginate: plaster and alginate hand cast
When you’re a little hung over and it’s cold, damp and gray outside, but you don’t want to waste the day, there’s nothing better than having some pals over for Crafty Caturday. I spent most of yesterday afternoon at my sewing machine toiling away at my latest historical undergarment while the Bloke perfected his pizza recipe. But the Bloke doesn’t tolerate peaceful stitchery for long — he needs the virile magic of technology. So we moved on to the coolest project of the day.
A good soundtrack is essential to Crafty Caturday. The Felice Brothers make a particularly appropriate and inspiring accompaniment if you’re struggling against perfectionism: they go at a song with guns blazing, and they don’t worry about sounding messy or just plain sucking. As a result, their albums are as full of misses as they are of hits (almost half the songs on Tonight at the Arizona cry out for the Skip button), but the hits are totally worth it: sloppy, spirited and eminently singalongable.
“Take This Hammer” makes me really excited to see the Felice Brothers live. It’s a good song for jumping up and down and bellowing along to. Especially when you’ve just come to the inevitable point in the project where you realize you’ve sewn something inside out or upside down and are going to have to unpick the whole seam and do it again. I love the anarchic hoots and hollers in the background, the obnoxious accordion, the filthy vocals and the tremendous energy. I love the American “goddamn”, which I don’t hear a lot these days. I also love the way Ian Felice doesn’t quite pronounce his Rs, so it sounds a little like Homestar‘s singing.
We’d decided to make a cast of my hand, as a trial run for a bigger project I have in mind. I knew the Bloke would be up for helping me, as he always loves getting involved in any project with a science-fair aspect (indigo dyeing, making moisturizers with lecithin), and this project involved dental alginate, one of the coolest substances available to the civilian with a few pounds and an internet connection. Dental alginate, the goo dentists use to take impressions of your teeth, comes as a powder you mix with cold water to form a viscous liquid the color and consistency of blueberry yogurt. I put my hand into a mold the Bloke had made from a shoebox, and he poured over the alginate.
Alginate sets quickly, changing color as it does. Within 3 minutes it had gone from magenta to pale pink to white, and had hardened to something resembling tofu, only firmer. I wriggled my hand free while the Bloke whipped up the plaster.
It’s good to read the instructions!
He poured the plaster into the space my hand had left in the alginate and we waited about a half-hour while it set. Then the Bloke peeled away the cardboard and set to work unmolding the cast bit by bit from the alginate.
This looked like so much fun I wrested it away from him and did it myself, while the Bloke hopped around behind me saying, “Okay, it’s blatantly my turn now,” and “Careful! Why don’t you let me use the knife?” But watching the incredibly familiar contours of my own hand emerge as I tore away chunk after chunk of alginate was just too cool.
I should have listened to the Bloke. I managed to break the cast in not one but four places. It’s pretty weird holding your own severed fingers.
Let alone sticking them back on with super glue.
I love super glue. It’s one of those rare technologies you can put your whole faith in. I managed to reattach all my fingers. Here’s the finished cast.
It’s pretty strange to feel and handle a part of your own body as a pure object. It gives you a sense, finally, of how other people experience it. Wow, all those people who said my hands were tiny weren’t kidding!
I was unprepared for the fineness of the detail captured by the alginate. It really does preserve every line, wrinkle and pore. This can be a little off-putting, especially in white plaster, which I associate with the smooth, flawless human forms of classical sculpture. I think I had expected to come up with the fair hand of a madonna. Looking at my seamed, imperfect skin mercilessly depicted in plaster made me feel a little bit old and used. The “warts” created by air bubbles in the alginate didn’t help either.
Here’s a more graceful shot of the finished cast.
Chris shows it off to my bemused housemate.
I don’t know how much more successful a Crafty Caturday you could ask for. Let’s hope my luck holds: my next project, a rather trickier one, is a torso cast. And no, I will not show you it. Unless you ask really nicely. Or your last name is Felice.
