A is for alginate, B is for bazoomas: plaster and alginate torso cast

Having a face is weird. So extremely weird that I’m still not used to it. I feel myself to be one thing, but other people are constantly reacting to this other thing, which I cannot myself behold, and their reactions are so disorientingly disparate I have terminal problems piecing together what I look like. You know that party game where you go around with a cigarette paper stuck to your forehead with some famous name written on it, interrogating people in the attempt to find out who you are? I feel like I’ve spent 29 years playing it, unsuccessfully. Maybe it would be easier if God had used more math and less art putting me together.

By contrast, I’m fairly certain my boobs are quite nice. This is as great a comfort to me in my maelstrom of subjective doubt as the cogito was to Descartes. They are small enough not to be cumbersome or distracting, shapely enough to boost morale and cooperative enough to be strategically deployed when occasion demands. They are The Team, and I have a great affection for them.

Apart from the fact that alginate and plaster are just plain fun, I had several reasons for attempting a torso cast. Since I resolved to accept no compromises in the man department, I’ve had to come to terms with the possibility that my breasts might not find another audience before succumbing to the ravages of time. More seriously, breast cancer runs in my family, and there’s a significant chance that someday I might have to take the cast in to a doctor and say, “Make them look like that again.” And finally, if I must age, I intend to become the kind of old lady who horrifies her children by showing their children what a rack Grandma had back in the day.

My poppets, your parents are the most frightful squares.

The Bloke volunteered with remarkable alacrity to help with this project. The plan was to cover me in a layer of alginate for a detailed impression, reinforce the alginate with plaster strips to give the mold rigidity and then cast a positive in liquid plaster. The Bloke mixed up a test batch of alginate to get the consistency right — not too thick to spread, but not so runny it would all slide off.

Of course, once he’d mixed it, he couldn’t resist taking an impromptu dental impression.

Because alginate sets within a couple of minutes and plaster strips won’t adhere to dry alginate, everything had to happen really fast. I got into position, baring my bosom artistically from an unbuttoned shirt, while the Bloke pre-dipped the plaster strips in water, set them aside and whipped up the alginate. Then he slathered handfuls of cold, slimy, mint-scented alginate all over my front, a mildly horrible but thankfully brief process. Then he covered that with crisscrossing layers of wet plaster strips. Within 5 minutes I was encased in a heavy alginate-plaster breastplate. When the Bloke works under pressure, stuff tends to fly around, in this case turning the dining room floor into a Jackson Pollock executed in alginate, plaster and gin. It made a god-awful mess. Of course, my housemate, who is also technically my landlord, chose this moment to come home.

I wore Chanel lipstick so you’d know it’s Art.

After about 10 minutes or so, the plaster was set enough for us to attempt to pry me loose from it. This was not an unmixed success. Alginate unpeels relatively easily from clothing, but we’d forgotten about buttons.

We tore the alginate in several places getting me loose, and didn’t capture a complete impression of the hands, so the finished mold was problematic. But it was still of sufficient quality, especially around what might be termed the key points of interest, to make us both go “ooooh!”

This is the closest you will get to seeing my actual boobs. Sorry.

Then the Bloke mixed up the liquid plaster and I went to work laying down the first coat with a paintbrush, to prevent air bubbles.

Then I just globbed the stuff into the mold with a soup ladle and my hands and left it to cure while we watched Superman 2.

The finished cast looks so cool I kind of want to show it to everyone I know, but you’ll have to take my word for it. I’m rather shy.