| OCR Text |
Show 250 Even worse was a later entry: "The separate figures were at last ready to cast, the shims in place for back and front separations, so we cleared the supper away and began. I had never done this before, cast in the round alone. I knew the plaster had to be thrown on in paste form, flicked in such a way as to get into all the undercuts, but I didn't know the technique. I tried to do it like Mr. Malin had done it, but it missed the clay model, great blobs of it went on the floor, the furniture. I got so nervous I was freezing, and it was contagious to him. He thinks it will take us weeks to clear up the mess, but at last the models are covered with about three inches of it (four dishpans of mixture). We swept up what we could, knowing that in the morning there would be more when we took off the mold, and went to bed at three A. M. I was terrified, not knowing what would happen, and dreamed all night about broken casts, etc. " It took eight hours, according to the diary, to remove the cast, take out the clay model, which came out in lumps and wires, leaving the hollow mold. My helper came home just as I was finishing it. There was more plaster on the floor and it had tracked everywhere, to the bedrooms and across the dining room and the porches. There was mud and plaster everywhere, a fine dust of it on all the furniture. My hands were sore from working with it, my fingers almost worn through, but: "We soaked the mold in the bath tub, mended it, lubricated it and he put the reinforcements in, lengths of pipe from the head to the feet, turned out into the feet of the male. The pipes for the female figure were |
