Transcript
Courtney Gray: Welcome to Creative Side Jewelry Academy of Austin, online at creativeside.org. I’m Courtney Gray. I started my school here, Creative Side Jewelry Academy, four years ago. I’m here in Austin, and I’m going to tell you about jewelry making today.
Today I’m going to talk to you about jewelry casting. This is a really fun technique used in jewelry making to produce beautiful, beautiful pieces. What you do is you carve a piece from carving wax. It comes in purple, it comes in blue, it comes in green, and they’re actually making wax now that’s actually gold-toned or silver-toned so you can show your client exactly what it’s going to look like in the wax. This is how I show my clients my wedding jewelry that I create, so they actually get to see the stones in place, they get to see everything before it’s made.
You’re actually going to take it and put it on a rubber base. Either you do this in your own studio, if you have a casting set-up. If not, you can send it to a casting company and source that work out.
And you’re going to take a flask, it’s basically a metal pipe, and you’re going to place it around that wax. Then you’re going to pour a plaster-type material called “investment.” It’s what’s going to create your mold. So we’ll put that in the kiln, and you’ll have an opening where your wax gets burnt out. And actually, it’s called lost wax because you lose the wax, it burns away, and then you pour molten metal, either by a vacuum or by a centrifugal casting machine. That’s what I teach here at Creative Side Jewelry Academy—how to shoot molten metal into that flask and create your cast piece.
