New Molds Can Be Hard to Get Used To!

I've been taking LOTS of custom orders lately, hence my lack of blog post updates! I had quite a large order for 12 of my dress form necklaces, then another 12 after that. Normally that would have been no problem except BOTH of my lovely, high quality dental grade silicone dress form molds (made by my dad; thanks dad!) decided to basically crumble as I was pulling the pieces out of the molds. Any mold will break down after a certain amount of uses and unfortunately, these molds chose the middle of my large order to break.

Now as I mentioned, the dental-grade silicone my dad had made my molds with is VERY expensive and he ran out of it, so I decided to try out Castin Craft's Silicone Mold Putty. The directions seem simple but the working time is VERY short, about 5 minutes, if that, so if you don't get the putty mixed quickly and press your item in it, you end up with a dried up, rubbery ball. I managed to mess up the first two so again, my dad helped me with making the molds and I used up all the material but I got four molds out of it.

I have to say, I'm not TOO happy with this material, it may be okay for clay pieces but with my Castin Craft epoxy resin, it creates bubbles all over the piece even if you let the resin sit and de-gas itself for a few minutes before pouring it.

It looks like this, you mix the purple and white until the color is uniform.


I Googled for a good hour and didn't find a thing about how to get rid of the bubbles other than not using a wooden stir stick as it introduces moisture (didn't help) or to pop the bubbles with a pin (only helpful for a few bubbles, not hundreds as I had in every piece).
I finally found something somewhere that suggested using baby powder or talc and powder the mold to get rid of some of the moisture in the material. It helped to an extent but not a whole lot. I did have some bubbles but at least the pieces no longer looked like a freshly poured glass of Sprite.




Final piece:



If you have any ideas or know of anything that works for sure for keeping bubbles out of pieces made in the Castin Craft Silicone Putty molds, please feel free to comment!