My moulds are now good.

So after the fiasco that was my first set of moulds I made a new set and then also modified my first set so that they would not be terrible. Below you can see all the moulds laid out like a happy family. you can also see that one of my casts worked perfectly around where i poured the plaster plug in to fill my old pour hole, but then ripped right next to that. This was caused by a few factors, namely that the moulds weren't really dry enough yet and the cast wasn't dry enough to take out the moulds. when i did casts later in the process when the moulds were bone dry they were so much nicer and easier to take out. I really was blessed by the weather we've been having recently as its allowed me to pour and dry my casts out in the garden in direct sunlight and i can then leave them there all day to dry out, which means they obviously dry very quickly. When I've done castings indoors (in the garage which gets no sunlight on any of it so it perpetually cold and damp) things have taken days and days to dry which is something i really had time to wait for so the fact i could pour and then remove casts on the same day or at the very least in 24hours was a massive help to getting lots of casts done.

In this last photo you can see a pile of boats at the back of the kiln ready for biscuit firing. the dark streets on the surface of them are where I've smoothed them with a steel spoon and the oxidised surface of the spoon has rubbed into the clay. hopefully that will just burn off but if it leaves a mark ill have to sand them down and start using something else to burnish my remaining casts.

One slight failure however was my attempt at making the clay decks separate and then joining them on. I had planned on simply casting the hull and deck as separate entities but then my moulds were bad and I wasted ages making them. Then I tried to make the desks from just a sheet of rolled out clay and they looked a bit shoddy but seemed to work, and then when the clay dried it all went very wrong: