Cleaning greenware

Although I do not recommend completely cleaning your doll parts in the greenware stage, there is a lot that can be done before that first firing that will make things so much easier. Some of these steps can be done while the pieces are still resting in the opened mold.

But let’s back up for a minute. There seem to be two schools of thought about how to open a head mold. Some people insist that the only way to do it is to lift the piece covering the face off first. I assume this is so the initial opening of the eyes can be done while the porcelain is still soft. I don’t seem to be able to lift off the top piece off without bumping it against the face somewhere, so prefer to have my mold face down and take the back of the head off first.

Once the mold is open, let the head rest in it until the porcelain is firm enough to lift out without distortion or finger dents. It should be pulling away from the mold by then, so it’s easy to tell when it’s ready.

The face-up-people make the initial eye opening by lightly twisting a drinking straw through the pupil area in still soft porcelain. The drinking straw takes the piece out easily and leaves nice, clean edges, where the feather knife can bunch up the clay and leave rough edges if the porcelain is too soft, and it can chip off later. Any chipping around the eyes is to be avoided at all costs! It’s easy to have chips extend into the eye lids and completely ruin the head.

The face-down-people won’t have access to the eyes right away, so forget about them for now and move on to bigger things – like the crown of the head. I like to mark a slight groove around the area to be removed with a small stylus or a pencil. This groove acts as a guide for your feather knife and helps prevent it slipping and making those sudden random cuts into the head where you don’t want them. Once the groove is done, you can go ahead and gently score through it with your feather knife until the crown can be removed. If you get too eager and try to cut through the porcelain the first time around, your feather knife can put enough pressure on the soft porcelain to cause warping or cracking during the bisque firing, so use a light hand.

If the shoulder plate is the two-piece type where the top of the mold lifts off exposing a lip of porcelain all the way around that needs trimmed off, score it next to the shoulder plate base and remove the excess, again remembering not to use pressure that will result in tearing instead of cutting. Repeated soft strokes are better then trying to sever the piece the first time around.

Once the excess lip is off, let the shoulder plate rest in the mold until it is fairly firm to help prevent distortion from its own weight when you set it down. If the ends need to be cut out of the shoulder plate, you may prefer to wait until the leather hard stage when the porcelain will retain its shape better. It seems to be in the nature of a shoulder plate to warp if it can, so the less handling until its firm, the better. The ends can be scored and removed either in the leather hard stage, or after soft firing.

Although the plug was trimmed out of the pour hole before the mold was ever opened, there will be excess porcelain over the ends of the arms and legs. This can also be scored and removed when the pieces are taken out of the mold. Just remember to let the pieces lay in your hand and don’t grip them, or you may leave finger dents.

Now that the pieces are out of the mold, and the bigger pieces have been trimmed off, set them aside to dry to the leather hard stage. We’ll continue our cleaning process when the porcelain is ready.