For the worthless object task, I was given the buckles from a pair of overalls. I didn’t want to make a sewing project with it because I didn’t want to introduce any new materials. So I wanted to transform the metal somehow. Either by bending it or by smelting it in some way. metal crafts are a new hobby for me and something I am still learning.
I thought about things that were worthless, and I thought about things that had a lot of worth. or even what is a measure of worth. So I started thinking about money and different types of money, like all the 1 cent coins my grandma gave me as a kid to use as play money. or bitcoin or other shitcoins that are only made to fool the first couple hundred people who buy them and then the value drops and they are worth nothing. So I wanted to make my own coin as a nod to that, but a physical one, because I haven’t used a physical coin in months. plus I was inspired by this work by. because of how beautiful the mass of them looked together. They looked so tactile and I just wanted to pick them up and drop them to hear the sound.
So i started with a coin made of polymer clay, with the words ‘WORTH ? VALUE’ and ‘WORTH $ VALUE’ .
I then pressed them into some damp sand to get an imprint. which is the traditional method when casting metal.
but the features of the letters got lost in the grains, so i tried again with some clay i harvested from my property.
which came out a lot better, i then used a toothpick to clean up some of the edges (we will see that this was completely unnecessary)
I knew i couldn’t turn the buckles from the overalls into molten metal as the melting point was too high. aluminium melts at 660.3 °C, which i thought was achievable in my forge as i have been able to bend steal with it. so i tried to melt some aluminium from a can.
I made a little wire contraption to hold it up.
This is what the aluminium can ended up looking like. funnily enough, it is still worthless, but not the kind of worthless I was going for.
So I went back to the chopping block because I had a group tutorial and couldn’t show some metal scraps.
I cut it up to have a better chance of melting.
I didn’t have a crucible so I used an unglazed ceramic.
except this didn’t fit in my forge, as I had made it only to fit knives.
so I swapped it to a steel lid of a steel bottle.
It did not work, I could get the metal hot enough to go yellow but not hot enough to melt and drop. also every time I pulled the little crucible out it would cool almost instantly. so I guess that’s why they use ceramic ones.
These plagues my social media and I would say most of these are terrible and a waste of plastic to create. So I wanted to create some fake ones.
so I went to my favourite AI image generator, MidJourney.
this was my prompt ‘pen attachment to hold lid, plastic, advertisement‘ and the result
pen attachment to hold lid, plastic, advertisement, useless
The goal was to make something useless with the most plastic.
these are two standouts.
I feel these encapsulate what i was going for. so much plastic, completely useless. but aesthetically appealing enough that you are almost tempted.
I tried a few more prompts
‘remote control plastic dust cover‘
Loved these, the prompt for the first one in no way did I mention wanting religious imagery. But somehow here it is. Ai is weird like that, it has a preference for certain artistic aesthetics.