Great job!!! Are there flecks of blue in the tufa, or is that my imagination?

Ladylong,

Congrats on your first tufa project. It looks great. I love the texture! Isn't a great feeling to have completed your first project.

SereneSeen

I really like how it looks. What ingredients did you use as a mix? Nice texture.

Summer

Rustinj - no blue flecks, it must be the shadows playing tricks with the perlite. :) Is your name really Rustin? Just curious, because I have a son with that name!

Sereneseen - yes, definitely a great feeling!

Summerday - I used 1 part each of Portland cement, vermiculite, perlite, and peat, and squirted in a little bit of Elmer's furniture glue along with the water.

This is a beautiful piece. What are you doing next??
Laura

Another one! :) Actually I want to make a couple of troughs and pots to replace some icky plastic ones. And I've been dabbling around with leaf casting, too. Summer is my "craft time" - I'm in nursing school, so the rest of the year there's only time for studying and working (and a little bit of sleeping, if I'm lucky)!

Ladylong,

Well, mind ticks or not, it looks great!

No, Rustinj is usually available for new accounts more often than Justin, or JustinR.

-Justin

What did you use for a mold? Love this form!

Claysoil, I built it around a cheap toy ball from Wal-Mart. I started with a layer of bias-cut cotton fabric dipped in concrete slurry, and then applied the hypertufa to that. After it had hardened for a few days I popped the ball and pulled it out, and brushed the whole thing good with a wire brush.

Thanks for the reminder about cutting fabric on the bias so that it can bend more readily. That's important, folks, if you don't already know that. (FYI the bias means having the "grain" of the fabric run on the diagonal of your cut line.)

Forgive me if this is too elementary, but I hadn't given a thought to either using a slurry-filled piece of fabric around something like that ball, much less cutting the fabric correctly. So maybe there are others like me.