Baby Casting, What's That?

Baby casting, what's that? You may well ask, it is exactly what it sounds like, taking casts of your baby. Not the whole baby of course! Usually just one hand or foot, though of course you can have any combination of baby castings you want

You could have a hand and a foot or even a full set of all of your baby's hands and feet. So how is it done? It's really just an extension of traditional life casting which has been practised by artists for many years. Essentially we take a mould of the body part and then use that mould to make a casting which is a perfect replica of the foot or hand we used to make the mould.

The traditional material used for life casting was Plaster of Paris, and it was used for both stages of the procedure, that means it was used to make the mould and the final cast. Plaster of Paris does have certain drawbacks; it generates heat when it's setting, not so bad when casting just a hand or foot, but it means it can get quite unpleasant for the model, when doing a full body cast.

The other major disadvantage of Plaster of Paris is that when it sets it is absolutely rigid, this means that moulds have to be done in sections or you would never get the model out without breaking the mould. It can't even be used to do just a hand or foot in a one piece moulding.

Now you must be wondering how we can make a mould of a real delicate little baby's hand or foot. How can we do it with something that gets hot and how can we get a baby to cooperate while we make a two piece mould? Well the answer is simple; we don't use plaster to make the mould.

What we use is relatively new material called alginate, it's made from seaweed and it's perfectly safe. If you've ever had a dental crown your dentist will have made an impression of your teeth using alginate. The obvious advantages over plaster are that it doesn't get hot when it sets and it stays slightly flexible, it's rigid enough to make a mould of a hand or foot in one piece but flexible enough to get your hand out with out breaking the mould. And the other great advantage is that it only takes a few minutes to make a mould of a hand or foot.

Once we've got our mould we take it back to the studio where we use it to make a plaster cast, the tricky part is in making sure we have absolutely no air bubbles in the casting. The only disadvantage to this whole procedure is that we have an alginate mould in one piece which means we have to destroy the mould to remove the casting. Not a big drawback when you weigh it up against the advantages, but if we want a new casting of the same body part then we have to start at the beginning and make a new alginate mould.