Well, today I finished the first part of the mold for the first part of my ball jointed doll. Mind you, I still need to work on the originals for many of the parts, but since the first part I'm going to be casting is the "blank" chest - that is, the upper torso without any breasts attached to it, I need to get this piece done so I can see how the whole thing will look before casting the final molds.

So, I carefully made a pour box and over the course of several days(it takes 8 hours per pouring to cure the rubber I'm using), I poured several layers of silicone rubber, sprayed on a few layers of demolding compound, poured several MORE layers of silicone rubber and finally demolded the mold. Because of the detail and complicated shapes of the parts I'm casting, I decided to go with clamshell molds. Just to make things MORE complicated, it's all but impossible to pour the pieces I want in a single piece. I'm going to have to cast clamshell pieces, glue them together and sand the seams. That means that every single piece of the doll I cast is going to require four pieces of rubber.

So I finished two pieces of what will eventually become two different clamshell molds for the upper torso blank chest and for the upper torso back. I pulled the rubber out of the casting box and after a bit of searching, found the seam, split it, then very carefully I pulled the two pieces of rubber apart and...the clay original inside crumbled. It fell into pea sized particles from the stress of me pulling the clamshell open.

This is not quite the disaster I thought it was as first. Yeah, I spent weeks on this piece(lots and lots of little modifications over time), but I have a nearly perfect casting of the front and the back of it, and I don't need the original to cast the other halves of the clamshell molds. But if these molds don't work for some reason, I have to rebuild the entire piece and hope for the best.