This week I decided we should start on the some of the accessories I have planned for the fireplace we made. This week we are making a grate to set the logs in the firebox onto.
I decided that clay would be the best medium for making our fireplace grate look the way I wanted it to look. But before we can get out the clay we need to create the mold or jig that we are going to use to form our clay to bake it.
I am making this grate to fit into the fireplace we made on the channel and for that I made the firebox very shallow to it would not take up too much room in the dollhouse. So I am making what is basically ½ a fireplace grate. In the real world the depth of the grate would be about twice what we are making and the bars that form the basket would curve up on both the front and the back. Ours today only curves up in the front and sits right against the back of the firebox.
For this mold I am using some craft sticks. For the leg part of our piece I used cut 4 pieces of one of the really big craft sticks from Walmart. The length isn’t really that important around an inch is what I did. Then glue the 4 pieces of the large craft stick together and clamp until the glue dries completely.
To form the mold for the top pieces I cut one of the regular size craft sticks from the dollar store in half and glued and clamped it until dry.
If you are going to make larger fire grate that has the full basket use a wider craft stick (like the tongue depressor size) and form those pieces just like the legs.
The glue on these pieces needs to be completely dry because they are going to go into the oven when we bake the clay on them and if they aren’t completely dry the glue could soften enough to make the mold come apart and distort the shape of our clay pieces.
Once the glue is dry sand the edges of the pieces. Don’t worry about the cut ends just the part that were the edges of the craft sticks. Smooth them out a bit. Then wrap with at least 2 layers of aluminum foil. The foil has two jobs. First it is going help smooth the edges so your clay hangs nicely. But more importantly if the clay tries to stick to the foil it is really easy to peel it off. If you skip the foil and the clay sticks to the wood it will be really hard if not impossible to remove it without breaking it.
We only need one color of polymer clay, black. For mine I used some Fimo soft. You can use whatever brand you prefer for this just keep in mind that the softer the clay when you work with it the more brittle the finished piece could be. That has been my experience anyway.
So condition your black clay to make it workable. Then roll out a sheet of clay using some craft sticks as a depth guide. Once rolled cut strips of clay about the same width as the thickness of a craft stick. This will create what looks like square metal bars to make the grate out of.
Now lay some of the clay strips over the bigger mold cutting the ends even with the bottom of the sides of the mold. You will need 2 for the grate but I highly recommend making at least 4 if not more. All the pieces we are working with are very fragile and I broke a couple of each size.
For the smaller pieces lay strips over the narrower mold and cut them even with the bottom of one side of the mold and then even with the top edge on the other end. They should form something that looks kind of like a capital letter L. Again make at least a few extra.
Leave the pieces on the molds and bake at the temperature recommended for your clay for 10 minutes. Allow to cool to room temperature.
Now time for assembly of our fireplace grate. Before we get to the how to do this step I am going to admit that the entire project almost went into the trash at this point. I had planned to use liquid clay but that was such a total fail that I knew I had to come up with a different plan. So I spent some time thinking and doing some research on what glues I could use.
To begin I wrapped some masking tape sticky side out around the mold I had used to form the legs for the grate. This is going to be a really important thing for a couple of reasons. First being it makes lining everything up so much easier. The other reason I’ll talk about in a bit.
On the surface of the tape I made some pencil lines. Front to back drew a line a ¼” from each end. Then I added 2 more lines that were ¼” apart. These 4 lines are where we will be lining up the small pieces that form the basket of the grate.
Then I drew a straight line lengthwise on the tape and a second on 3/8” away from it. These are the lines I am going to line the legs up with.
Because the sticky side of the tape will hold the legs in place so I can work with them this step will be so much easier that I first thought it would be.
Since I am using glue I had decided that super glue (CA glue) would be the best choice for the project. I have used super glue many times with polymer clay I know I have a tube of it somewhere. Somewhere being the operative word, I searched everywhere I could think of to find the tube I put away a couple of weeks ago when I cleaned off my work table and did some tidying up. I have no idea where the “easy to find again” place I put it is so I had to come up with another option. I am also out of my other two favorite glues to use oath cure polymer clay, at least one of which I don’t think is even made any more. So I did some research online and according to a couple of jewelry making sites e6000 is polymer clay safe. So that was what I ended up using. The sites I looked at did say the bond can be brittle but this won’t be handled very much and the spots can easily be re-glued if needed in the future.
Let the glue cure then we can move onto the next step.
Once the glue holding the grate together has cured enough that it will hold together. It will be time to remove it from the mold. This is a step that can be very frustrating. I actually broke the one grate I made on camera and had to make a second one. So learn from my mistake.
To remove the grate first slit the masking tape on the bottom side and slide it carefully off the mold. Do not lift the ends of the tape at all. Just slide it sideways to remove it. Then carefully peel the tape off the bottom of the fireplace grate. This is the other reason for the tape, if we had glued this on top of just the foil and it stuck we would have a lot more trouble removing it.
Once the grate is off the mold glue in some firewood into the grate so it looks like the doll family can light the fire on a cold night.
For my firewood I picked up a small branch on my walk last week. As soon as I got it home I placed it on a baking sheet on top of a sheet of aluminum foil and baked it at 250°F for about an hour. This should kill any bugs that might try to come into your home with the stick. It will also dry out any dampness remaining in the wood. I like to put it on foil just in case it leaks anything out, that protects my baking sheet.
I cut a couple of pieces of the stick about 1” and used the sane glue (e6000) to glue the wood to the grate and to each other.
Keep any remaining stick pieces because we use more of it in a future project.
As always I do want to sincerely thank all of you for watching my videos and reading my blog posts. It means so much to me that you are supporting me in this way. If I could ask you all to do just a bit more by subscribing to the channel and liking the videos and leaving comments. Those help more than you can imagine. Also if you could pass the links on to your friends I would appreciate it so much.
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