Recreating Lost & Forgotten Plaster in a New York Mansion - From the Mind of Christine McConnell

[Music] is [Music] oh [Music] [Music] welcome to from the mind of Christine McConnell today's episode is really exciting because I have been upstairs renovating one of the rooms when I noticed something seems to be missing on the ceiling in several of the other rooms there are these beautiful kind of cornis medallions that encircle the light fixture and there's nothing in here so I'm not sure if there ever was one but regardless of that I decided to see if I could go about making one myself to give a little history this was the childhood bedroom of Carrie Lavinia Richardson who was the oldest of the original family's four children she was a teacher and artist who raised funds to create the first public library in this town she even hand painted the freeze in the room at some point and it was likely In This Very Room where she passed away at the age of 88 surrounded by the birds that she had created in her youth my goal with the renovation of this room is to enhance the ceiling and walls while also being mindful not to do anything that distracts or takes away from her art around the border and so my very first step is going to be to go into the guest room that I renovated last year and I'm going to get some measurements of The Medallion that's in this room so I have something to kind of use as a guide [Music] so essentially the very first thing I'm doing here is I'm creating a mold first and then I'll be creating a track to slide this mold [Music] on now that I have my mold and my tracks ready it's time to see if this is actually going to work I'm mixing just a simple plaster of parse that I picked up at Lowe's with some water until I get a consistency that's kind of like a pudding and then I'm going to just start slathering it down on the [Music] track this needs to be done in multiple layers and so far it's working because this design has kind of a lock and key method it was a little bit of a struggle to get the mold all the way around over and over again but ultimately the finished result looked exactly how I wanted it to and so from there I just needed to let it dry out for about 10 hours at which point I could remove it and build another [Music] one as these pieces all came together I just couldn't believe that this was something that I could do myself at my own house and it is unbelievably messy but at the end of the day who cares because the end result is so pretty all right well that made an ungodly mess out of the attic I'm sure there's going to be a little flexive blaster in there for years so now I need to let these dry out completely and while that's happening I'm going to GD out some paper so I can design a silhouette [Music] it turns out Professor poof makes an amazing organic paper [Music] weight once I had my grid it was just as simple as laying my plaster pieces down measuring everything out and creating the design that I wanted [Music] a laser turned out to be an amazing tool to find the places I needed to cut in addition to that my project manager Professor poof really approves of this [Music] technique next I taped my template up onto the ceiling and from here I am going to be opening up the ceiling to see what exactly is going on in here okay so I've opened up the ceiling and sure enough there was a medallion in here I'm guessing the reason it's not anymore is I'm assuming maybe there was a leak at some point that might have destabilized the plaster and once they had lost several pieces they just decided to call it a loss and lower the ceiling a little bit but I'm going to try to make this work to my advantage by only hollowing out the center and hopefully what this will do is give my plaster pieces just a little bit more depth I also spent a little bit of time examining everything and I was able to figure out essentially what that original shape was and it's not terribly far off from what I'm creating the way I have fixed these was by mixing a little bit of a very liquidy plaster using that as kind of a glue and then pre-drilling several holes and then using very long screws to really just kind of lock it into [Music] place once all of my pieces were installed I mixed some plaster and put it in a cake piping bag like for icing and then I just filled in those spaces and then I just used a tool to create a coing effect on the inside and on the outside I just filled in any gaps with that plaster [Music] all right this is looking so beautiful and honestly I really could just leave it at this stage and it would be great but I have a little bit of an idea that might bump it up a notch and I'm going to see if I can't give that a try there are some really beautiful decorative elements on the exterior of the house and so I'm going to be using those as an inspiration for what I want to [Music] create there were also some really amazing looking cross like Flur Le on the outside and I'm going to recreate these as [Music] well okay I am super jazzed with how these drawings came out and now I'm going to use some polymer clay to turn them into threedimensional [Music] pieces the way that I'm doing this is I'm just putting the polymer clay directly onto my Trace getting that shape pretty defined and then just building a three-dimensional shape from that [Music] silhouette sculpting this larger piece took some doing but I was really happy with the finished result once that was done I had just a few more pieces to sculpt out and then from there I'm going to actually be able to start making molds for all of these shapes I'm using a two-part silicone mix to create these molds and something I loved so much about this entire project is every single one of the supplies I used can just be picked up from either like a Lowe's or a Michaels any kind of Hardware or craft store is going to have everything you need to do everything I'm showing [Music] once the molds were ready I just began mixing plaster of Paris in a really kind of liquidy consistency and filling the molds [Music] up all of the key pieces are now made and to figure out exactly where they're going to go I'm going to map that out on paper [Music] first I originally brought home Arthur buttons as a gift to the captive and somebody to keep Gertie company but he had other plans and he has just decided that he loves me so much and now I constantly have this adorable furry Barnacle that just kind of just goes with me everywhere I go [Music] once I had created a template for all of my little accents I cut them out taped this to the ceiling and marked around so now I know where all of my little pieces are ultimately going to go [Music] if you've enjoyed this episode so far and would like to see a whole bunch more follow the link below to patreon where I do a new episode every single month as well as craft alongs or live streams just this last Valentine's Day I did a chocolate covered strawberry episode that was really fun and just this last weekend I did a painting your pet craft along where I just basically sat down for 2 hours and did my very best to create a fun little portrait of Arthur buttons next month's patreon episode is going to feature how to create a really beautiful creamy ombre on the walls as well as the ceiling and also just how to really highlight a room with paint before I can reveal the finished room I just just had to do a little bit of cleaning and then install this amazing light fixture that I found on Facebook Marketplace and it is from this period just about the 1870s I believe [Music] [Music] m [Music] [Music] and it is all finished and I am so happy with how this looks honestly before I started I wasn't even sure that this was possible for me to do and now I just know that one day when I'm in my grave I'm going to be so happy knowing that this is going to be here long after I'm gone I mentioned earlier that there are three fulllength episodes of this project on patreon that really delve into all of the important details as well as the numerous fails that happened along the way while there were plenty of disasters with this project there were also a bunch of successes and so if you are in the second tier and up on patreon I'm also going to be uploading the patterns to everything that I created that you've seen thank you so much for tuning in I hope you've enjoyed this and until next time take care of yourselves and I'll see you again very soon

Channel: Christine McConnell

Views: 152,356

Keywords:

Id: lTG0jqGfA3Q

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Mon May 27 2024