Making HP Coins

Playing with toxic stuff is FUN!
On Friday Amy and I got together to make some galleons, sickles, and knuts for our Harry Potter train trip next weekend. We’d originally had plans to do them in Fimo clay, but the guy I spoke to at Barnes Casting Supplies in Newtown thought they might be too brittle. He suggested something a little more fun and a lot more dangerous: resin casting. So armed with a buttload of supplies, we set to work.

Looks fun, doesn’t it? We were like two kids having play-dough craft time! First we made the Fimo coins, which turned out much better than expected. That’s Amy talking to Rob and finishing off a coin in the first picture. We flattened the Fimo with the rolling pin, cut out circles with cookie cutters, and then stamped the coins with letters and shapes. While they were in the oven we got started with the resin. The first step was to make some molds. We were using “dental putty,” which is evidently the stuff they jam in your mouth when you get braces. You knead two different colors of Silly-Putty-like goo together and then you have, like, five minutes before it turns into complete rubber. We attached the charms to the bottom of various sized glasses and then smooshed putty all over them. Picture 2 shows the completed molds. Picture 3 shows the baked Fimo coins. (Amy’s got a great pic of these on her site.) Back to the resin. In Picture 4 Amy is measuring out equal parts of Scary Resin Stuff “A” and Scary Resin Stuff “B”. Note that we’re wearing dust masks and we had the door open with the fan blowing. (It actually didn’t smell bad at all though. I don’t think we had the super toxic version.) Picture 5 shows me and my small hands pouring the combined mixture into the molds. Within a few minutes they were starting to turn from clear into white and give off some serious heat. (That’s Picture 6.) In Picture 7 you see them nearly finished. Then we just popped them out of the molds as seen in Picture 8. The Snook is now going to help me spray paint them and add some further writing and detail.

So to summarize, we just spent $50 and countless hours of time to make fake wizard coins to pay for chocolate frogs on a steam train to a fictional village. Really, we just want to show up the other kids. Hooray for being grown-ups with discretionary income!