Salvation Army find turned into a Period Pounce Pot

I do love thrift store shopping and there is one store that is at the top of my list for finds.  I found this little beauty at that Salvation Army and immediately saw plans for it's future.  This appears to be some sort of salt/spice shaker.  There was a hole at the bottom, but the plug was missing.  That's OK, that's not what I needed it for anyway.

  

For this little gem to become the product I envisioned I would first need to chop off the handle.  Lovely handle.  Don't worry, I kept it.  I will be melting it down later to use again as something else.

Roughed up handle removal.  had some trouble with the remove and accidentally cut into the body of the spice shaker.  Will have a bit of pewter repair to the side.  That's OK.  Another opportunity to practice a new skill.

 Next step was to remove the lovely dome shape from the top.  That was quite a bit easier than I expected.  The pewter was so soft I was able to take my carving knife and pierce a hole in it.  I then used metal sheers to slowly cut around the top.  After the top was removed I used my knife again to clean up the edge and remove any burs.

Here is what used to be the bottom.  I sliced the hole on the bottom much larger.  I plan on using this at the new top.  Need to come up with a way to fabricate a screen to place on the top here.

This is what used to be the top and will eventually be the bottom.  I will either take another piece of pewter- ware I have and cut it to shape or else I will melt the handle down, pour it out and hammer it to shape.  Not sure which option works best yet.  I like the idea of melting the top and the handle.  That way I can say the entire piece was re-purposed without any additional pewter needed to complete it.  We'll see.

I hope to convert this specimen into something like the one shown in the following Holbein portrait.

I am not certain of the approach I will use for the top of the pot, but I decided to make a piece out of brass to see how it looked.  I cut a circle out of some cardboard and kept tweaking it until the fit seemed about right.  Now that I had a template I cut that same shape out of a brass plate I had been using for a coin balance I'm working on.

Happy with the basic fit of the piece I then removed it and dished it slightly with about 6~8 hits from my dishing hammer on a wood stump.

So far so good.  I like the overall look so I moved forward by cleaning up the basic shape with a more refined hammer.  Satisfied with the basic shape of the dished brass I then sketched a star on the top of the piece to use as a guide for my punched holes.  So far this has only been about 20 minutes work or so and I'm still considering it a proof of concept.  If the top turns out nice I may use it, but I also may decide to remake it using copper or pewter.

Following the basic guide of the marker I drew on the piece I used a punch and small hammer to mark the spots where I would drill.  I used a modern drill to make the holes in the piece.

On the flip side you can see the basic look of the star.  Even if I go with the brass on the final piece I'm not sure I like the start.  I want to first clean it up a bit and then try and use it.  I'm concerned with spending too much time before actually using it.  I want to make sure the holes are big enough, but not too big.  I also want to make sure there aren't too many holes.

I've seen some period examples of pots and some later examples as well.  Based on those examples I think I have about the right sized holes and about the right number.  I'm going to tape some cardboard on the bottom and give it a try before going any further with this project though.

Casting project

I have quite a few things on my list which I'd like to make.  Many of the items involve casting and so I started by slicing a chunk of soapstone into pieces.  I hadn't tried using ta miter saw before.  Worked rather nice.  The saw has very small teeth and didn't scar the stone as much as I thought it might.  With very little sanding the surface should smooth out nicely. 





I kept all the dust from the sawing for more future experiments in pounce to be done later…

More experiments with pounce

A friend of ours gave us a dozen organic farm "grown" eggs.  It sparked an idea with me.  I kept the egg shells and decided to continue my experiments with pounce.  Unfortunately I think that it will take a lot of eggs to make any reasonable amount of pounce out of it.

The gound up egg shells

The organic eggs before grinding

First attempt at pounce

"Pounce is a fine powder that was sprinkled over wet ink to hasten drying prior to the invention of blotting paper. The powder was prepared from substances such as finely ground salt, sand, or powdered soft minerals such as talc or soapstone. A mixture of sandarac gum, and pumice or cuttlebone serves as pounce and can also be used for sizing paper and vellum."

Pounce was made from ground cuttlefish bone, sandarac and other items. Note sandarac currently sells for $55 a pound on eBay and is therefore out of my price range for this project. The pounce I made can be used for both paper sizing and as a blotter. For use with sizing I mixed with ground rosin instead of sandarac. Both are varieties of tree sap. One of my kids dropped their cake of rosin while moving their violins around. It cracked and was therefore replaced by the violin store. As the rosin had no more use to my kids it became available for my SCA use.

Here is a picture of the cracked up rosin cake.

I used the rosin as a cheap and available substitute for sandarac. The rest of the materials used were ground up cuttlefish bone, ground pumice and ground salt. I mixed 5 parts cuttlefish bone, 4 parts pumice 2 parts rosin and one part salt. I ground up each material individually and them combined them all and reground them mixture. I then sifted the final mixture to extract any large portions of pumice or bone flakes which were not fully ground up.

Here are some pictures of the cuttlefish bone before and after It was ground up.

Here are some pics of the pumice stone I used before and after it was ground up.

I didn't take any photos of the finished product, but it doesn't look much different than the ground up ingredients.  I have a project on my list to someday make a period looking pounce pot, but for now I keep the pounce in a glass jar.  I plan on putting it into a small salt shaker for use, until I finish the pounce pot.