I snuck into my sister Haley's library to borrow this video. She took this video a long time ago when she was learning how to play with pewter. She calls it "Melting the Queen"

Things like this are why I find my sister Haley a little scary, and so fascinating. When she's bored, she melts little figure, in this video a chess queen. She likes the smell of the metal and the sound of the figure hitting the melting pot. 

There's something fascinating about this video, but I can't put my finger on it. The sounds the queen makes as she moves. The way her solid body melds into the liquid metal. The way her face melts at the last moment before she falls in. How she slides into the silver liquid beneath the black carbon. The regal majesty returning to whence she came. 

I guess sister Haley spends her time exploring physical poetry instead of spoken.

Ooooh! Haley is gonna be pissed! The silver chain for one of the pewter pieces she made is broken.

It's a relatively minor break; the piece itself is still ok, just the chain is broken. The piece almost got lost because of the chain, though, and this is a custom piece. Haley made the prototype by hand, crafted the mold, and poured the metal herself. Both the prototype and the mold have been either lost or damaged since then, so it's impossible to replace. 

Every piece she's done has a special place in Haley's heart, but this piece has a very special significance for her. It's one of her first pieces she made and it's also her first custom order. As for what it is, she'll only tell me it's the name of an angel, but she won't tell me which one. She says I'll find out if I'm supposed to know, but how am I supposed to find out if she won't tell me? Pfeh! Sisters!

I'm going to talk about my sister Haley today. She was named after Haley's comet. Considering what she was named after, it's not surprising what activity she got into. Metal made from fallen stars (meteorites) is supposed to have special properties, and many people think a comet is just a fallen star that hasn't fallen yet

Her passion is pewter and everything related to making stuff from it. She makes the prototype, then the mold, then she pours the molten pewter into the mold. Her preference is for making jewelry out of pewter, but she's happy as long as she's surrounded by the smell of molten metal and can watch it flow and pour. She's made several pieces of jewelry this way, custom one of a kind work.

Haley is really hard to describe. She is very friendly. People just open up and talk to her, telling her all the secrets of their trade and letting her have or borrow things they normally wouldn't let others. She's walked right into a bronze foundry (where they pour bronze into molds to make statues) and spent four hours talking with them about how they make molds and pour metal. 

She also gets exactly what she wants, people just don't say no to her. At the end of her visit to the bronze foundry, she walked out with a stack of irreplaceable books about mold making and design. She's gone into a machine maintenance building and they let her cut off a sheet of stainless steel and walk out with it. She went to a chemical supply company, informed them that they sold the chemicals she needed (they didn't know this), and returned a week later to pick up her order of chemicals.

She is also a little bit scary. I saw her buy a pair of welding gloves just so she could juggle hot metal that's over 400F (over 200C). She's also poured liquid metal while wearing almost nothing, hard metal music blaring on the stereo, the smell of molten metal in the air, and hot metal crackling and popping when it hit the ground. And she was laughing and singing!

She is also incredibly brilliant. She just absorbs any information related to what she wants. Metalworking, vulcanizing rubber, encapsulation, sculpting, soldering, plasticine...she just takes all the information and combines it. She doesn't believe there's anything she can't learn, so there's nothing she can't learn.