Ocarina of Time Coasters: Part Five

Hello!  Hey, listen!  Welcome to the fifth and final part of my Ocarina of Time coaster project!  In this part, I'll finally get around to finishing these things so I can move on with my life.  For the previous post, see Part Four: Casting.

Part Five: Finishing

After giving my coasters a day or so to fully cure, I peeled them out of their molds to see how they turned out.  I'll be honest, they're not great.  There are still some surface bubbles and rough edges in the molds themselves, which transferred directly onto the casts.  I cleaned up what I could with my X-acto knife and sanded down any jagged edges I created in the process.

Since my originals didn't get a super smooth finish, the casts came out a little dull.  I tried to remedy this by giving them a quick spray with some glossy sealant I had on hand.  For whatever reason, this ended up being a terrible idea.  The sealant ended up pooling up on the surface in some spots, causing ugly little bumps I can't even reach with my sandpaper.  It looks like I'll need better molds to get a shiny surface on these coasters!

Despite this setback, I decided it'd be best to just continue on now that I'd gotten so close to being done with this set of coasters.  I bought a roll of adhesive-backed cork-- originally meant to be used as a shelf liner-- to use as a backing for the coasters to prevent them from sliding around and scratching up the tables they'll be used on.  Cutting them with my X-acto knife was a little messy, but it let me hold them down and cut an outline into the backing before I peeled off the paper.

My poor table gets cut a lot...

At long last, I've gathered the six medallions!  This project ended up being a lot more complicated and time-consuming than I expected, and I'm glad to finally call it done.

Woo!

I had originally thought to sell these, but considering how wonky they look and how many man-hours they require, I'm not confident that's a route I want to take right now.  Either way, I've learned a lot from this project, and I hope you have gotten something of value out of reading these posts.  Happy crafting, dear reader!