Getting All Steamed Up

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Teapots have always been a favorite thing of mine to make. These teapots and burners are brass. They were gold plated when all the work was finished. I made the stands out of sterling silver and oxidized them black to appear to be wrought iron. The pots were fabricated from sheet and the burners were made from telescoping brass tubes and sheet stock. The knobs and handles are ebony.

One of the things that really bothered me about most miniature metal teapots was that the spouts didn't have a hole through them. That is understandable because most spouts are tapered and would be nearly impossible to bend into the right shape or cast with a hole through them. To solve that problem I decided to electroform the spouts over a tapered core of casting wax.

Electroforming is another process you probably don't want to hear about. It will suffice to say, that once I had built up enough metal on the wax, I was able to burn out the wax core and solder the spouts on the pots.