The Midwestival

Scott always says “Any day I get to spend outside is a good day.” While I don’t agree with him 100% (if it’s raining, I’m not going outside unless I have to), I will concede that spending most of the day outside on Saturday made for a very good day.

On Saturday morning, grateful for a sunny forecast in Madison, we layered on our warm clothes, coats, and hats and made our way down to the Atwood neighborhood for the 7th Annual Pour Your Heart Out Community Iron Pour. Alisa Toninato of FeLion Studios hosted, bringing in friends and fellow metalworkers from three or four states to help with the event held in the Sector67 parking lot.

Ahead of the event, we purchased two sand molds with heart shapes cut into them. We then carved our designs into the heart-shaped molds to make them our own. We dropped them off first thing when we arrived, and then waited for the event to kick off, which really meant waiting for the large homemade stove to get hot enough to melt some iron.

The crew took turns pouring coal coke and scrap iron into the furnace, which then melted the iron down with the help of a bright orange leaf blower. The metal needed to reach over 2300 degrees in order to be pour-able, so it did take a little while.

And then things got interesting.

The crew collected the spewing metal in a large, two-handed ladle and smaller, one-handed ladles, and then poured it into each individual sand mold on the tables – the ones we had carved and brought to the event.

How cool is that?

After the molds cooled enough – it really only took about five minutes – they were dumped out onto wood laid out on the pavement to cool even more. At this point, they broke them out of their sand molds and toted the metal inside to be wire brushed and cleaned up for us to take home, leaving behind piles and piles of used sand molds.

We took a great and wandered the Atwoood neighborhood for a bit, and then came back a couple hours later to pick up our finished hearts. We had to dig them out of a pile of all the completed molds inside of Sector67.

Scott found his pretty easily, and mine didn’t take too much longer. He carved an anvil into the center of each of his, keeping with the theme of the event and also with his newish obsession with the idea of becoming a blacksmith.

We spent a little more time outside, checking out the event as the sun dipped a little lower in the sky, glad for the warm temperatures and a day spent on a new adventure with friends.

We’ve got an entire year now to dream up ideas for our next sand molds. You can bet we’ll be back again in 2017.

Have you ever been to an iron pour? Or anything similar? What did you think?