Have you heard of Thermomorph? Neither had I........

Good morning friends

A long post from me today and right at the start I will say that this is a solicited (and honest!)  review of the product. I was contacted a while ago by David of Thermomorph asking me if I would be interested in testing and reviewing the product. Not having heard of it before I wandered over to the website and have to say I was curious so I said yes......
So, what is Thermomorph ? Well, they are Polymorph granules. They cost £19.95 for a 500g pot and are available from Amazon . Ok, I bet you are still wondering what it is; in essence it is a pot of plastic granules that melt when put into boiling water allowing you to mould and shape it. So why don't you join me as I test it out.

 I decided to work in the kitchen to begin with so I was near to the kettle. You can see that the pot is filled with tiny granules. I started by putting a couple of tablespoons of pellets into a bowl of boiling water. Very quickly you see them turn from white to clear.

 Like this! I used a spoon to push them together and lifted them out of the bowl. I was a bit careful when I first took them out but I soon realised that it was fine to handle.

 I rolled it a bit and began to press into the silicone mould.

 As you can see, I managed to fill all but one tiny mould with my 2 teaspoons so a little goes a long way. I left them in to cool (We'll come back to them later)

 Next I was going to try something so I popped a couple more spoons of pellets into the same bowl and realised that they were not  melting quickly because the water was not warm enough (So, each melting needs to use boiling water)

 I took them out and was going to pop them in fresh water but thought, I kind of liked the texture so I pressed and stretched it out and left to cool ....

 So, back to what I was going to do; more fresh boiling water and pellets, scooped out and popped onto a rubber stamp (Must use rubber, not clear!)

 I put an acrylic block into a bag and pressed hard onto the stamp to flatten the Thermomorph.

 It came off easily and I left it on the stamp to cool (It turns white again when cool) before peeling off.

 Then I tried some free hand moulding.  Not the easiest because you don't have that much time to work so I think you need to know what you are doing to do this. So that was my initial play time. So the next step was to add colour...

 I coloured these with Treasure Gold which was fab. I added some washes of paint to age. The starfish was painted with acrylic first

 I began to develop some projects using them

 I used a Crop-o-dile to punch  a hole and attach a chain tassel which was easy to do and just layered up.

I also found that I could use a heat gun to soften everything again allowing you to press and join pieces, like this face to the texture and it does not seem to lose definition. (Still more experiments to do though!)

So, in conclusion; a very interesting product. Overall I was very impressed, it is easy to use, cost effective and I will definitely be using this a lot. Especially for moulding as you would be able to make tonnes of moulded objects but I have more ideas I want to try too. Like die cutting, book covers different moulding....

However, one issue that cropped up was with the starfish, free hand shaping by pressing pieces together as I did for this will not work as it all fell to pieces with a little pressure as the separate elements didn't bond. Not a biggie but at least  I know that now. But by using the heat gun to join the face to the texture piece and pressing it in with some tools seems to bond the pieces together properly.

Here are the links; to the website

http://www.thermomorph.net/

and for the Amazon link

Click here


If you are still with me, thanks for sticking with it and I hope you've enjoyed it. At first glance, though it is not an inexpensive product, a little goes a long way. I've hardly made a dent in my pot and I've made more that what I've shared here and if you don't like what you've done you can always pop it back into boiling water and start again!