Green wax is made from the drippings of all the other tints, and from the yellow unbleached wax, with green tube paint added.
After preparing your cup of melted wax, have ready a plaster mold made on a tea saucer or tea plate. Dip your mold in hot soap suds, for flower molding, and with a small ladle pour over its wet surface the melted wax, trimming off the sides and making even sheets, remelting the clippings and resheeting it.
A wooden spaddle size of ordinary sheet wax is sometimes made, and used instead of the plaster mold, called paddle wax, and a great many teachers use a bottle, dipping the bottle, and forming wax thin at one end, thicker at the other. Either plaster, wood or glass must be dipped in the hot suds between every dipping in hot melted wax.
Wax Fruit is made in molds, and is always used with the paints in preparing the crude wax, and painted afterwards with dry powder paint.
Almost all molds for Wax Fruit should be made in halves—pears in three pieces—and some fruits require the mold in several pieces. Unless the molds are perfect the fruit will be defective, and nothing can make it beautiful when it is once molded wrong.
Your fruit should be perfect, and in making your molds care should be taken that there are no open places or leaks in the molds. Grease your lemon, apple, orange, or whatever is to be molded, well first in every part. Have ready your pasteboard cup, made a trifle larger than your fruit, nearly filling your cup with the plaster, mixed with cold water to the consistency of pound cake unbaked. Your fruit being oiled, be very careful to sink it down just half in the dissolved plaster. If you do not get in half, or if you sink it in more than half, you will have an imperfect mold, and your fruit will be defective. A little care makes it perfect.
As soon as the plaster is a little hardened, with a pen knife make four holes in the outer plaster rim, not touching the fruit. These holes, half an inch deep, are to hold the top of your mold; lock it into the lower half, blow off all loose pieces of plaster, and when completely hardened, oil the top of the fruit and the new half plaster mold, and the holes for the locks; then prepare the second half. Be sure and have your plaster fresh and strong, when thoroughly mixed to the same consistency as the first, pour over the fruit into the pasteboard cup, and even it all over. Leave it standing a good half hour, then remove the pasteboard cup, and if the mold seems hardened, carefully open it, being careful not to break off the locks, for upon the perfection of these consists the perfection of the fruit.
In a basket of fruit, lady apples are beautiful, crab apples, Seckle pears, Bartlett pears, a lemon, an orange or two, California plums, two peaches, and grapes are desirable. Two pounds of wax will make this elegant variety. None of the fruit should be large—all small, high colors, and perfect in painting.
After preparing your set of molds, prepare your wax, as before directed, and there should be twelve gill, or half-pint cups kept ready for this work, with the different tints. A small sharp pouring spout on each cup is a great help. The half-pint cups being generally used for apples, peaches, pears, oranges and lemons; the plums, cherries, and little fruits are made with the gill cups.
All fruit makers, masters, will tell you to be very careful and not get too deep tints; for a lemon use common lemon chrome paint, dry; orange, orange chrome, dry, and after making those two fruits, you make from the same cups your apples, peaches and pears, because the solid, clear color is needed first, and after, you can paint them to their natural tint. 1st, Lemon. Match the color of the wax to the lemon you imitate. Dry patent powdered yellow, gives a splendid lemon tint.