====Cooked Materials====
===by Chloé Lequette & Michka Mélo===

This page reports the afternoon of experimentations we had on June 24th with [[http://biomimdesign.wordpress.com/|Chloé Lequette]], a friend, designer & biomimicryist co-founder of [[http://www.enzymeandco.com|Enzmye & Co]]. She taught me how to cook a material based on eggshells and starch-less flour she developed last year for the Designers Days in Paris, and we experimented further with this recipe, adding other ingredients.

====How to produce the material ?====

===Step 1 - Eggshells===

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   * Get some eggshells. 
   * Rince them so that they are clean. 
   * Carefully remove the inner skin/membrane.
   * Crush them in bits as tiny as possible.

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===Step 2 - Flour===

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Mix flour in excess of water and let it sit for a while.

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Once you can see two fractions, a solid one sitting at the bottom of the flask, and some white water on the top, discard the water fraction and keep the solid fraction.

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This step aims at dissolving the starch contained in the flour, and keep only the glutinous fraction of the flour.

===Step 3 - Mixing===

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Mix the glutinous fraction of flour with crushed eggshells. 

The proportion changes the nature of the material. Chloé goes for 2/3 wet flour for 1/3 crushed eggshells, but she says that half-half is also fine.

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===Step 4 - Forming===

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You can either mold it, or use a syringe as an extruder.
   
===Step 5 - Drying===

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Then, just let it dry overnight. You can accelerate drying by using a microwave. One minute at 1000 W is too much, but five minutes on the grill position were fine.

===Final Result===

We ended up with slightly plastic objects of diverse shapes. They do not hold water very well and start to disagregate if they contain/are dipped in a liquid. This material is therefore more for decorative purposes, as a coating on vases, for instance.

====Others experimentations====

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We tried to replace crushed eggshells by some mineral powder with found in a jar here at FoAM. 

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The liquid material looked very nice. However, it did not work out well, as many cracks appeared when drying.