Molding Pewter, Molding Lives

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At the Centre for French Colonial Life in Sainte Genevieve, Missouri, we saw displays about pewterware used there in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

We usually associate pewter with the English colonies on the east coast of North America, but we learned that French colonists used it along the Mississippi River. It’s hard to take a good photograph of an object inside a glass display case, but I found this mold for making pewter buttons particularly interesting.

This picture of a pewter teapot spout shows what a spout looks like after it comes out of the mold but before the pewtersmith removes the extra pewter that oozes out between the two parts of the mold.

Ray and I enjoyed watching a pewtersmith at work at ALS Pewter in Sainte Genevieve.

Tom and Pat Hooper have been creating art together for 30 years. Today they make beautiful pewterware in Sainte Genevieve. Colonial Williamsburg is one of their customers!

Tom and Pat use both molds and a lathe to make pewter objects. The shop was empty when Ray and I arrived last week. Tom invited us to watch as he made a small cup before our eyes. On a lathe, he placed a small flat pewter disc about the size and thickness of a CD. In this series of pictures, you can watch the process as he turns that flat disc into a cup.

Here you see a finished cup (on the right) with its attached handle beside the cup we watched Tom shape.

God is patiently molding each of His children day after day.

. . . it is God who is at work in you,
both to will and to work
for His good pleasure.
Philippians 2:13

Thank you for the hard work you do each day to help Him mold your children. As Paul wrote to the church in Corinth:

I planted, Apollos watered,
but God was causing the growth. 
So then neither the one who plants
nor the one who waters is anything,
but God who causes the growth. 
Now he who plants and he who waters are one;
but each will receive his own reward
according to his own labor. 
For we are God’s fellow workers;
you are God’s field, God’s building.
1 Corinthians 3:6-9

 

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