With my final project being located on the Tate & Lyle Sugar Refinery in East London, my first thought for a material to model with was sugar!
After watching several videos online and reading the many ways you could make caramel I started to experiment with the sugar I had in my cupboards.
I initially started with caster sugar which did produce these amber and deep red translucent texture which was easy-ish to play around with but once it was left overnight in become incredibly sticky and in areas it started to melt.
I also experimented with different brown sugars such as light brown sugar and muscovado sugar which produced a more chocolate coloured and gritty texture, it did not produce the same translucent material as the caster sugar. However, it did melt when it was left overnight but not in the same way as the caster sugar. The structure was melting but it was uncovering a formation of existing sugar crystals that did not look like it had been broken down during the heating process. This could have been that my culinary skills were not up to the job or that the sugar has a higher melting point that the caster sugar, making it a much more durable sugar to break its chemical bonds.
The forms it produced were not to my liking (probably because of my amateur chef skills!), but the texture and colour was something that I loved! The photographs portray the texture so well and I hope to take this texture into my project.
