It's 8:14 PM on a Friday, and my left hand is currently bonded to a Tupperware container of rapidly hardening purple alginate, while Rachel Sennott has a full-blown panic attack on my television screen. My wife is desperately trying to wedge a silicone panda into our daughter's mouth to stop her from screaming, our dog is tentatively licking up a puddle of pinkish water that has seeped onto the rug, and I'm seriously questioning every life choice that led me to believe we could accomplish a Pinterest-worthy craft project while simultaneously consuming critically acclaimed cinema.
The original plan was dangerously ambitious, which is usually the hallmark of severe sleep deprivation. We were going to put the twins down, mix up one of those DIY keepsake kits, briefly wake one child up just enough to stick her hand in a bucket of molding jelly, and then sit back with a glass of wine to enjoy a film. It sounded so aggressively middle-class and manageable. You just mix the powder with water and hold their tiny fist in the goo until it sets, which surely can't be that difficult even if you're entirely devoid of artistic talent.
This was our first mistake. The second mistake was our choice of background entertainment.
A very specific kind of cinematic dread
My wife had looked up the shiva baby cast earlier that evening because she couldn't remember where she'd seen the actor who plays the sugar daddy, and we decided it looked like a nice, snappy comedy to have on in the background. If you haven't seen it, Shiva Baby is a 2020 independent film that's officially billed as a dark comedy but is, in reality, a ninety-minute anxiety attack set to the sound of violently plucked violin strings.
I can't overstate how incredibly stressful the audio design of this film is. There are scenes where the protagonist is just standing in a crowded room, but the sound mixing makes it feel like you're trapped inside a washing machine full of angry bees. The claustrophobia is palpable. You can practically feel the heat radiating off the screen, the suffocating pressure of relatives asking invasive career questions, the sheer, unrelenting dread of existing in your twenties. It's a brilliant piece of filmmaking that I deeply respect, but it's absolute nightmare fuel when you're already teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown because your living room looks like a crime scene involving Barney the Dinosaur.
The film essentially follows a young woman who runs into her sugar daddy at a Jewish funeral.
That's the entire plot, but the execution makes you want to crawl out of your own skin. And despite having the word 'baby' right there in the title, I feel morally obligated to point out that this is profoundly not family viewing. I only mention this because the algorithms that govern our digital lives are terrifyingly literal, and I can easily picture some exhausted parent blindly downloading it thinking it's an educational program about farm animals. It's not.
- There's an immense amount of swearing, mostly muttered in sheer panic.
- The central plot revolves around transactional sex and crippling millennial burnout, neither of which are particularly engaging topics for a baby.
- There's an actual infant in the film whose sole narrative purpose seems to be crying at the exact moment the tension peaks, which triggered a phantom let-down reflex in my wife despite her having stopped breastfeeding three months ago.
Please don't cook your children
But back to the physical reality of our living room. If you're ever seized by the delusion that you should create a physical memento of your infant's extremities, you'll quickly discover that the internet is full of conflicting and mildly terrifying advice. Our health visitor, a spectacularly no-nonsense woman named Brenda who speaks exclusively in sighs, casually mentioned during a weigh-in that we needed to be extremely careful about what materials we bought.
From what my sleep-addled brain could gather from Brenda's lecture, traditional Plaster of Paris undergoes some sort of exothermic chemical reaction when you mix it with water. I'm not a scientist, and my understanding of chemistry stopped entirely at age fifteen, but apparently as the plaster cures, it heats up. It heats up a lot. Brenda muttered something about it reaching temperatures similar to a fresh cup of tea, which I took to mean it'll absolutely cook a baby cast in it if you're foolish enough to stick their bare hand directly into the mix.
So, we bought an alginate kit instead. Alginate is supposedly derived from seaweed, which sounds very holistic and safe, though the powder we received was a violent shade of synthetic purple and smelled faintly of dental clinics. The instructions claimed it would change colour from purple to pink as it set, providing a 'foolproof visual indicator' for parents.
What the instructions failed to mention is the temporal distortion that occurs when you're trying to restrain a squirming six-month-old. Time ceases to function normally.
- You mix the purple powder with cold water, which immediately creates lumps the size of golf balls that refuse to dissolve no matter how frantically you whisk.
- You plunge the unsuspecting infant's hand into the purple slurry, at which point they wake up fully and realize they've been betrayed.
- You attempt to hold their arm perfectly still while they thrash like a captured marlin, splattering purple seaweed sludge across your trousers, the rug, and the dog.
- You wait for the colour to change to pink, a process that takes precisely three minutes but feels roughly equivalent to a standard prison sentence.
Bribery in the first degree
By the time the alginate finally began to turn a sickly shade of pink, our daughter was furious. She was arching her back, her face entirely red, performing that terrifying silent scream babies do right before they unleash an unholy noise. And on the television, the string instruments in the movie were screeching in a discordant crescendo as the main character desperately tried to hide in a bathroom.
The cinematic anxiety bled perfectly into our domestic disaster. I needed to keep her completely still for another forty-five seconds, or the mold would be ruined and my left hand—which was currently bracing the bottom of the container—would be permanently entombed in dental paste. My wife, sensing imminent collapse, dove into the changing bag and retrieved the Panda Silicone Baby Teether.
I've complicated feelings about baby gear, mostly because our house looks like a plastic factory exploded inside it, but this specific teether actually works. I don't entirely understand the physics of it, but because it's completely flat, she can actually hold it without immediately dropping it on her own face. My wife jammed it into the baby's free hand. The baby paused her screaming, brought the panda to her mouth, and bit down aggressively on the bamboo detail. The silence that followed was absolute magic, broken only by the sound of Rachel Sennott hyperventilating on screen.
It bought us exactly the forty-five seconds we needed. We slid her little hand out of the rubbery pink mass with a satisfying suction noise. She immediately threw the panda teether across the room, but the mold was intact.
I should note that not all our wooden or silicone investments have been this successful. We also own the Bear and Lama Wooden Play Gym, which we bought during a late-night scrolling session when we convinced ourselves that neutral, Nordic-inspired aesthetics would magically make our twins calmer. It's objectively a very beautiful object. The wood is smooth, the crocheted animals are lovely, and it looks fantastic sitting in the corner of the room. But if I'm brutally honest, the twins mostly just stare at the hanging llama with deep suspicion before ignoring it entirely to try and eat the wooden legs of the frame. It's fine, it holds up to them chewing on the structure, but it definitely didn't turn our living room into a serene Scandinavian sanctuary.
The grand unveiling of the claw
Once the alginate mold was empty, we had to pour the actual casting plaster into the cavity she had left behind. This part we had to do in the kitchen, mostly because I was terrified the dog would eat the purple jelly and we'd be spending our Saturday at the emergency vet explaining that our golden retriever had ingested a metric ton of fake seaweed.
You pour the white plaster in, tap the container repeatedly to bring the air bubbles to the top, and then you leave it alone for three hours. We spent those three hours finishing the movie, cleaning dried purple dust out of the rug fibres, and eventually putting a newly exhausted baby back to sleep.
When the time came to peel the alginate away from the plaster, I felt a genuine surge of excitement. This was it. The timeless keepsake. The physical proof of how impossibly small she once was. We gathered around the kitchen island, carefully slicing the rubbery pink mold away piece by piece.
What emerged from the rubble wasn't a delicate, cherubic infant hand.
Because she had been furiously trying to escape the entire time, her fingers weren't resting in a gentle curve. Two of her fingers were jammed aggressively together, her thumb was pointing at a completely unnatural ninety-degree angle, and an air bubble had somehow formed right on the tip of her index finger, making it look like she possessed a single, bulbous claw. It looked less like a sentimental milestone marker and more like a prop from a low-budget alien invasion movie.
We stared at it in silence for a long time. My wife eventually suggested we put it on the mantlepiece, but we both knew it would terrify houseguests. It currently lives in a shoebox in my office, a permanent reminder of the night we tried to mix high-stress independent cinema with high-stress amateur casting.
The only real casualty of the evening, aside from my blood pressure, was the outfit she had been wearing. The alginate had splattered across her front and, despite soaking it overnight, refused to wash out. We ended up having to bin it, which is painful, so I highly think stripping your child down to just a nappy or putting them in something you actively despise before you attempt this sort of witchcraft. If you need to replace ruined clothes because you also decided to do crafts at 8 PM, I strongly suggest picking up one of the sleeveless organic cotton bodysuits which are lovely, incredibly soft, and frankly deserve better than being covered in dental plaster.
Unhelpful answers to your casting questions
Is alginate actually safe for babies?
Our health visitor seemed to think so, mostly because it's non-toxic and supposedly made from marine algae, though I remain slightly skeptical given the radioactive colours it comes in. It doesn't heat up like plaster of Paris does, which is the main thing. It just feels like a cold, wet slug against your skin. Wash it off thoroughly though, because it tends to hide in those little wrist rolls and hardens into crusty bits that are a nightmare to pick out later.
How do you keep a baby still long enough for the mold to set?
You don't. You basically just have to throw out every grand plan you had about a serene bonding moment and instead pray the goop sets before your child manages to wipe it into their left eye while you furiously attempt to distract them with anything that isn't nailed down. We used our silicone panda teether, but honestly, an episode of something incredibly flashy on an iPad or sheer brute force singing of 'The Wheels on the Bus' might also work. Just embrace the wriggling.
Why does my finished plaster cast look like a mutant claw?
Because you trapped air bubbles in the mold when you were pouring the plaster, or because your baby was making a fist of pure rage while the alginate was setting. There's no fixing it once it's done. You just have to accept that your child apparently has the hand structure of a velociraptor and hide it in a drawer where it can't frighten the grandparents.
Can I watch Shiva Baby with my children?
Absolutely not. Unless you want your toddler asking you what a sugar daddy is while you're standing in the queue at Tesco, I'd strongly advise against it. Save it for when they're securely asleep, and even then, maybe have a strong cup of chamomile tea ready because the soundtrack alone will dramatically increase your resting heart rate.
Is there an easier way to get a baby handprint?
Yes, just use an ink pad and a piece of paper like people have been doing since the dawn of time. It takes two seconds, costs almost nothing, and doesn't require you to turn your kitchen into a makeshift special effects studio. Or just take a photo. They grow so fast anyway, you won't even remember the claw phase.
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