Class Wisdom

Tuesday at class, Ron did a demo of a kind teapot that Ron Meyers makes. He showed us how to put the different parts together. Above, he's cut and putting a slab on the bottom of the wheel-thrown body of it. It's got a parallelogram kinda shape. Quite different. I like it. Maybe one afternoon, I'll make one.

Ron's always available to help give tips to our throwing. On this night, he gave me some great feedback about my trimming and making the foot (bottom part) of the pot. The goal is to have the foot be symmetrical to the inside of the bottom of the pot. Hard to explain; I knew this, but I 'get' it in a different way now. Ron drew this:

The wine is mine. After this, I went back to all my 10 pots that I had trimmed and re-trimmed them; they look even better now and are a bit lighter. Thanks, Ron! Soon, I'll post the results of this...

More Sgraffito

Lately, I've been doing more and more sgraffito.... words that is, not images. Etched the words on this plate a few days ago. Maybe in time, I'll etch images; words seem to come more quickly now. It's what I made for my sister's recent wedding.

On a different note, does anyone know how to upload pictures to blogspot so after they are uploaded, they can be enlarged with a click on the pic? Sometimes that happens for me; at other times, not.

This is going into the bisque kiln today.

Not always...

Not always. This is what rarely happens to one's pieces. These two cups were in the electric kiln with glaze on them. Everything put into the glaze kiln is SUPPOSED to have been already fired in the bisque kiln, but something was put in there that hadn't been bisqued. (Fault is both the one who loaded the kiln and the creator of the piece, putting it wrong the shelf). So, it exploded and ruined all of the pieces in the kiln. My thumb even got cut too as I ran it over the pieces. In the pic below, the bowl is also ruined and the other bluish piece.

I was disappointed because I really liked the form of these two cups, although I was experimenting with the glaze and didn't like how that turned out at all. There were pottery shards on the inside bottom of them. They were ruined so I threw them out.

Oh well... Such is life sometimes, huh?

The pottery world isn't perfect either.

The day did get better as I made three yunomi teacups. They are each made with about 1 1/4 lbs. of earthen red clay. The shapes came quickly. Tomorrow I'll trim them and put slip on them as well as on other plates too. There's glazing to do too...

My clay shelf is full! (the middle one) Thankfully, the day got better. That is always a very good thing.

Oh, and I'm reading Hannah McAndrew's blog more closely these days. Her slipware work is incredible!

Chalices

Chalices: Time consuming... beautiful... harder than it looks.

Patience required.
Made my first chalices today. Made the top part yesterday... Tough to make the bottom part. It messed up on many more stems of the chalice before I got four that were good. I have a few friends interested in purchasing communion sets, which is wonderful. These are made with earthen red clay. they're smaller than they look and they'll shrink for sure. Next, I'll make several different sized plates. Overall, I"m pleased...

Made them in two steps:

bowl part... top part of chalice (in this pic, turned upside down). Then I made the stem (or whatever it's called) and slipped and scored the two pieces together.

This all took so long. Got one of my bowls out of the bisque kiln and it had a few cracks in the bottom. That was the first time that's ever happened. Put glaze on it anyway to see what'll happen. Made another bowl...

Things just didn't come easy today. Yes, I tell myself; there will be days like this. Didn't even have time to run.

Oh, yesterday, I also finished this plate by puting a sgraffito spiral design on it. I'll do some different glazing with this one.