A Day Away

I can tell that when I have a day away from the studio these days. It's usually not good. It has been very challenging not having work. At least my home looks better today as I cleaned.

Yesterday though, a lot happened in the studio. Above is the work I glazed plus my four new yunomi teacups. :)

I also did some slipwork and added slip to several bowls and yunomi teacups. I tried a new method... taking a small sponge and dipping it into some pouring slip and making a spiral design while rotating the piece on one of those shimpo (whatever it's called thing that spins pieces in a circle). So, the four on the bottom and left in the above pic had that slipwork.
Here's a closeup of that new slipwork. I'm eager to see how it turns out with the Ron's creme glaze on it.

A side view of some of the slipped pieces.

And, four of my yunomi teacups came out of the electric kiln. They quickly made their way home, but not before a few pics. I glazed a bunch of others too.
These pics aren't the best, but the pic above and below show my latest favorite form. Earthen red clay with white slip, glazed in Ron's creme. If you look closely, you can still see some of the spiral slipwork through the red wine in this pic. :)
Now, my shelf is almost empty. Pottery is saving me these days. I'm thankful.

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!