Shambling Towards Perfection

Yeah I couldn't think of a witty title today. But anyway. Tuesday was the last day for wet clay, and also our first raku firing. So first, I had to glaze the mushroom and oval box. I decided to save the fairy hut for tomorrow, when we'll be doing naked raku. I used some bright red underglaze on the top of the mushroom, plus turquoise crackle, tomat's red (I think), and copper luster. Anyway I was trying to go for a pretty brightly colored, contrasting top. I put white crackle on the stem, and then also a few dots of alligator rust on both the top and stem to make it look a bit warty. I forgot to get a picture after that was glazed. For the box, I did black glaze on the zigzags on the bottom, turquoise crackle on the flat part of the top, and glass red on the knob. Both pieces came out great, although I did have 2 small cracks in the mushroom's top. One of the instructors had a piece that cracked, too, and she builds stuff like woah, so I wonder if the temperat...

So apparently the theme of this session is plates. I didn't mean for that initially, but it's turned out to be a great platform for all these different decoration techniques. On Saturday, I got a dragon egg and two plates smoothed and ready to be decorated. These are all made with 412/stoney white cone 10 clay. The dragon egg I'll be decorating tonight via the surface erosion technique , where you paint on a resist and then sponge away material, leaving the painted parts raised above the rest of the surface. I'll be using an acrylic medium, not shellac like in that link, as I won't be doing anything nearly that complicated. The plates though I was actually able to decorate on Saturday. For the first, I used an embossing tool to trace a design of Betty White. I'm hoping it looks like her, anyway. I'll use an oxide wash that's wiped off to highlight the carved in design. For the second plate, I used the " mocha diffusion " technique wh...

Saturday was Glaze Day. I only had 4 pieces for the traditional high-fire glazing, but I also had pieces to raku. The only new piece was the top of my egg, which I completely forgot about the previous week (oops). I also had two older pieces I wanted to re-fire because I didn't like how they'd come out. Here they are before I did anything to them: That's one of the nice things about raku; do-overs aren't too hard to do. There was enough room for my two older pieces, so I reglazed them and they were fired on Saturday in two separate firings (that makes *three* for this session! we apparently love our raku around here!). I put curdle blue on the top part of the butterfly's wings and glass red on the lower part. I also added just a bit more alligator rust to the body. I put white crackle on the head and body of the angel, plus glass red on the wings and in splotches here and there on the rest of the piece. Here they are after applying new glaze, and then after t...

The second class of the session has come and gone. Our teacher always uses the second class to teach the newbies how to throw, so I listened hard and attempted to follow along. I managed to turn out two specimens of roundness: a bowl and a cylinder, again using half-and-half I had leftover. I'll have to break into some of my other clay leftovers at some point, I think; I'd forgotten that if you're actually successfully throwing stuff you can go through clay much more quickly than with hand-building (well, at least with my rather perfectionist standards of hand-building). So hey, maybe I can use up my vast stock of leftovers. Wouldn't that be something! Anyway, I had actually attempted to make two cylinders, but as our teacher always says, "bowls happen". It's pretty easy to make a bowl, but keeping the sides straight and making a cylinder is much more difficult, which is why our teacher has us aim for cylinders at first. The bowl did indeed happen first,...

Ok, so, I never actually documented my projects last summer like I had intended, nor did I record the fall session. But hey, it's a new pottery session (started last Saturday, ), so might as well give it another go. We'll be doing raku like usual, as well as a saggar firing  (you coat the piece in a special chemical, then wrap it up in aluminum foil with some combustibles, and fire it like that). Last session we tried obvara for the first time, but pieces had an unfortunate tendency to crack and/or blow up. One takes the red hot piece out of the kiln, dunks it in a "brew" of water, flour, sugar, and yeast and then dunks the piece in water, going back and forth between the two a few times. So, you know, blowing up happens... We voted on which special firing techniques to do this session and I'm guessing that's why obvara lost. Ah, well. My plans for the special firings are to make dragon eggs. I made an obvara dragon egg last session which somehow did not...