Shambling Towards Perfection

Yesterday was the start of the summer pottery class session. No pics yet, since I just barely got started on stuff last night. Plus there was that whole dead phone issue. It was a very interesting session though. Our teacher brought in samples of a ton of different types of surface decoration ( sgraffito ,  mishima , and a bunch I can't remember right now) and challenged us to make some pieces incorporating some of those techniques. This session we're going to do a cone 5 firing in addition to our regular cone 10. The underglazes we have available result in brighter colors at the lower temperature, so we can show off these techniques with more vivid colors. Cool! I had already decided to do another dragon egg, but with more interesting decoration, so this fits in just perfectly. I'm not sure what I'll do for that, exactly, so first I'm taking the opportunity with the cone 5 clay (b-mix) to make a couple of small slab-built, molded bowls or plates and try out some ...

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...

Saturday was the last day for wet clay. I couldn't really do anything new on the wheel, mainly because it wouldn't dry fast enough to trim or to be ready to be bisqued in time for this coming Saturday, which will be Glaze Day. I did manage to trim my final cylinder-thing without destroying it, so yay. I completely forgot to take a photo though, because Saturday was really quite hectic. We did a raku firing, which ate up a lot of time; first I had to paint my dragon with raku glazes, like so: I always think it's neat to see what the glazes look like first. Some of the newbies kept thinking the final color would look like the color when it's not yet fired, and that's definitely not always the case. I put white crackle on the shell (though alas, it didn't really crackle), alligator rust on the main body, glass red on the spines, black on the eyes, and a new glaze on the wings. It was technically a regular low-fire glaze, I believe, but our teacher speculated ...

Saturday was the fourth class of this session, and I did a little of this and that. The first order of business was getting our bisqued saggar pieces ready for the actual saggar process. I would have taken pics, but my hands had toxic chemicals on them, and I wasn't gonna get that stuff on my phone... First we all donned gloves, and then for people who wanted a pink color to come out during the firing, we painted a solution on our pieces (while wearing face masks... Lots of protective gear during this process!). I failed to ask what was in the solution, but you apparently aren't supposed to get it on your skin. Anyway next, you tear off 2 pieces of aluminum foil large enough to securely wrap your piece in. You then add various types of combustibles, including organic matter like banana peels, horse hair, cat or dog food, or leaves, as well as powdered household chemicals like fertilizer or weed killer, and finally small bits of metal, such as a bit of steel wool or a bit from a...

During the week I got my dragon egg for saggar mostly finished. It's made around wadded up newspaper as per the "clay potato" technique, plus I did go ahead add two chunks of clay inside the paper so they'll rattle around inside the egg after it's finished, suggesting something's inside. Here it is after I added the first vein, as an experiment: I was pleased with how it looked, so I added 2 more veins. During Saturday's class I finished smoothing the egg's surface out as much as possible, shaped it a bit more, and added a crack so it would look like the egg's inhabitant was attempting to escape. That also conveniently made a nice big opening for expanding air to escape from during firing. I also smushed the veiny bits by paddling them, following a suggestion from my teacher. It makes the veins look a bit more a part of the egg, in my opinion, so I'm quite happy with the effect. Overall I think it turned out pretty well: Saggar fir...

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,...