These are the last of the salt-fired white clay pots. Meh. As I previously mentioned, I’d never use white clay for salt firing again. As for the designs, these were forays into 3-D outside decoration, with limited success. A couple of the blue fronds fell off in in the bisque stage and the red “flowers” look like buttons whose plastic coatings wore off. I’m taking a hand-building class this summer. Hopefully I’ll learn the proper way to attach clay to clay.
All I can say is…I tried. One cup came out well (the one on the right); the other one…well. Neither is especially well suited for coffee drinking as it will tend to be too tippy and not large enough by a long shot (for those of us who enjoy a substantial cup of coffee). Bad design. But it was fun innovating. They are fun to look at.
I made these two porcelain espresso cups with saucers for a friend. She asked for no handles, which made them easier to make. They are almost the same size!
Would you believe that I have more salt-fired pots to show? But let me take a break from salt-fired to show this porcelain pitcher that I am particularly proud of. It stands about 7 inches tall and is the perfect size for holding and pouring olive oil or vinegar. I need to devise a corking system for it.
For the glazing I used robin’s egg blue overlaid with frosty matte, which makes glaze under it run. My intention was to run the line of blue into the white with more of a blur, but I didn’t dip the frosty matte quite far enough down. Next time.
Four more of the salt-fired pots here. There were 20; one bit the dust (in the trash)–unusual for me in that the purpose of this blog is to track my progress as I learn the craft of pottery. But the pot that met its demise was a particularly unsuccessful one. It was my first closed form, on which I also attempted to make a lid. Sigh. Nope.
So. These pots. On a more positive note, the bowl pictured is not only nice to look at, but it’s very functional. It has made its way into the bowl section of our kitchen and gets used a lot.
The vases. The blue-glazed vase with the wildflowers is also nice to look at, but is not as functional in that it blows over in a puff of wind. In my attempt to make my pots lighter and less brick-like on the bottom, I got carried away while making this vase. It could have used a bit of heft. The heft all went to the large brown and cream vase. It weighs a ton, but is not going to wander when sitting outside or bumped into by a cat. Much more functional. It’s holding the wildflowers now.
The white pot got a lid when the pot’s shape suggested that it would like to have one. I put so many hours into that lid in trying to make it fit. Which it never did. In the end, the lid joined the pot from paragraph 1 in the trash. The pot now looks like a ball jar to me, painted white. It’s made from that porcelain-like Loafer’s Glory clay, which is so boring when salt-fired. It won’t be one of my favorites, although its simplicity and lack of color does go well with the very purple flowers.
Here is yet another salt-fired piece–this time a deep bowl. It actually looks better in real life than I was able to portray here. The light must have been funky the day I took its picture. This pot is in a show at the community center right now where I use the pottery studio or I would take another photo. Perhaps I’ll update it in August when I get it back.
I believe I was flinging glaze onto this pot in my rush to the finish.
Believe it or not, this is a salt-fired pot. It looks very different from the others I have shown to date in that the clay I used for this one was a porcelain-like mixture called Loafer’s Glory. I think the salt firing is wasted on something so light. No salt bursts are evident at all. I’m sure I would have liked this pot better if I had used the Phoenix clay that produced the nice toasty brown color on other pots I made for the workshop.
Now that summer is arriving, many of my pots are inspired by plants and flowers. As in, something to them in, whether it’s a planter or a vase. Here is a vase I made for salt firing. I like to test out different shapes. To show the clay that I am boss!
This is one of my largest pieces to date: a salt-fired bowl. Notice the squared off edges on the rim. This is one of the first I made of this batch–long before a friend started strongly suggesting that I round off the edges using a small piece of chamois cloth. I now round off my edges, but usually using methods other than the chamois since every time I use one, it tends to end up in the clay waste drain-off bucket. I lose more stuff in there. Digging around at the bottom is nasty—yuck.
The glaze is modest as I was running out of time for glazing. We had roughly three and a half hours to glaze all of our pieces before it was kiln-loading time. In my case, that was 20 pieces. And I didn’t exactly know what I was doing at the time!
This bowl is large enough to hold a quart of strawberries.
What I consider to be a very successful small pot, one of the salt-fired bunch, very blue.
Ceramiclectia 