It’s 6 Inches Tall!

I was trying for taller, but… I like tall and thin, but it’s hard. I’ll keep trying.

So then I played with glaze. Lately I’m in love with the black glaze (granny’s black shorts). I also wanted to continue my experimentation with the runny frosty matte used in conjunction with a colored glaze. I know I wasn’t supposed to let it go past half way to two-thirds down the pot, but the devil made me push that envelope. I let the drips inch down to the bottom in a couple of spots. Now I know why I shouldn’t do that. I was lucky the black glaze didn’t end up creeping down onto more than just the foot of my vase.

This looks pretty with red carnations in it.

The Continuing Quest for Functional Garlic Keepers

This garlic keeper promises to hold a few bulbs of garlic! The outside design is green and purple underglaze, applied at both the greenware and bisque stages. The effect is one of crayoned on color. Not what I was expecting, but when is it ever?

A Misplaced Flower Pot

I was cleaning off a set of shelves a couple of weeks ago, and what should I find tucked away in the corner of the highest shelf (where I couldn’t see it)? This pot that I made for salt firing last spring! It got left behind!

This was one of the pots I made using the porcelain-like Loafer’s Glory clay, which wasn’t great for salt firing in that you couldn’t really tell that pots made from this clay had been salt fired. There is none of the interesting salt flashing that you get with darker types of clays. So, even though this is a cone 10 (high fire) clay, I decided to glaze and fire it in the electric cone 6 kiln in the studio where I do my work. I swiped on some blue-green glaze, then  dipped it in a translucent green, then swiped on some more of the blue-green glaze mixed with a bit of sapphire blue glaze. This is the result. You can see a bit of the first glaze swipe underneath everything if you look closely. Plants growing here will be happy with it. It has a hole in the bottom for drainage. Which is probably good as the waterproofness probably wouldn’t be as sure as if I fired this at cone 10.

Spin Art

Here is the first finished pot of the new year: a serviceable cooking casserole. Structurally well-made, but the paint job was another of my experiments. I saw a really neat technique online that wasn’t this. It didn’t work as advertised or I did something wrong. I had to turn it into spin art, which would have been okay with me if not  for the black puddling around the inside edge. On the outside, I experimented with tube-squeezed underglaze to create texture. That worked. Not discouraged. I learned a lot with this one, including the exercise of adding the side handles that add a nice functionality.

Garlic Keeper or Cooking Pot?

Still trying to get the garlic keeper right! This one is actually pretty hilarious. The first one came out too small; the second one holds (maybe) two bulbs of garlic. While I was working on this one, a friend in the studio buzzed by to see what I was working on. “A garlic pot!” I said. She chuckled and said, “A cooking pot.” Well, maybe I went a bit overboard on the size here, especially the lid, but the person I gave this to was thrilled to be able to store a whole string of garlic bulbs. There’s something for everyone!

Still trying. I have another one in progress…

A Vinegar Decanter

While this piece mostly came out looking okay (but don’t look at the straightness of the handle), I have to admit it gave me a run for my money. Part of the problem was that the optimum time for trimming it at the appropriate time was a bit out of my control. The studio was closed for the two-week Thanksgiving break. I was on the fence as to whether to try and trim it or not, but that decision was handily made when I didn’t wrap it tightly enough. By the time I got back to it, it was too dry to trim. So the bottom is a bit heavy.

Next, I got really unexpected glazing results. I was aiming for a gradient from top to bottom. First, I painted the greenware with green underglaze and put it in for bisque. Then, I painted spearmint green glaze on the top potion of the pot. I poured white glaze into the inside of the pot. I then dipped the top half into frosty matte and painted some more of it loosely on the middle. If you look closely, you will see that this combination produced a lavender color on top and the very unexpected, but not unpleasant yellow band in the middle. The spotty frosty matte on the middle caused that portion of the pot to be rough, not glossy, like the rest. I didn’t like that, so I painted on some more spearmint and put it back in for glaze. It didn’t do anything for getting rid of the matte portion, but gave me some more of the lavender below the yellow. As you can see, the result is not the gradient I had hoped for, but results like this one are what makes creating ceramics so much fun. Surprises!

The handle is another story. I need to get a handle on handles. I foresee much more practice in this area this coming year.