A Plate???

This is my first plate. Because the photo is so one-dimensional, you can’t really see how it looks like something dug up from the ancient Roman ruins. It’s got a bit of a pot belly in the middle. My family tells me it would make a nice wall hanging.

Aside from the structural clay problems, I also had the blurring together of the underglaze and the glaze because I hadn’t learned that lesson yet. I made the design by pressing peppermint geranium leaves from my garden into the leather-hard clay, then pulling them off. I then painted the underglaze on and wiped off the excess so that it stayed in the impressions.

Experimenting

Here is a slightly (well…more than slightly) off-kilter bowl. I was probably trying to make a cylinder, but ended up with a bowl. I placed some glass pieces at the bottom before glaze firing to see how it would turn out. Lessons learned: make sure the color of the glass will go with the glaze (which it obviously doesn’t here), make sure the pot doesn’t list to the side (the glass will follow the slant), don’t plan on using a pot with glass in it for food.

I drew the graphics on the outside of the bowl using underglazes, then bisque-fired. Then I applied glazes (blue on the inside and clear on the outside) for the final glaze firing. I was happy that the designs stayed put. The first time I tried the underglaze, I put the glaze over the top and fired everything together (see first post). It all ran together.

First Pottery Post

I’m branching out! To date, I have been a photographer. Nothing three-dimensional. Some of you might know me from photoeclectia.wordpress.com or http://www.photoeclectia.com. But I got the pottery bug after taking a couple of community center classes and now I’m hooked. I plan to use this blog to document my progress. I hope that in my first year of throwing pots on a wheel that I will be able to make at least one or two pots that don’t list to one side or the other or that feel like boat anchors. Not there yet.

I started in March 2017. Let’s see how it goes.

Here are my first couple of attempts. One was good enough to put an orchid into, but believe me, the clay rules. In my earliest attempts on the wheel, it worked me more than me working it.