Pinched tea cup

Nothing like a leftover bit of clay (or clays) to invite one to pinch a pot, or in this case, a small tea cup. This one used up what was left from the small, two-color anvil bowl.

Pinching clay is one of the simplest methods of shaping and is usually reserved for objects small enough to fit in one's hand. Still, it is a little tricky to get things even. Multiple pinched shapes can be joined to make larger pieces. I added a foot ring to this cup.

The pinkish orange color is from a mason stain. After a bisque firing, I applied clear glaze to just the inside.

Another small object of questionable value except as an exercise and experiment for the potter.

Mushroom anvil bowl

There are all kinds of doodads to help the hand-builder make things that are uniform (more or less). One of them is what is called a mushroom anvil. Made from wood, a variety of forms may be attached to the handle. To shape the clay, the potter makes a slab, lays it out on a piece of foam rubber, then quickly presses the form into the clay. (See my anvil here.)

I tested out the anvil a while back, using two different colors of clay, one colored with mason stain.

After a bisque firing, I applied clear glaze to just the inside to display the difference between the glazed and unglazed surfaces.

As you can see, the bowl is quite small. There are larger forms available, but I haven't coughed up the bucks for those yet. I believe these are hand turned and made from fine wood, so a little pricy.

Popcorn bowl #2

Bowl #2 was made at home, by slumping a slab over a pyrex mixing bowl that I sometimes use for popcorn.

Again, a dearth of notes, not even photos of what I was doing. If memory serves me right, the inside is glazed in 'Stoned Denim' and the outsie in 'Cinnebar'. The rim shows a layering of the two.

And AGAIN, I didn't allow for shrinkage, so this bowl would be better for pasta or salad instead of popcorn. One of these days, I will learn to make everything at least ten percent larger than I want the end result to be.

Popcorn bowl #1

Bowl #1 was made in class. No construction pictures. The method was one kind of coil building. As I recall, mine started caving out, so I had to make a "dart" - cut out a section and "glue" the edges back together. Initially, I was unhappy with the thing, but decided it wasn't so bad after all.

After firing, I decided to try the "peacock" method of glazing (at home). The idea is to create runs of color that resemble a peacock's tail. I used Mayco 'Stoned Denim' for the base, Amaco 'Honey Flux' for the U's and big circle, and Mayco 'Cinnebar' for the dots. I really don't know what I am doing - can you tell?

It didn't turn out the way I had hoped. Basically, the glazes did not run.

I *think* what I did next was overglaze the inside of the piece with 'Oatmeal' (or was it a layer of 'Honey Flux'? I really need to get better at making notes.) Anyway, the idea was to get some movement of the glaze. After yet another firing, the result was much better, closer to what I was aiming for.

Again, I did not allow for shrinkage, so this isn't much of a popcorn bowl by today's standards. When I was a kid, we had a set of salad bowls we used for popcorn, and they were about the size of this bowl. It just goes to show you how serving sizes have grown over the years.

One ugly sushi boat

One of my complaints about the recent hand-building class I took was lack of oversight by the instructor, as she was busy working on her own stuff during the class. Maybe if she had been paying attention, she would have stopped me from doing this:

Before

After

The colors are okay, but what I did with them is ugh. If I had it to do over, I would have used underglaze on the imprints, then maybe glazed them with the Mayco 'Aurora Green', then glazed the whole thing with the Mayco 'Fossil Rock'.

The accompanying soy sauce bowl is a little better. Because it is so short, the Mayco 'Landslide' pretty much just flowed onto the Mayco 'Peppered Plum', but fortunately did not flow off the piece onto the kiln shelf.

Before

After

My SO and I glazed our bowls on New Year's Day (do we know how to have fun or what?) Mine is my last piece from the class. Going forward, I think my pottery posts will be more project-centric, assuming I remember to take photos and document what I am working on. My goal of reserving Wednesdays for clay-making already failed: I didn't sleep well Tuesday night, slept in Wednesday morning, walked the dogs, then took a long nap in the afternoon, so most of that day was shot. Better luck next week.

Class six

Our final hand-building class was this past week. The emphasis (for me) was on glazing. The brushes and glazes at the studio were not impressive, so I worked on a couple of pieces, then brought the others home.

Sushi boat

These went on the dipping dish

Dipping dish

Between the store owner's need to fire LOTS of pieces for upcoming shows and all the pending holiday gifts, the to-be-fired shelves were rather packed and some of my stuff did not get fired. But these two platters were done. I'm medium pleased with them.

And then I went shopping in the store which I'll detail later.

On the homefront, I did make some "cookies" for putting under objects with drippy glazes and some stars for ornaments (or whatever). The cookies don't need to be perfect, just flat. The plastic wrap under the star-shaped cookie cutter keeps the metal from sticking to the clay and makes a tidier edge.

I also carved some stamps, one with my initials, the other with a dog paw print. They need some more cleaning up, which isn't easy to do on such small items.

This piece was supposed to be a dog bowl, but the wall wasn't working for me, so now it is a random dish of some sort. After marring the surface with my fingers, I decided to go all the way and added the fluting and impressions to give it some interest and texture. (I don't have a decent banding wheel, so placing a piece on newsprint makes for an easy way to turn it.)

I "slumped" some clay over a bowl. (The nylon keeps the clay from sticking to the bowl as it shrinks.) This will be another popcorn bowl, but slab-built. I'm leaving its surface plain. I think. Until it is bisque-fired, I can change my mind.

Soon it will be a new year, which is the perfect time to make some changes. I think I will alter the format of my pottery posts so that I can show the steps of creating a piece all in one go. A separate document with all the little tips and tricks I pick up along the way might be helpful as well. And by "helpful", I mean helpful to me, so I don't have to search for information in the blog. Stay tuned!

Interim week

No class last week because of Thanksgiving. Instead, I got brave enough to try some more glazing, but only after consulting the combination examples on the Mayco site.

What I have is the Mayco Stoneware 2023 Glaze Kit, with samples of a dozen glazes. I wanted to try Amaryllis (SW-192) on the fish I made a while ago (and which I apparently never blogged about), but I didn't want it to be *all* Amaryllis. So I applied two coats of Sand Dollar (SW-196) on the head and fins, then two coats of the Amaryllis all over. Theoretically, the head and fins should turn out different from the body. We'll see! (The dark spots are crystals that should produce an interesting result.)

This piece is one of my watering devices. I plan to set it an inch or so into the soil of a potted plant. When I water the planter by pouring water into the fish mouth, the water should flow out the buried holes at the base. Ideally.

After watching a video provided by Amaco on layering PC-31 Oatmeal over PC-33 Iron Lustre, I glazed a couple of heavy mugs that I also never blogged about. The one on the left has three coats of Oatmeal over three coats of Iron Lustre, with the Oatmeal restricted to the top third of both the inside and outside of the mug. The one on the right is the opposite: three coats of Iron Lustre over three coats of Oatmeal, with the Iron Lustre on just the top third of the inside and outside, plus the heart.

I frequently fall down a rabbit hole of glaze combination posts on FB, where everyone seems to apply three coats of each glaze. Yet I'm a little worried about how much these glazes will run, so my next task is to make "cookies" or "biscuits" - disks of bisqueware to go under the pieces when they are glaze fired. The cookies will protect the kiln shelf from running glazes... I hope.

Class five

We were supposed to make butter dishes at the fifth hand-building pottery class, but I kind of steered us toward finishing techniques. My popcorn bowl from last week wasn't as bad as I thought it was, but I wanted to make it better. One method is using a rather large rasp to trim away excess clay and make the walls more consistent. Once again, no pix.

When I was satisfied with my popcorn bowl, I decided to pinch a little pumpkin. The instructor showed me how to make the ridges using a shaping tool, the same one I used to make the toes on my turtle pieces. It's one thing to *have* pottery tools, but it is another thing to know how to use them.

Then I laid awake that night, thinking of different ways to make pumpkins, both large and small, most of the methods horribly inefficient.

At home, I glazed another platter I had made a while ago. This one is similar to the previous one, but this time I decided to use both Celadon glazes over the underglaze. Fingers crossed it turns out okay.

Dark green underglaze, applied to leaf

Dark green underglaze, wiped

I've taken several pottery classes, but I don't recall being encouraged to "rib" in any of them. Ribbing a slab after rolling it out not only smooths the surface, but aligns the clay cells. I obviously did not rib this platter, nor the previous one.

Using a "magic eraser" gave cleaner results removing excess underglaze, but the small imperfections on the platter's surface held onto the color.

Jade celadon, applied to leaf

Wasabi celadon, applied all over

Both of the leaf platters are at FW Clay, waiting to be fired. The store charges by the weight; the two platters weighed 3 pounds altogether. Since I used my own glazes, the total was $5.25. (Bisque firing is free if one purchases the clay from the store.) I could see where someone doing mass production for an art festival might find this method expensive, but I don't really have anything to compare it to besides the maker space I was at, and they recently changed their pricing policy for kiln use, probably because they were getting so many big producers in there.

We do not have class this week, due to Thanksgiving. Hopefully, all my pieces from class will be bisque fired by next week, and the platters glaze fired as well.

Class four

The fourth hand-building class was to be on coil-building. I was pretty excited because I have struggled with this. And the instructor promised to teach us an "easy" method. Again, I neglected to take photos.

Her method was more of a hybrid between coil-building, pinching, and wheel-throwing. My first impression was, I don't like this. It took me two tries to come up with a quart-size popcorn bowl that would stand up. I've seen videos where the coils are more like long slabs, where the coils are thick as hawser rope, where the coils are very thin, so I'm aware that there is more than one way to make a coil-built bowl. But I was disappointed that what we learned was not more traditional.

Or maybe I was a bit disgruntled because the instructor pooh-poohed the container of slip I brought for constructing the wall vases. I was hoping for a bit of help with them, especially the cutting part, but was mostly left on my own. Consequently, they are not quite even. The instructor seemed alarmed that I was not going to carve them. Frankly, I cannot draw, let alone carve, so I brought them home and "carved" them using different pasta shapes.

After watching several YT videos on glazing with Amaco Celadon, I decided to work on a platter I made a while ago. Initially, I was going to use dark green underglaze (Amaco Decorating Colors) on the leaves, then top them with Celadon 'Jade', then cover the whole thing with Celadon 'Wasabi'. But after wiping off the underglaze, I decided to skip the Jade and just use the Wasabi. We'll see how it turns out.

Underglaze applied

Underglaze wiped off (mostly)

Glazed (but still a bit damp)

I admit that I get a bit disgruntled with myself because I am not a very good potter. But I remind myself that I have not been doing it long, and I like to experiment, so results are usually unexpected. I'm still itchy to get a small kiln of my own, so I can make my ugly pottery away from the public eye, as I do enjoy the process.

More glazing of slip molds

The kilns are still not functioning at the maker space, although they hope they will be by next week. They are offering pottery classes but have had to cancel them, which is not a good business practice. We may jump ship and take our clay to another maker space in town. We'll see.

Meanwhile, I continue to glaze the slip mold figurines that someone else made. There is still one goat and a Buddha to glaze. I bought some glaze just for the latter, but the test tile for it has yet to be fired. *sigh*

Meanwhile, on the home front, I started working up the mason stained clay, making wonky little dishes which I am extremely dissatisfied with. One artist I admire is Louise Bourgeois. Among other sculptures, she created stacks of shapes that I've wanted to imitate with clay. So now I plan to shape the mason stained clay into stackable shapes, probably like river rocks.

Long time, no see

Hello there.

This blog basically fell to the wayside, probably because trying to maintain more than two blogs was a bit much. There is the garden blog (woodchuckacres) to keep track of the yard and the fiber blog (bittenbyknittin) to keep track of my adventures in fiber arts, and now I want to keep track of my pottery journey. I thought of starting a brand new blog, but that takes a lot of work. So I'm going to usurp this blog and use it for clay.

I am very new to clay, definitely an amateur who sometimes gets caught up in experimenting instead of creating. And that's okay. One experiement that is going on right now is mixing mason stains with stoneware. My motivation for this is my lousy glazing skills. I figure this way I'll have a base color that I can embellish, then cover with a clear glaze. We'll see how that works out.

1%, 5%, 10% stain samples

Today I poured some plaster batts. I've been skulking around the thrift shops, in search of plastic bowls and such, to mold the plaster of paris goop. There is a round one that will be just a batt, and the other three will be slump molds of various shapes and sizes. I already have a large rectagular batt that I use as a building surface.

I've been following a few pottery groups on FB which have been inspirational. One potter showed pics of leaf-shaped pieces she had made. So, of course, I had to try this myself. Using a leaf from the coleus on the front porch, I made two things, one an an impression of the leaf, the other an outline of the same leaf.

I don't have a kiln... yet. Instead, I joined a "maker space" where someone else does the firing. This is both good and bad. The worst is the kilns keep breaking down. That is why I'm tempted to get a kiln of my own, but even the small ones are expensive. Plus I would need an electrician to upgrade the power.

Besides the above, I've been glazing some slip molds that someone else made. These are not yet fired, but I think I did a decent job. We'll see what they look like when they come out of the kiln.

My SO and I have been renting space at the maker space, but he has been cleaning out his basement and I have set up a workbench in my garage, so we plan to shift to working at our homes while retaining our membership at the maker space so we still have access to the kiln and glazes.

And that's where things stand right now. Future posts (assuming I stick with this) will move both forward and backward in time, so we can see where I have been and maybe where I am going as well.