2/14/08 - Valentine Pottery

Last week I didn't go to class, so this week I had a lot of catching up to do.

My first finished piece was ready today. Remember the pint glass? It's now obviously a large hot chocolate mug with no handle. I think it holds around 10 ounces of liquid, and angles out at just the right depth sot hat it settles into your hand while you're holding it. I had glazed it clear, but the color came out more of a brown. I asked Gary about it, since it was a red clay. You could see the red on the bottom of the foot where there was no glaze, but then the "clear" glaze turned it brown. Apparently the iron in the clay had reacted with the clear glaze to make it less clear and a little brown. Yes, the clay and the glaze react together in firing. Neat! I had also dipped one part in Maria's Blue, which turned out great on my square bowl last quarter, but on this piece mostly just turned the area a kind of yellow with a hint of blue in the very middle of the area, near the rim. I'll post a pic of it soon.

The little teapot was ready to be glazed! I kept holding it cupped in my hands and carrying it around. It just feels good to hold! I wasn't sure how to glaze it since the hot chocolate mug didn't work out as I'd hoped with the clear. I finally settled on using "floating red" to glaze it with. Gary had shown me about 50 test pieces he had made to do glazing experiments with, and a few of them were made with red clay. The floating red looks like it reacts well with red clay to make a color most like the clay itself. The floating red on blond clay doesn't look that red at all. Glazing the teapot was scary. I didn't want to plug the holes in the stem, so I blew into the stem to clear them. Then I made sure to remove all glaze from the rim and the bottom of the lid, in case they needed to be fired together, so they wouldn't fuse together. Fingers crossed.

Let's see. Otherwise, I trimmed a tall vase from a couple weeks ago, glazed another handle-less mug. (With dark blue, I think. The mug is like the pint glass but with curved sides instead of straight.) I threw a quite large bowl with nice shoulders. I think that's the term. It doesn't settle down into a bowl shape; the bottom is fairly steep and then it opens up more. I'm moving away from the sunken look of my earlier pieces. Then I threw and discarded three or four other pieces. Not a very productive night, but a fun one. I was the most sociable I've been in class, like ever, I think.