Clay: Spoons

I did clay club on Thursday afternoon into the early evening. While Zan glazed her Obsidian clay plates (she’s calling them Horizon, and so I just might call mine Eclipse), I rolled out a slab for another of my plates with the same clay.               

There’s a hairline crack in the bisque of my very first plate of Eclipse, which will likely get bigger upon additional firing, but I’m going to glaze it as a test. I’ll need to remember when scoring those stripes on the underside to not continue them all the way to the edge or to ease up on the at the edges, so that I don’t crack my plates. I’m bringing my bag of Obsidian to the parks and recreation studio this Saturday to slab out yet another plate. This dinnerware will be my slow plate series before my porcelain series. Zan also showed me her Navajo Wheel spoons.      

Oh my golly are they cute! And so I pinch potted a ball of scrap Obsidian which Zan told me would crack and that the handle would likely break off. And so I wedged it back into more scraps of clay and then rolled it out into a thick slab and cut out the outlines of whole spoons.                      

I don’t know how functional these spoons will be—maybe they’d be suitable for sauce spoons for chimichurri or aioli. One is going to be a soup spoon though. But I’ll definitely be making more of these while rolling out plates. And yes! Another black plate ready for the kiln!                        

Check out Zan’s plates behind my large one in which she filled in their undersides with white underglaze and painted wax resist. Next she’ll dip them in the bucket of Colonial White gloss glaze on one side and then rotate to its opposite side to dip but leave a vertex or a very acute triangle of raw clay unglazed. And there’s an edge of each of her plates which is very rough or very unrefined to accentuate that raw imperfection. When Zan saw my plate, she said too perfect, which made me laugh. I’m always lamenting over my handmade versus handcrafted pots, but these plates exemplify the wabi sabi I’ve been seeking. And always I’m anticipating lunch before craft or clay on a Saturday:                        

Life is good when there’s sushi. Or poke.                                      

Next week I think I’ll attempt to make my own poke rather than buy it from the warehouse or grocery store. I’ve sushi grade ahi tuna in my freezer.