clay: a pottery afternoon

I had to skip a day clay club this week because I had to return my rental car—the agent had asked how’d I liked playing James Bond. Omg, so fun, I enthused to him, it makes me kinda wanna buy the Miata, but I’m glad to have my car (which looks so good after being painted and detailed)back with more room in the back seat or in the trunk for my ceramic tools and slabs of clay (aka my locker). Before lap swim, I had to do a Thursday clay club. I really appreciate how putting my hands on mud grounds me. Zan loves this planter which I thought meh, but she said she wants to trade it for something. Cool! I want one of her mugs on which to adhere an iron oxide decal of Sadie. However, she said it needed a dish. And so I made one this afternoon. 

I put drainage holes in my planters in order to not have to make a dish(seems minimalist to me), but I had been pondering making a flower pot with drainage holes on the bottom sides and adhered to a dish for drainage to go into a dish if not into a sink or the earth--and so that'll be next week's clay play.

I'm so NOT DIGGING these cocktail cups. I investigated how to better incorporate text into these mugs because I do love the white gloss overglaze on speckled buff.

So the plan is to make iron oxide decals of the text and adhere them onto the fired mugs, which would be so much less time-consuming than me stamping and then filling in the recess with wax resist. Sigh, but now I've got these 7 mugs to get rid of. I think I'm going to just smash them out of existence. Wasteful, I know, and I know next time to test ONE before making multiples. Also let me make my cocktail cups more uniform or all one size: choose a diameter and continue to make the edges thinner or more comfortable for the lips.

Before leaving the ceramics studio, I managed to make another bottom dish for this butter dish cover lid. I don't know if I calculated correctly. I measured the finished butter dish with a standard ruler, which I wrote down and then found those measurements on the shrink ruler. But instead of putting the shrink ruler on the wet clay, I measured the shrink ruler with a regular ruler and wrote those dimensions down too, give or take a quarter inch. The shrinkage for Speckled Buff is 12%, which I looked up on Clay Planet's website.

Doh! I measured the dimension of the cover lid, but forgot to extend or add inches for the lip into which the top fits into the bottom. Aaargh. And so I cut skinny slabs with a ruler and just scored and slipped them all around the bottom dish. I don't know if it'll work, but I sure didn't want to throw away the top that I went to the trouble of building, smoothing and sanding, firing into bisque and then glazing and firing again. If I have to make another bottom dish in case this second bottom dish does not work, I will, and I'll also make another cover lid for this second bottom dish if it doesn't fit the first lid. Maybe that'll be my formula. Make the bottom dish first and bisque and glaze and fire, then measure the wet clay against the finished dish to make the butter lid cover.

But I'm liking the higher lip because if butter melts in the dish, it won't spill or leak out, and I think I'll glaze the interior white and burnish the lip and sides in order not to overglaze the exterior.

And here's the sad story of my 5 tea bowls. I should never have glazed the exterior with crackle because it's a low fire glaze that went into a mid fire kiln. Aaargh. I didn't know it was going to run as much as it did, but I should have known because I've seen the low fire lemon yellow overglaze run on the "happy" colored speckled buff planter I made for a client. I should have just left the exterior unglazed and painted a rim dip or waited to bring to the other clay studio to overglaze with gloss clear.

I love my tea bowl cast and am not giving up on it. I'll do over or pour more casts because I do want to see that Coyote Fire Opal again, which was so pretty on the thinner casted tea bowl. I wonder if I could salvage the three above that did not break by taping sand paper on to a wheel and then just run the wheel and grind the bottoms on the sandpaper.