clay: more soap dishes and a pumpkin mash-up

Yesterday at Clay Club, I made two soap dishes from a dark clay with two different ovals and sawtooth templates I had printed on to card stock beforehand. I had worried that the templates were too big, but they've shrunken considerably! And so I just looked up the shrinkage for Laguna's Electric Brown clay, and it's 12.5% give or take 2% plus or minus. There are some hairline-cracks underneath near the swooped sides which I think are visually interesting, but Zan suggested I burnish them. And so I did with the back of a metal spoon, but couldn't obliterate them completely. Below is the oblong one made from an 8" x 4.5" oval. A day later, the clay had shrunk 7" x 3.5" x 1.25".

Below is the more circular oval cut from a 7.25" x 5.75" template that shrunk to 5.75" x 4" x 1.75" a day later.

And today since I'm going straight home and not doing clay club, I used my lunch hour to glaze a pumpkin that a student had hand built in her beginning ceramics class but was going to relegate to the reclaim bucket because she didn't want to bisque fire and glaze it. And so I had rescued that greenware pot, painted it burnt orange and kelp green and fawn underglazes and then layered a rice paper decal over it. Thanks Ruby in 3rd Period!

After the pumpkin was bisqued, I put a bit of coffee brown low fire glaze and then used school glue to temporarily stick the vine (the whole reason I wanted to save this charming pumpkin), and lastly coated with a couple layers of low fire clear.

I'm going to load the pumpkin this afternoon into the low fire kiln, and we'll see if I want to put it through the kiln again for a mid firing.