Glazing night

Last night saw the final session of the "intermediate wheel" class I'd been taking in Tiffany Hilton's pottery studio, and it was "glazing night". I was concerned that I might not have time to glaze all my pots (twenty-five in total) in one two hour and forty-five minute class, even with a plan to make them pretty simple, design-wise. 

I still had a bunch of pots to wax the bottoms of, so I got right into that. I also had a plan to try something new, with TIffany's permission -- I'd brought two cookie decorating tools, small plastic squeeze bottles with little red protective caps. My plan was to fill at least one of them partway with glaze, and then see if I could squirt it out onto a pot which I would have spinning on a wheel (not too fast, of course, as it would not be secured to the wheel!), with the aim of producing some interesting patterns, perhaps spirals.

I decided to go with "iron red", which I would then cover with "olive green", producing a kind of black hue where the two colors merged. At first, because the glaze was kind of watery, and the nozzle a bit too wide, the squeezing of the plastic bottle produced some blobby shapes, not at all like the more delicate patterns I had hoped for. 

Then I got the idea of putting the tiny red cap back on the bottle, and poking a smaller hole in that cap with a needle tool. This allowed me to create a thinner, more controllable spray, which actually ended up working pretty well, and I used it on the insides AND the outsides of some of my larger pots and a few of my mugs. Some of the effects of the spray on the outside of the pots were unexpected and attractive. I wish I'd taken some photos of them before I did the next step of dipping the pieces in the olive green glaze, which obscured what I'd done with the spray. But I hope the final result will show those patterns.

The photo at top is a shot of some of my glazed pots from last night (the top two shelves), including some I decorated using the technique I just described. I can't wait to see what they look like once TIffany fires them! -- PL

Teapot Tuesday

Often, when I get to pottery class, either hand-building or intermediate wheel, I don't really have a plan for what I will be doing. I get there and I let the clay speak to me. Or perhaps a better way to put that is that the clay and my hands have a conversation, and eventually something emerges.

But this Tuesday morning, in my hand-building class,  I arrived with an idea. It wasn't a fully-formed idea, but I knew that I had two prepared slabs of leather-hard clay to play with, having made them at the end of the previous Tuesday's class. The idea was pretty basic -- make a boxy teapot.

I decided to use a shape I'd stumbled onto during my last hand-building class in the Spring. I'd made a template which was essentially a rectangle with one of the ends narrower that the end parallel to it, so that the shape (and I am sure there is a name for it, but I can't at the moment think of it) tapered toward that end. I used this template to make four pieces of clay which I then joined into a four-sided form. But instead of joining them narrow end to narrow end, which would have resulted in a sort of truncated pyramid shape, I decided to alternate the order, flipping each successive slab so that the narrow end joined with a wider end. I'm probably not articulating this too clearly. But the result was a very intriguing geometric shape which pleased me greatly, and I went on to make several hand-built pots using this technique. Here's an example from that last class:

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to do something similar to build the body of this slab-sided teapot, although the shape I had in mind was less vertically-oriented and more squat -- as teapots generally are.

It came together pretty quickly. Once I'd textured the slabs (using two small carved wooden rollers TIffany has in her studio, part of her extensive selection of texture tools), I traced the shapes with the template I'd made onto the slabs and carefully cut them out.

Once I had the basic body shape, complete with base, I had to make a top with a lid, and decided to go with a long rectangular lid, again made from pieces of a textured slab.

Then it was on to the spout, which came out a little funky -- I think I was rushing a bit, and didn't consider its shape carefully enough… so it isn't exactly centered or straight. But at least it i positioned at the right height, thanks to TIffany stepping in and reminding me to keep that in mind (I'd made a teapot previously with a spout poorly positioned, making it impossible to fill the pot more than two-thirds full without tea beginning to spill from the spout).

For the handle, I'd considered building an angular shape out of the slab, but ultimately decided to try something a little different, carefully (so it wouldn't crack) curling a piece of the softer slab into an half-cylinder shape, then cutting fingerholds into that once I'd attached it.

Will it all work as a teapot? Will the handle be comfortable to hold? Will the spout dribble or flow? The jury's still out. But it was a lot of fun to build. -- PL