Today and Yesterday

This is one of my current projects. The clay is still fairly damp - it's the right consistency to trim. After I finished trimming it, I painted on several coats of red underglaze and then used something sharp and shiny to carve squiggles into the clay. This particular clay is little loafers, which is white when fired. The plan is for the bowl to be red, with the white lines showing.


I'm so very proud of this bowl. It will break my heart if something happens to it. It's huge, for me, at 6" or so across. It's also thin and even and not lopsided! I love it so! The first picture is as thrown, the second is after trimming. It's bisqued now and waiting for me to figure out the glaze. So pretty...



I threw this one on the same day. It's a nice bowl. I have no idea what colors to make it yet. Something happened during the bisque fire - there's now a chip on the foot. Grrr. But, it's a minor problem.



And here are some of the things I finished ages ago and never posted...

My first squiggles bowl, from September. The clay is called desert buff and it fires to a very nice oatmeal color. I carved in the squiggles and then dyed them with rust oxide. The rust color darkened to black in the kiln.



Here's the completed zebra dish. It's kind of shaped like a bathtub. The clear glaze is kind of gobby and my orange dancers faded out so I'm not thrilled with it. I do like the little zebras though.



This is how the squirrel vase turned out. The red in him faded away, leaving him a black squirrel. Kent State University, in Kent, Ohio, is known for their black squirrels so I've decided that he's a Kent squirrel.


A lot of the glazes that I use are from Coyote. Their site also features a really cool gallery of things that have been done using their glazes. I REALLY liked the sun bowl done by Terri Baldin. (Go here, it's the third one down.) This bowl was my version of her idea. I used mottled blue by itself, and it came out a bit dark. Next time, I'll also use Oasis.



Given the stack of bisque on my shelf, I'll have more to show soon. Actually, it may take a while. I signed up for a raku workshop, which has me ridiculously excited, and I'm busy making things from raku clay to have bisqued and ready to go by the workshop at the end of February. Do check out the video on raku - that, in a significantly more amaturish fashion, is what I'll be doing soon. The artist that is having MY workshop takes another step and quenches the pot in water after pulling it from the sawdust. This means that I have to use a clay that can withstand some serious man-handling. I REALLY hope stuff turns out! So excited!