Latest Progress with Pottery

It's been a while since I showed what I've been up to in the studio. What with work, traveling for work, vacation, playing elsewhere and whatnot, I haven't gotten to spend as much time as I'd like playing in the studio. But I do have some more finished stuff. (I have about a metric ton of bisque waiting to be glazed too. Here SOON I need to spend some time getting that finished, especially if I end up moving at the end of this month.)

I finally managed to finish a couple things that I've been sitting on for MONTHS. The poppies, the little owl plate and the goldfish are all actually from last fall and I just wasn't in the mood to finish them. The poppies in particular just needed me to fire them and then clear glaze them. I just forgot about them until I cleaned off my shelf and discovered them lurking in the back. That's one bad thing about having the top shelf - I can't see up there and I lose things.




I've been working on mugs and handles lately. When I first started throwing, my first couple of handles went really well and I listened to everyone whine about handles and thought, "What is their problem? These things are easy." Yeah. Shows what I know. Handles suck. So I've been practicing. A lot. I still have a long ways to go.


This one is getting better. Of course, I put a handle on there and it ended up being HUGE so I carved half of it away with a knife. It's still big, but better than it was. I don't really like the painting, so I may reglaze it. We'll see.


The handle kind of sucks on this one, but I'm thrilled with the way the glaze came out. It was totally worth all four days!


Another lesson learned: when dealing with more than one clay color, stay AWAY from ruffled rims. I am very fond of ruffled rims, and not just because they do a very nice job disguising uneven edges. They're pretty and I like them. But, in order for these marbled clay pots to look their best, you have to either 1) use a rib while it's still on the wheel and scrap off the top layer or 2) sand the living snot out of it - for HOURS - to remove the layer of slip and show off the marbling. If you ruffle the rim, you sand. By hand. For hours. And hours. Blech. But, it did turn out pretty cute.


One of the potters in this area does some REALLY cool stuff. She's actually the one who taught the Raku workshop that I recently attended. One of her trademarks is to put a pretty little flourish on her pots and I really like the way it looks. So, I had a couple of little bowls go wonky on me the other day and I tried her flourish. They turned out kinda cool, I think.



I'm still playing with texture. This isn't quite where I wanted to go, but I'm getting closer.


Based on something that another lady in the studio did, I started experimenting with painting with underglazes on top of glaze. The flowers turned out pretty much exactly as I hoped they would. I'll be experimenting further with this method, especially over other colors of glaze. The magnolia bowl won best in show at this year's annual pottery show at the studio, netting me a nice gift certificate to the store.




We got some new glazes to play with, so of course color experiments must follow. Some were brand new colors and I'd never seen them on my preferred clay (Highwater clay's little loafers). This is Pam's Blue glaze. Not bad, but not really what I had in mind either. Further experimentation is needed.


I love, love, love the creamy matte. It's a dip glaze for us and it's just really great. My favorite combination with it so far is with gunmetal green and tournaline, like this. But I'm also interested in how it combines with other colors as well. These were okay. I like the Pams Green (third one) the best, I think. The bowl that I tried the orchid and eggplant on was really thin, so the eggplant kind of gobbed up a bit. It's not bad, but I'm not thrilled with it. My fault - I applied the glaze too thickly.




And lest you think that all pottery works out well, I fussed with this ginger jar and lid for AGES - trimming and sanding and cooing over it. And then, I screwed up and glazed it with the wrong damn color and now it's ugly. Also, the lid doesn't fit worth a crap - it warped in the kiln. *sigh* Lids are worse than handles. Confounded things.


Lately I've been playing with collaring - taking a tall, straight cylinder and making the top smaller. It's tough, but I'm getting there. One major thing with collaring is that your rim usually ends up wonky. If you don't have enough to just cut off, you start getting creative. So, I'm doing a lot of pitchers right now... which also helps with that whole handle thing. The first one reminds me of a chicken for some reason, although no one else seems to see it. I love the second one, and will be desolate if it dies in the kiln.



I'm also finally working my way into larger balls of clay. I'm very comfortable centering and throwing up to about three pounds of clay. Over that, and it all goes to hell. Lately though, I've managed a couple of things that were nearly five pounds. Yay! Big bowls! Yay! One problem with that is that the glazing starts getting EXPENSIVE, so there's probably not a lot of huge things in my future - I can't afford it. I've got a bunch of stuff in the bisque fire now, that should be ready for my next visit. Once of them is my first attempt at a chip and dip bowl, so more pictures will be along shortly!

Raku!

Remember how excited I was, and how I couldn't wait and then they postponed it and I was so sad? Well, we FINALLY got to do the raku firing. Ideally, this doesn't happen when it's 98 degrees outside, with high humidity, since you're playing with fire and need to be covered in long pants (all natural fibers!) but I'll take it whenever I can get it!

Raku pottery uses special glazes and a particular firing technique which creates an oxygen reduction. This brings out the metallic colors of the glazes and you end up with pots that can look like gasoline spilled on blacktop - irridescent and metallic. I love the look, but there are some things to be aware of. This is a very unpredictable process. If your walls are not even, or sometimes just because, the pot can explode from the thermal shock. It is pretty much impossible to predict what your pot will look like after. Even the most dependable of glazes can behave erradically in the kiln, so if you're a control freak who needs to KNOW what your pot will look like when complete, this is not the process for you.

Also, raku is NOT food safe due to some of the more toxic elements in the glazes. We mostly dipped with some brushing to add the glazes, and we were outside in a very well ventilated area. Some people use airbrushes to spray the glaze on. If you do this, you MUST use a very good respirator CORRECTLY. (Someone in NC was seriously injured this year when she installed the filters incorrectly in her respirator - her lungs were seriously burned from inhaling the chemicals in her glazes and she almost died.) Unlike typical pottery, the reaction is not complete so it is necessary to seal your raku to keep the colors vibrant. I'll be using grout sealer, per my instructor's recommendation.

The first step, of course, is to have bisque. You must use clay capable of going to cone 6 and it must be a robust clay to stand up to the thermal shock. I shared a sleeve (25 pounds) of Highwater Raku clay with P. It's a bit more groggy (more sand) than I've gotten used to, so throwing it was interesting. This is the bisque that I had ready to go for the firing.


P picked me up, with coffee ready, and we were off around 8:00 am. The studio is at the instructor's home and is located about an hour away. Once we arrived, we greeted her German Shepherd, refridgerated everything for lunch (we'd decided on potluck, so everyone brought something) and headed to the studio.

As with any firing, the first step is preparing the bisque. She had compressed air to clean the pots or you can wipe them down with water to remove any dust. Then wax the bottoms to keep the glaze off - I dribbled a bit on one pot and once the wax is on there, you can't get it off without refiring so I used a brush to splat wax here and there on the pot. (Sometimes I think that I haven't necessarily gotten better at the pottery, I've just gotten better at making my mistakes look intentional.)

Second step: glazing. Chose your glazes so the colors and textures compliment your pot. Or, if you have no idea what the colors will look like, slop them all over the place and have fun!








Step three: loading the kiln. This is the first step that is a bit different for raku. As you must pull the pots quickly from the kiln, you load them with an eye to getting them back out. (For an electric kiln, the pots stay put until cool so you can pack 'em in there pretty much any which way.) The kilns we used for this were lowered down over the stack of bisque, so planning became even more important - you don't want to not have room for the kiln to be lowered. Once everything is stacked and ready, the kiln was lowered into place and lit. (These were both gas fired kilns.) Then we waited forever.



While we waited, we shredded massive amounts of newspaper into a large trash can. We also made "gaskets" by completely submerging 8 - 10 open sheets of newpaper in water. These we set to one side for later. We also got the metal garbage cans ready for the next steps. We emptied any ash out, covered the bottom of each garbage can with sawdust and a handful or two of the shredded paper, and made sure we knew where the lids were.


Step four: pulling pots. When the glazed pots were ready, we pulled on heavy fire gloves and grabbed long handled tongs. The kiln was raised. (The main kiln was rigged with a concrete block counterbalance, which made it MUCH easier than the secondary kiln. That one required us to put a rod through the handle on the top, and two people raised the kiln up and over. Both the guys lost most of the hair on their legs, and I was fairly convinced that my pants were going to catch on fire.) The pots were glowing red hot, and the heat was incredible. We reached in with the tongs, grabbed a pot, and put it in a metal garbage can. The paper people then threw several handfulls of shredded newspaper into the can, then another pot, then more paper until the can was about 3/4 full. Then the wet paper gasket was placed over the can and the lid fitted over that.





Step five: burping the pots. After everything sat for half an hour or so, we lifted the lid and introduced more oxygen into the garbage cans. Once the fire flared up, we added more newspaper if needed and shut the lid again.



Step six: into the water. Everything sat for another hour or so. (And we took the opportunity to go off and have lunch - YUMMY. P made an amazing apricot cheesecake, I made marinated cheese and a fruit salad, there were sandwiches, pasta, veggies and dip, more fruit - everything was REALLY good!) After we ate, and dragged ourselves back to the kilns, we used the tongs again to root around in the trashcans and find all of the pots. We put them into the water to quench them and they stayed there until they were cool enough to handle.



Step seven: out of the water. Once the pots had cooled, we fished them out of the water and rinsed them off. Some of the colors look even better if you scrub them with Ajax and a scotch bright.

Step eight: sealing. At some point, I will take my pots and seal them with grout and tile sealer. This keeps the colors from fading.

A separate part of the program was to be smoke painting. To do this, you put unglazed bisque in the kiln, heat it 'til it's glowing red, pull it out and immediately use feathers and horse hair to add designs to your piece. Once it's like you want it, let it cool and then polish it with several coats of wax. I tried this several times and failed miserably. I had one piece close, but I didn't realize that if you refired it to heat it up, you lost all previous attempts. Darn it! So, I ended up glazing everything 'cause smoke painting is currently beyond me. Part of the problem was that you have to work REALLY fast, and with 8 of us milling around, the pot was cooled off before I even really got to it. I'll need to play further with this.

And here are all of the after pictures. All in all, I've happy with how they turned out and with the whole experience. I definitely want to do it again one day!