Oblong Platter

I unloaded the kiln last night and was very pleased with some of the results. It’s always a mystery which pieces will turn out as I’d hoped and I’m sometimes disappointed. This opening, I was please with nearly everything and very excited about a new design I’ve been working on. I’ve began making some oblong platters using clay slabs made with a handy piece of equipment called a slab roller. It works a lot like an old wringer washing machine. (Am I old or what?!). The clay slab is draped into a carved wooden bowl/platter shape I purchased while in Virginia a month or so ago. Here is a picture of the carved bowl. The wood draws the moisture out of the clay aiding in the drying process. When the piece is leather hard, I use slip to decorate the inside of the platter. And here is a picture of the piece I took out of the kiln last night. It is glazed in a rutile green glaze which flows nicely over the slip texture. I’ve got several other platters like this to glaze and fire and I can’t wait to see how they look.

Busy, Busy, Busy

I've got three more sales left this season and I've been busy getting things ready for the remaining sales and completing orders from previous sales.

My last post had a photo of a square plate I'd done a slip trail design on. Well, here's the same plate all glazed up. The glaze is a rust color where it's thinner over the slip and a soft cream color where it's thicker.

Slip

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I attended a workshop presented by Sarah McCarthy at the Jacksonville Center for the Arts in Floyd, Virginia. The workshop focused on texturing wheel thrown pottery, but we also spent some time discussing hand built and slab pieces as well. I enjoyed using slip to add texture to many of the things we worked on the workshop weekend and wanted to put the technique to work adding interested to some rather plain square plates I'd been making. I have plenty of slip in my throwing buckets at the end of a day so that was pretty easy, but screening out the grog was a little more challenging. With a great deal of determination, I managed to screen an ice cream bucket of slip and prepare it for use in a squeeze bottle. Here is a picture of one of the square plates with a slip design on the rim. I'll have lots of experimenting to do to find patterns that appeal to me, but that's part of the fun right? And one of the cool part about slip is you can just wipe it off with your sponge if you don't like what you've done and start over. The possibilities are endless. Thanks for visiting, let me know what you think and stop in again.