Breaks Over

The soup bowl event was very successful but I was too lazy to blog about it. I took a needed break and now the holidays are here. The mug is a gift which will be mailed out very shortly. I've layered three different Seattle pottery glazes. One is runny and pulls the others with it, which is exactly what I want. The vase below that is a test of all the Coyote Clay glazes that I have. I put 2 bands on the rim with the hopes of finding that special winning combination. Some pleasant results but I won't be giving out any gold stars.

It's that time of year- Utah Soup Bowl Event

For all ages.

Last of the flowers in new vase

Enjoying one more bouquet from the garden before the weather gets cold. The vase has a Seattle Pottery turquoise glaze with a black glaze of my own concoction, overlapping. The second glaze firing gave me the look I was after.

Muffin Keeper is a keeper

I had made this piece at least 2 years ago but couldn't figure out how to glaze it. In fact it has an old stamp I used to use. The knob had popped off in the bisque firing but it was a clean break. Well I finally had a glaze combination that worked for me. I used layers of 3 different Seattle Pottery glazes with an Iron Red accent glaze. I knew the glaze would run, but I never know exactly how much. I put a little glaze under the knob and that attached it back to the lid. This kiln god got it right.....embrace the drippiness!

A set of four

Every time I've made a set of bowl, something goes wrong with the fourth bowl. So it's about time that I finally got a good matching set of four bowls (the fourth bowl is holding up the third bowl). Shapes are almost identical, nothing cracked, glaze didn't fail and glaze is random but similar. I made sure I placed all bowls in the middle of the kiln. I used Seattle Pottery Supply glazes....mottled blue over mottle brown. Poured on, not brushed. Yeah!

Never enough bowls

Soup/salad bowls drying in the furnace room with a fan. The large bowl is my second attempt at a 3 pound bowl. I need to go larger next time but it will do for now.

Small and detailed

These small pendants get a loop of Kanthal A1 annealed 16 gauge wire shortly after they are formed. This allows me to hang them for glazing. I started making little things when I first got into working in clay and I like to return to it. Even though it is 90+ degrees F outside, I do need to start working on Christmas items. Difficult to wrap my mind around that.

A few more cobras

I had made a few more pieces just in case of a failure of some sort. There are so many stages where a piece can go wrong, ie ...cracks at bisque firing, or even exploding or someone else's piece exploding and taking yours with it or multiple ways glazes can fail with blisters, crawling, dripping and fusing to the shelf, it's amazing we keep at it at all. But when all pieces come out better than expected, and no matter how thoroughly I examine the pieces, I wouldn't change a thing, it makes my week, maybe month! And that's the hook that keeps me and my pottery pals, making and creating.

Cobra mug

I think this is the best mug I have made so far. It is large but light, a strong and simple shape but enough detail on the lip and foot area to keep it interesting. (I did use a rib this time when shaping on the wheel). The black glaze has lots of depth with additional colors breaking through and the inside rim dripped into the Mayco shino glaze better than I had hoped. The black glaze is a Seattle Pottery Mottled Brown with added cobalt carbonate and red iron oxide. And most importantly, the glaze on the cobra stayed put. I am happy that it has a new owner who is very pleased.

Cobra stamp for mugs

I've been working on a project for a friend. I made the cobra stamp from an impression I took off a car medallion. If you know your cars, you'll know which one. The details came out better than I expected. A little corn starch, dusted on first, helped the clay release. Applying the cobra to the cylinder was more challenging. The clay had to be soft enough to bend to the curve of the mug, but hard enough to maintain the detail when attaching. Tomorrow and the next day, I glaze and fire.

New glaze combinations

Same old glazes, new combinations. Loving the results. This is one of the bisqueware pieces I had sitting on my shelve for about a year and a half. I finally forced myself to finish it. My glazing skills needed to catch up with my throwing skills. I plan to make more.

It's barbecue season

I couldn't waste a perfectly good barrel fire without doing some experimenting. Before I started the fire, I put a few of mostly small pieces of pottery (1.5 inches wide and high) in the bottom of an ash-filled metal barrel. Only one piece was larger and might have been of hand dug Draper clay. All were bisqued fired but one little jigger, which was greenware. I wrapped each pot in a salt-soaked ragged and thoroughly dried them in the sun before barbecuing. I got many complaint from my kids who were cooking hotdogs when the largest pot exploded and a shard or two flew out of the barrel with a bang. Oops...there goes my Mother of the Year award again, lol. I like the results. I'm not sure the salted rags did anything in particular but the barrel seemed to have reached a high enough temperature to reach the clays maturity....cone 5 maybe. The chips on the side of one pot occurred, I think, when we kept adding sticks on top of everything not knowing where the pots were in the ashes. Just some outdoor fun.

Draper Arts and Crafts Festival 2014

I had a very enjoyable day at the festival and the time just flew by. Thanks to everyone who stopped by. Meeting the Events Director, attendees, customers and fellow vendors was a great pleasure. I am in great debt to my daughter who helped me pull it all together. It is true that the devil is in the details! But she told me that is was part of my Mother's Day gift so I won't feel too guilty. I have only one complaint. It was too cold! Maybe 50 degrees, and breezy. The sun didn't show itself either. I guess we're lucky it didn't pour like it did in the neighboring town. My booth was under the pavilion but not too many customers want to walk around in the cold rain. Despite that, I actually managed to sell some pottery and I look forward to doing more of the same next year. Hopefully without a winter jacket, however!

Attention Utahns!

I am so excited! I have been assigned booth #10 which is in the open pavilion. I have made limited edition and one-of-a-kind pieces for this event. Great gifts for Mom's Day which is Sunday. So come early for the best selection or just come by to say "Hi."

Getting ready

Saturday, May 10 there will be the 2nd annual Draper City Arts and Crafts Festival. I was going to be lazy and not participate but my daughter convinced me to enter. Since I started making pottery about 5 years ago, I have accumulated quite a few pieces. So it is about time I take the next step. My daughter ordered these business cards to make me official for the festival. She is quite the organizer. Good thing....I need all the help I can get!

I spoke too soon

I woke up to sleet and snow, with enough accumulations to make the lawn white and the roads slushy. The weather people claim it will be sunny and in the 50s by afternoon. To me, it looks like a great day to do some glazing and make some pots in my Momcave. : - )

Storms have passed

We had an all-day rain yesterday with snow in the mountains. A few days before that, the wind gusted to over 45 mph. Some folks around Utah State were without power due to downed trees on power lines. But today is a new day and the Eastern Red Bud tree (yes Eastern, not western) managed to hold on to those pretty blossoms in all that wind. Just a little update from my locale. Hope your weather is calm where ever you may be.

Light to dark

I got the idea that a vase would have an interesting look if I could get the glazes to blend from light to dark. Overlapping multiple glazes that I had, sort of did the job. I had to use a glaze that I knew would run in order to get a bit of running and blending at the shoulder of the pot. Next time I will reverse the order because I like the upside down image, better. Or I could always stand on my head. Yeah, that's the answer.

The bowl of drips

Yes, I am still working on soup bowls. I can't actually remember my initial plan for glazing this particular bowl but I know this wasn't it. But sometimes when you get cool drips, you've got to keep them and see how it fires. This was a custom mixed glaze called Lilac with a layer of Laguna's Celadon Froth on the outside. It's either avaunt guard or ugly. You decide.

Medallion bowls

I carved a little stamp to make my own medallions on yet another soup bowl. Seattle Pottery Supply's Shadow Green glaze brings it all together. Iron Red glaze accents the medallions and dripped a little as I had hoped. One of these days I'll make a set of bowls for myself and stop using my ancient set of Corelleware. This reminds me of a reply a carpenter/builder gave me once. After seeing a beautiful example of his work at a friends house, I commented to him, "Your house must look amazing. Where do You live?" He said, "a trailer home in a trailer park." He said that when he got home from work, he did not want to build or fix anything. For now, it's soup bowls for everyone else but me!

Never put an egg in your pocket

We have a small flock of chickens and I needed to bring one egg in the house to refrigerate. Who needs a basket for one egg. I'll remember I've got an egg in my pocket. Well one distraction led to another and I get to the bathroom sink to wash my hands and I hear a crunch! Now I remember....ughhhh. At least very fresh eggs have strong membranes and I was able to scrape most of it out of my pocket and put it in a nearby cup. Guess what I'm having for lunch? I had to share. Hope your day starts out better.

Soup Toureen Bowl

We've got almost 50 bowls completed and we have 50 more to make. I don't feel like I've even hit my stride in bowl creativity. As I was bringing in this pot for firing, I received some encouraging compliments , even in its greenware state. To "handle" and stamp a piece, I usually have to work it at home to get it to the correct leather hard stage. It turned into a real cutie and I will try to make more of that shape. The glazes are Seattle Pottery Supply Dark Mottled Blue painted generously 3X in the interior and lip and a pouring of Lagunas Celadon Froth on the exterior. I put a little Iron Red on the square around the leaf but one coat wasn't enough. I will have to revisit where the Celadon and the Blue meet on the lip. I like how that looks. All at cone 5/6 in a Skutt kiln.

Glaze fix

A previous, temporary instructor of the senior center had purchased a large amount of Laguna Catalina Crackle, without testing. Bad idea. It ran like it was in a marathon, and blistered leaving sharp craters. The sludge that settled in the bottom of the bucket is impossible to mix by hand. Not exactly user friendly. Thanks to an article in Pottery Making Illustrated July/Aug 2013, In the Studio "Crazed" written by Deanna Ranlett, the glaze shall not go to waste. I tested two possible solutions suggested in the article and both worked...the addition of Gertsley Borate or EPK. The trick was to get the proportions correct since I am dealing with a bucket of wet glaze. So my testing measurement went like this.... mix 1/4 cup of drained glaze sludge with 1 teaspoon of EPK mixed in 1/8 cup of glaze liquid. Repeat until empty peanut butter jar is full. I will have to expand my measurements since I've got a large bucket to amend. This bowl, for soup of course, shows the results. The bare buff colored stoneware becomes an attractive toasted color next to this glaze. And that crackle finish makes it worth all the trouble.

Drippy Soup Bowls

At the fundraiser, I noticed that people were looking for "his" and "her" soup bowls. So even though no two bowls will be identical, I have decided to give myself the challenge of making some bowls as similar as possible. Colonial White glaze over Brown Mottled makes for nice drippy rims on this pair.

Mug of many glazes

From bottom to top, the glazes are, Burnt Orange, Iron Red, Brown Mottled, Colonial White and a drizzle of Catalina Crackle in the middle.

4 new glazes

The Draper Senior Center's soup bowl fund raiser was so successful this past November, we are already planning for this November. Since we will be making 100 bowls this time around, we need a good supply of glazes. And that is what I recently ordered. Its almost like Christmas again! It is great to discuss other glazes and all things pottery with other potters because that is where I learned of Seattle Pottery Supply and their glazes. (You would never know how good their glazes are from their web site images, however.) Upper left and continuing clockwise is Mottled Dark Blue, Shadow Green, Burnt Orange and Brown Mottled. They are very paintable and stable at cone 5/6 although all but Shadow Green can be fired at 04. More tests to be done, always! The overlaps show potential for color variations. The random spots and rim are Laguna's Colonial White which I find plays nicely with others. Lol. This is more fun than I should be allowed to have. Now to make more bowls.

Completed

More glazes used on a piece, the better. The exterior body glaze is chun red, interior is colonial white. The lip has bands of shadow green and iron red which I paint on the upper portion of the pot knowing they will run a little. I find that when I layer glazes from other manufacturers I get more interesting results than when I stick with the same company. Laguna, Standard Ceramics and Seattle Pottery Supply glazes work well together. More on Seattle Pottery and soup bowls in the next post.

Time to catch up

I have been meaning to get this mug glazed, fired and gifted months ago. But sometimes there are not enough hours in a day. So sometimes, Christmas extends into January.