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.