Epiphany

Whoa!! Hold the presses!!  You mean when you fire pottery at the temperature at which it was intended to be fired, wonderful things happen??

Yes, it seems that this is true............ so I finally realized what was going on between the clay and the glaze and the firing and told Dave to put everything in at cone 6.

Here are my latest pieces:

I love the vibrant colors!  I've been waiting so long for this!

Yes, I still have a ways to go with the color.......... I still see lighter areas.....Maybe I'm not letting it dry enough between coats?  Maybe it didn't all get three coats?  

I know that brushing it on is not the ideal technique, but it's all I've got at the moment.

It's not perfect, of course,  but there's nothing like a small step forward to make you giddy with excitement!

I may just bisque my huge platter and glaze it (very scary):

or my doormat plate next.......... Yay!!!

In trolling through previous photos to find this week's firings, I thought I would post some other pieces as well.

This plate was a gift to Julie, my best buddy.  The bottom is made from a sink strainer I spotted at Bath & Body......... the green matches the green in her house perfectly!

I like this piece because it has a retro sort of look to it.......... I used oleander leaves as imprints for the leaves.  It was also my first try at making my pieces thicker and I immediately liked the difference.

This piece has not been glazed yet (fear is the major reason behind this) but it has a funny story behind it.  The cruddy looking doormat piece next to it provided the beautiful geometric pattern----I found it laying next to the road in the dirt as Howard and I went on one of our walks around the neighborhood.

The last piece is the wall hanging I made for Dionne and Jared when they got married.  Thankfully I learned about Stroke & Coat glaze BEFORE I wrote their names on the already-glazed background.  The stick was a lucky find from school..........

Pottery: trials and tribulations

I got an excellent piece of advice today and decided to follow through.......... I've been dabbling with pottery for about 4-5 years now and should start posting some of those efforts.

I got a beautiful North Star slab roller in 2011.........I've warned my children it has a lifetime guarantee, so they'd better start thinking about who's going to get it when I'm gone.......

Here's one of my first endeavors............ you might say that was an ominous beginning.........

My first problems involved surface textures.  Nothing looked smooth and there were weird wrinkles everywhere ........ hmmm .......sounds like me in the mornings!  :))

But even so, they looked better before glazing than afterwards.......... So now, my current nemesis (what's the plural of nemesis??) is glazing, glazing, glazing.

Here's the past week's efforts:

On the plus side:  I like the free form and it was smooth and the edges looked much better than in the past.  The blue painter's tape worked really well and I like the jagged edges on the sun's rays.

On the minus side:  I thought the turquoise would effectively cover the yellow and while it doesn't look BAD ......... it doesn't look deep turquoise as I wanted it to, therefore not having the dramatic contrast for which I had hoped.

Possible problems:  totally novice-type errors........ the clay is a cone 10, the glaze is cone 6, and it was fired at cone 06.  What a mish-mash!

Plan:  buy a cone 6 clay at NM Clay........ talk to gallery owner I know and ask her how she glazes with a brush and yet ends up with no brush marks......... is it the firing process??  

The more I learn, the more I realize I hardly know anything!!!

This is Humberto.

Good news?? He's a very nice man. He loves to fish and host fish fries. He loves his garden and his kids. He goes to church and wants to buy a little boat someday.

Bad news?? He can't do concrete work any better than I can.

Worse news?? He's the one who made the concrete edge around our grass.

Our first clue was when he declared that for some mysterious reason, the truck didn't bring enough concrete. They had to wing it and mix some up right then and there in the wheelbarrow. Two concretes= two colors, two consistencies.......uh-oh. Did I mention they dribbled it everywhere??

The next day we discovered why there wasn't enough concrete: the forms weren't deep enough and the concrete drooled out the bottom and made a concrete floor all around.........

Then he pulled off the forms too soon and the concrete stuck to them and left holes in the edging............ So he patched that with concrete miracle patch.......yet another color..............

Meanwhile, he's humming the whole time and babbling how he loves pleasing his clients......oy vey ......