Wednesday, October 2, 2013

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!!!









No comments:

Post a Comment