Big Changes

Last night, the dragonfly dishes came out of the glaze firing. We are very pleased with the results! The matte brown glaze spread a little and turned purple and blue. The result is a much more organic look and feel which is what we were hoping for.

The rest of the pieces in the firing were all worth getting weak kneed over, too! More photos of it all to come!

I think I'm in love!

I posted this dish a week or two ago in the leather hard stage. Often, this is the romantic stage with pottery. Either you are in love with your piece - it is smooth, dark, and cool but still flexible enough to bend to your will; or you hate it. Occasionally you might let the hated ones grow on you, but by the time they are bone dry, you should know whether or not the relationship will work.So, this little guy passed the love test and went on to be bisque fired and then glazed and fired again. Sometimes, at this stage, you fall right back out of love. Some pieces go bad in the glaze firing and disappoint you with blisters or pinholes or even (gasp) cracking. I always wonder what I did to make them hurt me so. But this little guy was true to my heart and came out perfect!

Pottery Squared

We are starting off the new year with new work. While I have always loved hand building, we have concentrated on wheel thrown work. At least partly, this is because hand built work can be so time consuming and I tend to think people won't pay what the labor requires.

I am trying to let go of preconceived notions and realize that what we believe is true is not always actually so. So, on that note, we are exploring new ideas and allowing ourselves some time to stray from the bread and butter of wheel thrown work.

Our first wanderings are a line of square dishes. These are not as time consuming as other hand built work and should be reasonably priced. We are using slabs of clay and slumping those slabs into molds. When they are not quite leather hard, we are stamping the rims with our hand carved stamps. I had fun figuring out if Alex's cylindrical wave stamp could make the turn on the rim of a square bowl. It worked out so perfectly you might think I was confident it would work. After the pieces are leather hard, we are adding rather tall feet.


Also coming - perhaps photos tomorrow - are a line of Neti Pottery. If you are not familiar, they are used for the Hindu practice of sinus cleansing. I have recently begun this practice and I am a huge believer... Alex is not so enthusiastic. Our journey into sinus cleansing pots began because another enthusiast remarked, "Why can't Neti Pots look nice? A good potter should work on this." I took it as a challenge and went straight to the wheel.