Pottery

Pottery is a new hobby for me which I’ve been practising at evening classes since Jan 2016.  I chose it as it’s very practical and I wanted to create beautiful and/or useful items.  It’s not as easy as I thought.  There’s a lot more to think about and a little bit of praying to the gods of the kiln!

I’m posting it here to show my mistakes, and hopefully to chronicle some progress as I get better at this.

Here is the first set of pots I tried.  A piggy bank, using the basic thumb pot and modelling. A tankard/mug using slabbing.  They came back from the bisque firing intact – great!

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The thing I learnt here was the unpredictability of glazes (I was never that great at chemistry!).  What happened here was analogous with putting a red t-shirt in a white wash – the white stoneware glaze has tin in it, which reacted with something in the black underglaze that I used to do the drawing on the mug.  Trouble is, anything else in the kiln using stoneware white would also react.  This is why my mug and piggy bank both ended up pink!  Luckily I didn’t ruin anyone else’s pots, and maybe it was a happy accident, especially for the pink piggy.

 

Th next couple of attempts were disasters! I’m posting here to remind myself that everyone has to start somewhere.

The vase was a fairly competent coil pot, but then I ruined it by painting on the pattern with too thick a glaze, which bled and lost the detail.  It’s getting a few coats of acrylic on it when I get chance!

The fish-shaped soap dish was fun to make, by using broken glass pieces in the bottom, but I was really disappointed when the glass leaked through the eye hole and stuck to the kiln shelf.  Schoolgirl error, but hey, I won’t do it again!

 

This is what I did in autumn 2016.  The small round bowl was my first try at wheel throwing, which I really like and plan to do more of.  The larger chip-and-dip and 2 oval bowls were slab and coil.  The glaze was done by dipping in blue glaze then painting on Tenmoku (brown), which I now know is great to use to give a nice granulation effect.

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That’s all folks.  Next instalment coming soon….