NEW posts added and some bits moved

I have just re-entered my older pottery pictures and put in a whole new load of pottery pictures, the old ones were mixed in with a different post, and I wanted to put a bit more detail in the posts, also having an entry per pot means the images and text don't get so out of control. Everything dated today is posts about pottery - there's about two and a half pages of pottery blog after this post.

I gave up trying to keep the pots in order - so they are a bit random.

tea-light cover

Playing around - this is a white earthenware coil pot, which then got savagely attacked by a knife and hole borer - it makes a nice tea-light cover.

It was a fill in pot near the end of term.

hedgehog in progress

A work in progress - he has been for quite some time - since last July I think. He's raku clay and lives on my sideboard.

I do not know what this is, I was playing around with the feel of pinch pots - its a sort of undersea monster fish squid thing - it feels just righ in your hand though - it kind of cuddles into my palm.

DTS pinch pot pig with oatmeal glaze, I think he has a lot of character.

big chunky coil pot

This is quite a large pot - about 10 inches tall, I made the opening so it's just large enough to get your hand into it, but if you have a first full of candy its rather harder to get it out again (evil aren't I)
Its made from black iron stoneware, with the red green glaze, then I dribbled extra red on the glaze, and painted the letters with the red glaze

Decorative coil pot with cobalt blue glaze

This is a decorativbe coil pot - using a bowl as a mould, I made coils from red earthenware and arranged them in teh bowl, then smoothed the inside a lot.

After Firing the outside was touched up with an oxide to highlite the insides of the coils and then I glazed it with a cobalt blue glaze - which has to be one of my favourite glazes for earthenware.

Cat model

First pinch pot model. He is made from red earthenware, and was fired to biscuit, then smoked by the tutor in a bin - the random effect hit him just perfectly. I then heated him in the oven and waxed him to daren up his surface and set the smoking.

This was my first coil pot - its black iron stoneware with a red glaze and some texture work, I painted small bits of glaze on the squares to make them stand out a little. It's now home to some pretty wooden roses I bought Chris for our anniversary.

My first pot

This was my first pot made at pottery class - its a simple pinch pot in DTS with red-green glaze. It has a poesy Lizzie collected for me while walking with Chris. It leaks a fraction when full.

Pottery - dragon

This is probably my favourite and best piece - also the one which took the most hours to finish. He's made of Raku, with a red/green glaze. His body is two large pinch pots, and his head is a smaller pinch pot, he's kind of hybrid of a variety of fantasy books including discworld (hence the ears)

Cobalt blue and white earthenware figures

White earthenware figures with cobalt blue glaze. I actually treid to decide whatto amek first, and tried to make it impressionistic as well. The Glaze isn't really quite this purple - the flash does something strange to it.

Quick Froggy

This froggy was an end of year model - I had one class left and there was no point starting something complicated. He's made of DTS - two pinch pots joined. The glaze is crystal blue, it has to be on quite thick which is why his head looks a bit peculiar.

I think I should have given him pupils. Lizzie calls him the blind frog.

Textured plaque

A textured peice for my Daughter, we found a snake in our grass last summer and she loved him so much (grass snake) she wanted to keep him. I wouldn't let her so uncorporated this into her plaque. One day if we ever own our own house again I will hang it on her door.

Its made of DTS (a fairly groggy stoneware), the base peice was heavily textured with a texture roller, then another peice was textured with a plastic toy wheel, this was cut into the letters, everything else was done with mdeling tools. The darkness is Copper oxide - which is rubbed all over the palces where texture is desired, then wiped off the places where it isn't - making the texture jump out a bit more.

stick figure model of my husband on the beach

I hated the process of doing this. OK I quite like the way it looks, but the assembly and then clothing of the figure was just to hurried for my somewhat deliberate disposition.

We had to create a skeleton figure - with a trunk, hips shoulders arms and legs as well as a head, then clothe it with pieces which had to remain open to the air as much as possible (for air to escape while firing). The clay had to be used quite thin for the clothing which meant you had to work fast as thin clay dries faster and starts cracking up when you drape it into position.

GIraffe

This giraffe is made from raku clay - a strong clay which is good for modeling as well as being great for raku firings.

His body was made of two pinchpots, and his neck was a series of coils, then his head was another pinch pot. He was then painted with under glaze colours, and from tehn on treated as earthenware despite Raku being Stoneware - firing him at stoneware temperatures would fade the colours. THen he should have been glazed with earthenware glaze and fired as earthenware again, but the tutor had a bad day and gave me the wrong glaze (stoneware), hense his soemwhat milky appearance.











Other side where you can see his tail.

More pottery - Slip decoration

This pot is slip decorated and uses a variety of techniques with the slip. First the Blue was painted on with a wide brush whilst rotating the pot on a turntable. This was allowed to dry to 'leather hard', then the white and some of the green were sponged on . Again this was allowed to dry a little. Then the wood of the tree was created by scraping away the blue green and white. The swing bar was also created this way. The ropes were painted on. Then a bit more green was sponged over the wood for foreground leaves. Then a slip trailer was used to spot fruit on the tree. I then spun the bowl on a turntable and painted the plum coloured rim and dark line, then used the slip trailer again to make green spots.



This is the side view. The feet are little pinch pots with holes in the bottoms.

More recent Pottery

This is my first hard slab group of pots, they each have a different texture - one is coarse netting, another was rolled on by a decorators texturing tool, and the other was rolled out on a knit doily