What's New in Pottery?

Lots! I have been working on several different skills and here are the results.

Soup mugs. Trying to make a pair of something is hard. You get one right, but duplicating the effort isn't easy. I'm very happy with this one, glazed in my always favorite "blue rutile."


but the second one ended up smaller than I wanted, and the glaze came out differently. It is right on the inside

but too brown on the outside. Glaze is affected by how thickly it is applied, where that piece is in the kiln, what other pieces are in the kiln with it, and by the mood of the kiln gods.

Another soup mug, this one glazed in "sea foam," with "ocean runner." Ocean runner has no color of its own, it just affects the color of the primary glaze. I'm still learning how to work with this glaze. Here, I applied it in drips around the rim.

Racheal glazed this companion mug of the set. She needed a pot to use to teach glazing to another student, and I let her use this one. Same glazes, but she dipped the upper portion of this soup mug into the ocean runner after she applied the sea foam. See the different effects?


Another skill set I am practicing is making narrow-necked pots, in this case, pump dispensers. You buy the little pump parts, and use the cork to help gauge the size of the opening. This is blue rutile again. The inside, which you can't see, is that soft denim blue of the above mugs. The flower images were achieved by pressing an old-fashioned decorative button into the wet clay right after throwing.

This color is called "grape jelly," from a line called WonderGlaze. This brand of glaze is unique in that it can be fired at two different temperatures. Most glazes are "high fire" or "low fire," and if you put a low fire glaze into a hot kiln, you burn out all the color. (Made that mistake once!) In this case, if I had fired this piece at a low temp, I would have gotten more purple. Firing it in a high-fire kiln brought out more blue, making this sort of "periwinkle" shade.


I had two bowls of similar shape with the same glaze, one large and one small. I decided to make a set of three, so I threw another one in an in-between size. The bowl came out great, and the glaze, "chun plum" is terrific.

The size and shape is right to make a stacking set of three bowls. But, when you put the set together, you can see a slight variation in the color of the middle sized bowl. Kiln gods again!

How do you like this color? It's called "hot tamale," and is another Wonderglaze product, with the option for high or low firing. I only applied two coats, and low-fired it. If I had used a third coat, I might have had better results with the white speckled effect of this glaze. I don't think you can tell, but I pressed a stamp with a sort of Celtic knot design [edit: Chinese symbol. Thx, sis!] into the bottom of this bowl. If you click to enlarge, you might see it.


Please don't ask me what the difference is in high- and low-firing of the kiln. All I know is, greenware (raw, dried but unfired pots) goes into a low-fire kiln to produce bisque pots (first firing) and then the second firing is based on the glaze requirements. All I have to do is put the correct color-coded tag on my piece and Peggy takes care of the kiln. Learning to throw and trying to figure out the glazes is hard enough. I can't begin to think about the kiln!

Bisque pieces at home awaiting glazing include another pump dispenser, a bowl, a sugar bowl and creamer set, and a couple of things that I'm not sure what they are. At the studio, I have a set of four "dragonfly plates" that I threw Tuesday night. I made four plates about 7.5" in diameter, and pressed a rubber stamp of a dragonfly into the center of each one. My plan is to glaze each plate in a different color (probably chun plum, forest satin, blue rutile and grape jelly) and then put a thinner layer of "Saturation Gold" over the base glaze. I am hoping for an iridescent shimmer, like a dragonfly's metallic gleam. Wish me luck!