one pot

One of the things that I love about raku is the total unpredictably of what is going to happen to the glaze in the bin with paper. Sometimes one side of a particular pot may look totally different from another.

One of Bill's pot was such a pot.

Don't they look different?

The rest of the yarn bowls

And, here are the rest of my yarn bowls. I wasn't sure which profile I would like the best and so I threw several different styles as well as hand built a couple of different styles.

A couple of them turned out to be seconds, which in Pottery world means that there is a flaw or two, but it is still functional.

Oh yes, there is one more of which I have yet to get a picture. The yarn bowl in question was my third favorite one and given to a very dear friend who promised to take a picture and send it to me. You know who you are!

Bill's production

Here are the pots that Bill made during the raku workshop. I am sure that he will have something to say about them.

This one is about 13 inches across the rim

The bottom of this is what is called "naked Raku" where you put slip on the bare pot and glaze over top of the slip and the idea is that the carbon from the burning paper doesn't penetrate where the slip and the glaze are. Except that this one dried too fast and a lot of the slip fell off.

Here is a hand built pot not unlike my yarn bowl. Only larger.

This is a test piece mug. The idea was to mask out portions of the clay before you applied the glaze and you would get black areas.

A two tone vase.

What we call the Ming Vase. More on this one later.

And another naked raku. This one was much more successful.

It is really hot here and I am so glad that I am not firing raku today. It would be brutal!

Raku 2011

This summer I was brave enough to take another raku course. Raku is a kind of pottery that is fired to it's final glaze temperature rather quickly. The clay is made to withstand relatively quick temperature changes.

You start by throwing or hand building your pots. I was really interested in making some yarn bowls. I threw some on the wheel and hand built a few. The clay that we were using was really too stiff. The teacher was rather upset with the supplier for sending the wrong blend of raku clay. It was so stiff that I ended up ripping some skin off of my hands on the first day. Which is why I  ended up doing some hand building.

Bill also took the class with me. He enrolled in a pottery class last winter and really liked it. I knew the teacher of the raku class and thought that Bill would learn a lot from him so I basically forced him into taking the class by getting it for him for his birthday.

After the pots have been bisqued (which is to fire them in a kiln to a low temperature to drive off the excess moisture and make them firm so they don't come apart when they get a bit wet) you put the glaze on them and put them into a kiln. The kiln is them brought up to the melting point of the glaze which is somewhere between hot and stinking hot depending on the weather. We had a hot windless day and so it was stinking hot.

The next day we went to the teachers place where he had a river nearby as well as a cover over his raku kiln.

And we turned the kiln on to fire. The pots on the top were put there to dry a little more. Because of having to put pots into a hot kiln, they needed to be warmed up just a little bit before hand or the clay and glaze may pop and explode a bit. NOT what you are looking for!

And then you wait around for about 45 minutes while the kiln comes up to temperature. Beer may be involved. So may munchies.

When the pots come out of the kiln, They are put into a metal garbage bin with a base of wood chips and some newspapers. The cover is put on and they are left to cool down some for about 15 to 20 minutes.

The pot is then plunged into a bucket of water and scrubbed to remove the carbon on the surface.
Here are two of my pots. I focused mainly on yarn bowls and these were my two favorites.

 Here they are a little blurred but the colour is about right.

Craftier and Craftier

Since the new year, Mira and Bill have been taking a night pottery class down at the Craft College. Before the class started, Bill was asking me what I thought that he should throw. Did I want bowls or mugs or something else? Having taken 2 years of clay,  most of it on the wheel,  and watched beginner class after class make monstrosities, my reply was "Anything. If you manage to throw anything half decent, I will be happy"

Well, after very little instruction (and many, many, many, youtube videos) Bill managed to make a number of very nice actually usable pieces of pottery.


Here are his three mugs. The one on the left even has fish relief on it. They were sculpted out of a slab of clay and detailed and then attached.

Here is one of his first bowls. It is about 5 inches across.

Here is one of his early vases. We will not see his first vase like thing. It is holding 5 pens and can be used to defend the house from intruders. It's a little thick. And heavy. And ugly (he agrees).

Here is a cereal bowl. Bill has also made a much, much, much, bigger bowl. Actually larger than any bowl that I have ever thrown. It is in the kiln being fired right now and will hopefully make an appearance soon. 

I think that Bill was rather taken aback by my early comment of "Don't expect too much from yourself" There is a steep learning curve when dealing with clay. Especially when working with clay on a wheel. He was determined that he would take command of the clay and show it who's boss, so to speak. And to show me that he would do just fine thankyouverymuch! And he did.

Close Ups

As requested, here are a few close ups of a couple of my pots.

In the first few classes I threw two basic forms. One was belly forms that looked sort of like a honey pot in the Winnie the Pooh stories. Back a hundred years ago when I was a student, it was one of the forms that I enjoyed throwing. I made a number of mugs like this but over time they left my life in various ways. Some walked away in the hands of friends. Some were abused and eventually died. And a couple succumbed to temperature shock.
Here is the last one that I have. It was one of the ones that succumbed to temperature shock. There is a hairline fracture on one side so it has been holding toothbrushes for the last 10 or so years. 

I had fun decorating around the handle. I seem to recall that we had a workshop with a fellow named John Glick who showed us some fun decoration techniques that he used. I really wish that I had taken more photos of some of my pottery from this time. Most of the pottery ended up in the hands of others, and none of it was documented. I was still in the delusional land of "I made it once, I can make it again". At the time I didn't understand how children change things.

Oh, the lessons we learn.

Now I know, just because you can do something doesn't mean that you will.

My forms this time around were not quite the same. And as I said, I had forgotten (or didn't take into account) the whole shrinkage thing.  The little blue pot is 3 inches where the brown mug above is a respectable 4.25 inches. I was also in a bit of a rush and didn't really want to take the time to make handles. These cups would have had to be espresso cups anyway.

The second type of form that I concentrated on were bowls thrown off the hump.

The basic idea of this type of throwing is that you put a big chunk of clay on the wheel and center only the top of it. You then throw your bowl and cut it off the hump. The top part of the clay is centered again and the next bowl is thrown. This continues until the clay is all used up.

Here is one of my hump bowls.

I started to scratch words into my hump bowls. This one says "Truth". The glaze is one that doesn't  show up the words at all. Chris, the teacher, said that he was very interested in using "safe" glazes. And by that he means glazes that don't run too much and muck up the kiln shelves. I understand this totally, having seen what runny glazes that were over-applied by inexperienced people can do to a kiln shelf.

This is the one glaze that actually shows the words. I really like it but it is not the glaze that I would like to have on all of my pots. I would like a celadon. Which is basically a clear glaze with a little colour that shows up words and/or throw marks really well.

This cup says "Oh Dear". The reason for this was that it was still a little bit wet when I was trimming and I gouged the foot a bit. So...."Oh Dear.....I goofed"

Finally!

Here are the first of my glazed pots.

We had 5 glazes to chose from so I did some glaze tests to see how they flowed and how the engraving on the pots looked. There were a few that I liked but I am persuing other options because none of them showed up any lettering.

 

Here are the two bowls that I glazed last week. They seemed so big when I took them off of the wheel but now that they are fired and glazed, they seem a lot smaller. I know that there is some shrinkage in the kilns, but it seems like a lot to me. All my post seemed to be really small. I guess that I will have to try and throw some larger ones so that they can shrink down to a normal size instead of these tiny little things that I ended up with.

In any case, I should have a few more things to show sometime next week.

Pot progression

Now now. Not that kind of pot!

This kind.....

These are a few of my trimmed pots. I was going for a stemless wine glass shape. I think that I succeeded in most cases. There were two that managed to dry out a bit to much to trim and they ended up in the waste bucket, but the other 20+ managed to survive. I still don't know what glazes we are going to have available. I hope that they are ones that shows the trimming lines that you can see on the two on the left.
Last week I spent the entire 3 hour class trimming. NOT my favorite part of the potting process, but I generally like the results. On reflection, the dislike of trimming probably comes from my lack of confidence. I feel that I might trim through the bottom of the pot, or that I will not trim enough off the bottom and leave it too thick and it may crack in the kiln.
Practice makes prefect and I seem to have very little time to practice.

Getting down and dirty

A couple of weeks ago, a new semester of school started, and along with it was a new session of evening classes. One of the classes is a throwing class. Throwing pots on a wheel that is. Not throwing things across the room. Although that may happen with pots from time to time. All accidentally of course.

As I mentioned this past summer, I had taken a year of pottery back in my student days. I really enjoyed playing in the mud, most days, and thought that it would be nice to do a little more. I also would like to make a few large bowls and the perfect mug. I looked for my prefect mug at all of the craft sales that I was at this past Christmas season and didn't find what I was looking for.

So now I have a goal.

Here is what I threw the first day of class. 9 muggy forms and 3 bowls of various sizes. Unfortunately, they ended up being a little to dry to put handles on by the time that class came around again so I h=now have a bunch of "vases" or "handle-less mugs".

 Here is one of the 4 bowls that I threw last night. The circular batt that it is sitting on is about 12 inches in diameter to give you a rough idea of the size of the bowl.

And here are the other three bowls that I did last night. They make me very happy!

Next week, I get to trim these babies and try and throw my perfect mug form. And for those of you who have never done any pottery, when you throw a pot on a wheel, you usually leave some extra clay on the bottom and when it has dried a bit, you put the pot back on the wheel upside down and use a special tool to "trim" away any excess clay. That is how potters put a little rim on the bottom of pots. We call then feet.

As for the two things that didn't work out, well, you all know what a lump of sloppy clay looks like right? But I saved my clay and spread it out of a plaster bat to dry a bit. Next week I will get a wedging lesson. I tend to kneed my clay, which is a bad thing. Wedging is sort of like kneeding except that you are both softening the clay and removing any air that is present. Kneeding is an action that introduces air into the mass that you are working with and air pockets in clay are bad in so many levels. When you are throwing, they make your clay uneven on the wheel. Think unbalanced spin cycle in the washing machine and then translate that to wet clay. Not good. It can also cause your pot to blowup when being fired because the air pocket heats up and has no place to go, pressure goes up and a piece of your pot comes off. Also not good.
So I need to learn how to stop kneeding my clay and start wedging it.

Everyday is a new adventure.