Chugging Along

This week in pottery class, Ron showed us how to facet pots.  This was my most successful effort.  Believe it or not, I used a stretched out spring from a ball point pen to make the design.  If you pull the wire straight through, the spring will make stripes.  To get this effect, I gently moved the wire back and forth as I pulled through the clay.  The sides of the pot were vertical when I cut the facets.  After cutting the design, I pushed out from the inside (while it was turning) to create the curve.  This also caused the facets to twist a little which I think is really cool.

I can't wait to experiment more with this technique.  I didn't get a chance this weekend.  I have thus far been unable to reproduce the stretched out spring tool.  The one pen I have taken apart so far had a very wimpy little spring in it that seemed way too flimsy when I pulled it apart.  Warning to ball point pen users everywhere: your pens are not safe until I find the spring that I need.  I also had a pile of things that had to be glazed this weekend, so I took care of that instead of making new stuff.

In other good news, we learned that we will be making our classes up that we missed due to snow.  Yipee!

More Snow and Some Cold

We got more snow this week.  A LOT more snow.  It started about mid-morning on Wednesday and Cleveland Community College closed at 11 am.  All day and night classes cancelled.  Oh well, there goes another pottery class.  As excited as this southern girl gets about seeing snow (yes, I stocked up on bread and milk earlier in the week), I would like to request that our next snow happen sometime other than the middle of the week.  We are 5 weeks into this class and have missed 2 nights!  Enough already.

While at home being snowed in, I caught a cold. I suppose it is a good thing that I could spend some time resting on the couch while feeling punk.  For this I am grateful.  Friday afternoon, I managed to get off the couch and the roads were clear enough to make it in to town to the studio.

The big project for this weekend was an oval platter.  I started by throwing the rim.  

The next morning, it had dried enough that I could cut this off the bat, sort of squish it into an oval shape and attach a slab for the bottom.  

I think I will probably try something different for texture on the bottom next time and I wish the sides were a little more flat, but its not too bad for a first try.  Does it need handles?  

Then because I saw it on a video this weekend and I was rolling out slabs anyway, I tried making one of these.  It is really different from anything else that I've done and was pretty fun to make.  What do you think?  If I make more of these trays, I'll need to figure out a way to make it more "mine."  This one is almost an exact copy of what the potter in the video made.

One-Piece Jar

We missed our pottery class last week because of the snow.  I'm pretty sure that ours was one of very few groups of students at Cleveland Community College who were disappointed to miss class.  The big question that we had for Ron this week was, "Do we get to make last week up?"  Not one of my math students asked me that question.  

This week, Ron had something special for me to work on - jars with lids that are thrown as one piece and then cut apart.  My first few tries weren't particularly impressive to look at, but this weekend I managed one that I'm not embarrassed to show you. 

This is the finished piece.  

I almost forgot to take pictures of the process, so this isn't exactly what it looked like when I finished the throwing part.  I started with a cylinder and then closed the top and made the knob.  Closing up and making the knob is by far the most challenging part of the whole process.  Step by step pictures of that would be nice, but my hands were way to messy to touch my phone at that point.  Then I used a tool to push in that gallery that you see.  Then the piece needs to dry to leather hard.  Over night worked for me on this one.  

Then I used a tool to cut off the top.  Its important to make the cut at the very top of the indention so that the two pieces fit together correctly when you are finished.    

Next I did some trimming.  Using the bottom of the jar as a chuck, I trimmed the inside of the lid.  I also trimmed a little bit off the outside of the indented part of the bottom piece.  

The idea was to get the lid to fit over the indented part of the bottom.  In this picture, I've gotten the inside edge of the lid and the outside edge of the bottom trimmed just right.  

Clumsy, Clumsy, Me

I made a big, round  baker yesterday.  To be fair, it's not all that big probably, but for me, this was a big, wide piece.  I had to take the drip pan off my wheel in order to have room to get the tool I was using where I needed it so that I could clean up the sides.  Anyway, I was feeling pretty good about what I'd created.  Maybe too good.  As I was moving it to the table and sliding it out of the way, my hand slipped and I poked the side of it with my thumb.  No more big, round baker.

After a few minutes of being disgusted with myself, I decided to do the adult thing and NOT smash it with my fist.  The poke didn't go all the way through, so I put it back on the wheel to see if I could fix it.  I never got it back exactly how it was before the accident, but I managed to salvage it.  When it is still, you can't really tell that its out of round a little bit.

The handles went on today.  Since I'd kind of goofed it up already, I tried experimenting a little bit with the handles.  First I tried pulling handles.  That did NOT work...for a number of reasons, so I pulled those off and tried again.  In this picture, the handle on the left looks like it is out of proportion with the piece.  I hope that is just perspective.  The handles were the same size when I made them and the one on the right looks OK size wise to me.  My current focus is on making substantial handles.  I've been feeling like some of my handles were too delicate for the pots they were going on, so I'm working to correct that.  I will try to remember to share a picture of this when it is finished.