Throwing Pots. Term 1 – Photo Gallery

1. Matching pots
These matching pots were only matching because they both fell over on to the floor and got squashed the same amount down one side! I used a blue glaze to coat them and then flecked brown over the top using a toothbrush:

2. Pot with lid
This was one of my favourites so I was a bit worried about messing up the glaze. I decided to make the inside of the pot white and to highlight the butterfly with blue. The outside I glazed a solid blue and the lid a combination of blue, green and brown:

3. Large bowl
This was a bowl I threw from a chuck at the end of one of the classes. It is by far the biggest bowl I made during the whole term. I began by glazing the inside and outside white and then on the outside I put a green stripe half way down, followed by a brown stripe below it. I painted a green rim around the top and dotted it with brown. I think it’s one of my more successful experiments with glaze!

4. Pot with very thin walls
I turned this pot so much that the walls started undulating. Impressively it didn’t crack and survived being fired. I put a bit of all the glazes on to this pot. Inside it is white and the outside is mainly blue with a little brown and green painted over the top which gives it a nice shimmery effect:

5. Penguin pot
I tried to do more uniform stripes of brown glaze on this pot by painting them on using the wheel rather than by free hand. The main glaze is green inside and out. I also used a little brown on the inside to highlight the penguin:

6. Pot with a belly
I was pleased with the shape of this pot when I first threw it and I was happy to see the glaze came out much better than I expected. It’s similar to the large bowl, mainly white with a green and brown band on the outside, a colour combination I think works surprisingly well:

7. Small pot
I kept this one quite simple, blue inside and out with a brown stripe towards the base:

8. Pot with decorative base
I went straight through the bottom of this pot when I was turning it so had to patch it up with some extra clay. I glazed it green with a little brown to highlight the decorative part. I like the way it looks quite seventies!

The others that didn’t come out quite so well . . .
1. I liked the pot because it was an unusual shape, however the glaze I chose was too dark and looks very murky:

2. The pot itself had sagged a bit but I was pleased with the decoration around the outside. With the glaze I went way too experimental on this one! Not really sure what I was thinking, especially with the green dots but safe to say it didn’t work!

3. This pot was a bit wonky to start with but then the decoration was even wonkier and the glaze turned out very patchy where I’d missed bits!

4. I also had a similar problem with this one in that my glazing was a bit patchy. I don’t really like the blobby patches of blue either, although for some reason they look a lot better in the photo than in real life!

Throwing Pots. Term 1 – Week 10

The last week of the term and look at the impressive array of pots the class has to glaze:

We are shown a few new techniques of glaze application. For an easy way to do stripes you can place the pot in the middle of a wheel, spin it slowly and with a steady hand and a paintbrush do uniform stripes of glaze around the pot. Another technique is to fill a jug full of glaze and start pouring a steady stream back into the container. Once you are happy the stream is steady you then pass your pot through the glaze quickly and can achieve some really interesting free form designs. Then there is the splatter technique with a toothbrush which can be used to add flecks of colour over the top of a solid glaze. Here is my attempt at the splatter technique on the matching bowls (bear in mind that the colours will be very different after glazing and will melt and merge with each other, i.e. don’t be put off by the splodges!).

Having been a bit more experimental with this batch of glazing, the results could go either way and I can’t wait to see how they turn out. The next post will be a full before and after gallery of all the pots I made on this course so you can see what worked out and what didn’t. After that there will be a summer break from pottery classes so no more posts until September when I’ve already signed up for more!

Throwing Pots. Term 1 – Week 9

The penultimate week before the end of the term and after last week’s disaster with the fallen pots I promise myself I will try very hard to be less clumsy. All I have to do is turn and finish the following three pots without dropping or injuring them in any way.

First up I go for the bowl as it’s a more straight ahead shape to turn. After what seems like months I centre the clay to make a chuck and then get to work. I’m a bit timid due to past experiences of over turning but do a decent enough job and then decide to add a little decoration. My first penguin pot!

Next up is the pot with the lid. This bowl is too shallow to fit over the previous chuck so the teacher helps me to reshape the clay and then it sits snugly inside. The lid is turned separately upside down in the bowl, a clever technique. I go careful because it’s one of my favourites and it miraculously survived last week’s fall. Decoration wise I keep it fairly plain but add a little butterfly so that when the lid is taken off there is something to look at inside:

Finally I work on the last vase shaped pot. It fits over a funnel shaped chuck and I shave quite a bit of weight off the bottom. I decide to keep this one plain. I threw it a bit wobbly to start with (non deliberate) so it has a unique shape without needing decoration!

Throwing Pots. Term 1 – Week 8

The pots we glazed last week are out of the kiln. It’s amazing how a glaze can transform a pot and I have no idea at first which ones displayed on the table are mine. I think once the 10 weeks are up and all the pots are finished I’ll post up a little photo gallery of each one before and after they were glazed, but until then here’s a little taster of the results:

The pot on the left is the one from Week 5 which I over zealously turned and turned until the walls were paper thin and undulating. We thought the clay was so thin it would crack during firing but it was a little survivor!

After examining my newly glazed pots, I search for the pots I threw in previous weeks that now need turning. I seem to have accumulated quite a few over the past weeks and after a thorough search I find about seven. I need two boards to put them all on and place them carefully on the windowsill. This is when disaster strikes! Whilst I’m turning, one of the boards suddenly overbalances and takes the pots down with it. They are ‘cheese hard’ during the turning stage so although they are not completely squished they have all taken a serious bash. A rescue mission follows and amazingly only one of the damaged pots is completely unsalvageable. Don’t worry about him though, the clay will be recycled again and one day he’ll be part of another (better) pot that will survive!

Salvage job number one:
The teacher helps me to reshape this damaged pot into a square bowl and I cover up the dents with decoration. I make the decoration using the sprig I made from a bracelet rolled in clay and I think the results are quite impressive considering the impact it suffered!

Salvage job number two and three:
Aren’t really salvage jobs because I decide to leave them the way the fall made them. They match each other in shape which I like. Maybe a japanese style rice/dumpling bowl with dipping bowl to match?!

Thankfully, after a quick bit of reshaping and smoothing over, my favourite little pot with the lid also survives but after all that salvaging there’s no time left to turn anything.

Throwing Pots. Term 1 – Week 7

Glazing and Rolf Harris

A very exciting pottery lesson from start to finish this week. I walk into class and this is the view:

An array of pots made by previous students all different shapes, colours and sizes. Large buckets of glaze are set out at the back and on the table are small pots of glaze with paintbrushes. The pots on the table give a good indication as to what each glaze may look like once it has been fired and also demonstrate different techniques in application. Some have stripes of colour, others have blocks, some are one colour on top of another and others have patterns:

I don’t think things can get much more exciting and then our teacher tells us that for some reason ROLF HARRIS (living legend) will be in the building today! At this stage she’s not sure why he is visiting but says that if we finish glazing our pots in time we can go and see him.

I’m sure my approach to glazing would have been much more studied if Rolf hadn’t been in the building but after a short demonstration I realised that you can coat the whole pot really quickly in glaze by dunking it in the buckets and filling up the inside with a jug. First of all though you have to get your (clean) hands in and give it a good mix. It feels really nice, kind of silty. If you can see wrinkles, veins or any other distinguishing marks through the glaze coating your hand then you know it is about the right consistency. I’m blaming Rolf for my rather rushed attempts but the process itself has to be quick because you can’t leave the pot immersed in the glaze for long otherwise it will coat the pot too thickly. We have to leave the base glaze free and a clear centimetre or two at the bottom of the pot so that the glaze doesn’t run during firing and stick to the kiln. Here’s one of my more careful efforts:

So after swiftly glazing all the pots I had available I ran off to the student’s union to find Rolf in full voice singing to a bar full of students. What a performance! Giddy? I was high on Rolf for days.

 

 

 

 

For a detailed review of Rolf’s performance and other gigs in Cardiff please go to http://riffsinthediff.wordpress.com

Throwing Pots. Term 1 – Week 6

This week I make five bowls! Definitely my most prolific week so far. One of them has been thrown with an (originally accidental) inner lip, which prompts the teacher to show me how to make a lid to fit inside. It’s very clever really. She measures the width of the inside of the pot and then centres the clay. She then shows me how to section off some of the top half of the clay whilst also leaving it attached to the bottom half of the clay. She throws a circular lid with a circular knob on top and cuts it to the right size by sticking a pin underneath the circle of clay whilst the wheel is still spinning. This sections off a circular band of clay until it is the correct size. I help to wire it off the wheel and then the rest of the clay is used to make another lid in case the first one doesn’t fit quite right.

I also try to make some larger pots this week with the aim of getting them big enough to hold a large ball of wool (see week 4 idea!). I don’t think they are quite big enough yet but they are getting there.

To finish the class I take a proud shot of all this week’s pots together!

Throwing Pots. Term 1 – Week 5 (homework)

More sprigs!
This time more shapes seem to work because the clay is slightly drier:

So clockwise from top left, a ladies head from a brooch of mine, a butterfly from a necklace, a bracelet rolled along the clay, another butterfly this time from a ring and a penguin keyring.

Throwing Pots. Term 1 – Week 5

I’ve only been away a week and I feel like I’ve forgotten everything, including what my pots look like! I search through the pots that are ready to turn on the table and am pleased to discover three of them have my initials on. Luckily we have a short demonstration on how to make a chuck and then I’m off! A chuck is the official name for a mound of clay that you centre and shape so that your pot fits over it snugly and can be turned. After making the chuck I go at my first pot with such gusto that I carve straight through the bottom. My second attempt is no better. I keep turning the sides until I realise the walls are almost paper thin and undulating! Distressed I go to seek help and to my surprise my teacher is delighted. She explains to me that botched pots are ideal for trying out new things. With the one I went through the bottom on she shows me how to patch it up and attach a sprig to the base which acts as both a new bottom and a decoration. I’m impressed. It looks as good as new and quite a bit fancier:

As an experiment we decide to leave the pot with thin walls as it is. I’ll never in a million years be able to turn such delicate thin walls again without making a hole, so we’ll just have to see if it makes it through the firing process without cracking. If it does it will definitely be a unique shape!

The third pot manages to survive my heavy handed turning techniques and doesn’t look too bad. Phew! After all that turning I’m looking forward to next week when I can get throwing again.

Throwing Pots. Term 1 – Week 4

I’m on holiday which is nice, it’s even warmer than the kiln room, but I miss the smell of clay on my hands!

I find a bowl with a spiral shape cut out the side for knitters who want to put their wool in a bowl and thread the wool through the spiral shape to keep it held in place. Something to try in class?

Artist’s impression:

Throwing Pots. Term 1 – Week 3

Fire Fire

This week I see the kiln room for the first time. The best thing about the kiln room is how lovely and warm it is. The temperature the kilns have to reach in order to fire a pot sounds a bit scary to me. Over 1000 degrees. Isn’t that hotter than the sun?! I’m sure the max most ovens go is 250. So maybe that just means a kiln is four times hotter than your average oven? I’ll find out for sure next week but whatever it is, it makes for a very cosy kiln room.
Before the pots can be glazed they have to be fired and then when they have been glazed they get fired again. Before a glaze is applied, the pots can be stacked into a kiln like this:

However, after a glaze has been applied the pots can’t be stacked otherwise they will stick together when the glaze heats up, so they are spaced out in bigger kilns like these:

After we have been shown the kilns we are free to work on some new creations. We are told that when the pots are fired they will shrink so to make a nice curvy bowl we will need to really exaggerate the curves.

I concentrate very hard and the time goes too quickly but I manage to do my best turning job yet:

And I throw a pot I’m so proud of I have to photograph it before I take it off the wheel in case something goes horribly wrong!