Progress Notes October 2010

A vase that sort of survived decapitation

A vase that lost its head twice
By the middle of October I finished throwing all my five class assignments (to be glazed by the December final show and tell). I wanted time to dry, bisque and glaze them (taking our travels into account also). Living in a dry climate means taking extra time to dry stuff slowly and avoid cracking. Especially since I am using porcelain type clays.

I traveled with the pottery in the back of our RV tow truck, making time to do the final shaping and sanding as I could. This lovely vase suffered decapitation while sanding. It was reattached and fired. It fell apart from not careful enough handling in the bisque stage but I said, what the heck, and glued it back together with glaze and glazed it anyway. The result is not sellable but it will make a nice home vase as long as you don't look too closely.

The glaze, Black Walnut , Mayco SW104 is a commercial glaze that works from cone 6 to cone 10. I fired this to cone 10 along with my barium glazes (see November notes). It gave a lovely microcrystalline effect.

A tall pot thrown in parts and joined

This was thrown in 5 parts and joined
I did the throw-in-parts assignment twice to improved my chances.

The first one did not survive bisque firing. The second did. Back-ups are very good advice when trying new stuff especially with more than a month drying-to-glaze time schedule.

Notice the tape around each glaze jar behind me. New Mexico is a reaaalllly dry place.