I made the coolest sea bass last night! In clay of course....and a little tiny minnow type fish with a rather dismayed expression on its face...it is so cute!

Thinking about pottery again, although I haven't made any new stuff since the fall semester ended. I did drop off everything I'm going to sell at Monarch Mountain. None of it is as good as it could be if I were more experienced, so I tried to price it accordingly. Anyway, now that the old stuff is out of my hair and sight, I can start thinking about making more.
Ideas:

• Making a school of little fish. These could be small enough that they wouldn't have to be hollow, and they could even be bisque fired individually or in smaller groups. When I glaze them, I can lay them adjacent to one another or overlapping. When the glazed piece gets fired, the clay and glaze vitrify, and so they will wind up joined by the glaze. Loading such a piece in the kiln would be a pain. I would have to do it myself probably. The beauty of this is that the entire piece would not be at risk during the greenware or bisqueware stages. I've had several pieces broken already, and it pisses me off. With smaller groups of fish or individual fish that are assembled at the last possible minute, if one fish or one small group gets broken, it isn't such a devastating loss, and I can still readjust pretty easily to compensate, or make extras with the expectation that not all of them will come out intact.
  
  
• I also want to make fish that can be positioned away from a wall, swimming in midair above a base. (No, not mobiles, although that would be interesting too). I could make stones by throwing bowls, deforming them into stone-like shapes, texturing them to obliterate the throwing lines, and notching them to accept the fish.
  
  
• Also, I want to start making small groups of fish , like 2-4 small trout sized fish.
  

And I had other ideas, but now my older kids are being a pain, so I have to go and bring the household into order.....

The fish came out really nicely, except for some glaze dripping on the back side of it, which is a fairly minor issue. It is RED!

Got some reference books for doing pottery over the winter break. Well, sort of. They aren't pottery books, they're books about turtles, whales, and coelocanths, all things I wnt to depict in clay.

And for some reason, I've been really food oriented even though I am not really eating any more than usual. Oh! I found teff flour! They don't have whole grain teff (snarl) but I am happy to be able to get this. Also found amaranth flour, another hard to find item. :happy dance:

And I tried to make summer rolls tonight, but the stupid spring roll wrappers aren't working right. Will but a new batch of them tomorrow and use the filling with those. :-)

Three pieces had sold by the time I left. I got one of the raku pieces and brought it home; the other weren't done yet. The raku firing was cool and invigorating, even though there was a lot of smoke. So, here's how the raku process and firing works (I don't know enough yet to be highly technical or accurate but will do my best!):

The raku pieces need be be sturdy, with simple shapes and preferably no projecting parts, because they're going to have to undergo very stressful and sudden temperature changes. So we made plates, tea bowls, vases, tumblers. These were bisqued (think of it as a pre-firing with no glaze), and then we had to use special raku glazes. There's a white, and a copper glaze that turns shiny green and metallic, and others...I didn't know about the others so didn't use those. These were then put back into the electric kiln to force any remaining moisture out of them, because otherwise, they might explode and ruin other pieces when they go through the firing. Meanwhile, our teacher fired up the top hat kiln outside. This is a kiln such that the top lifts off the base via use of counterweights. It is propane fueled. The pre-warmed and dried pieces are then loaded into the top hat kiln, which looks like a flat base with a cup turned upside down over the base. Flames and heat sometimes come out of the top of the kiln. The temperature in this kiln has to go up to 1900 degrees Fahrenheit, after which helpers stand by with gloves and tongs and others (like me) stand next to metal trashcans holding armfuls of straw. The red hot pieces are carefully dropped into the trashcans onto a bed of straw, and then more straw is thrown onto them (which promptly ignites) and the lids are put on quickly. Meanwhile, the top hat kiln is filled again with more pieces. After a while (like 20 minutes) the pots in the trashcans are pulled out and laid onto pieces of kiln shelving. They're all covered in blackened straw, but when you brush the straw off, the colors are intense and stunning, even gaudy if you use only the copper green. As they cool, they make small pinging sounds and the glaze cracks, because the temperature changes have been extreme. So if you use white, which I used a lot of, you get this network of fine cracks, and the smoke and soot from the straw turns the clay body black between the cracks.

The neat thing about all this is that it's very fast, you're directly involved and you watch all these cool things happen right in front of you, not behind the solid door of a kiln. It's almost magical. Also there's this element of instant gratification; compared to waiting a couple of days for a glaze firing from a regular kiln, the raku glaze firing gives you a finished piece in your hands within an hour. I think it would be too stressful to go through every day, but it is a refreshing change from the routine of the usual way.

At the pottery sale (finally) and none of my stuff has sold yet (uh-oh, gotta buy gas next week...) but who knows, it still might. People keep wanting to buy the stuff I'm keeping!

I got a lot of newly glaze fired stuff:

• the colander's glaze is all washed out and flat; going to try to reglaze and refire it.
• The baking dish is sort of underwhelming. I mean, it's good enough to use, but it isn't special. I might sell it.
• The paddled lidded box was glazed in shino and it looks great! So do several other shino glazed items.
• One of these is a coffee cup which was paddled from a slab cylinder (see note below) and glazed in shino, finger wiped down to the body, and the interior was glazed in iron red, which dribbled in s few streaks on the exterior as well. My mentality is to let accidents happen in pottery, because they're often fortuitous.
• The goat teapot is bisqued, but every time I look at it, I feel sad about the horns it used to have. :-( I need to get over that, lol....
• Made an elephant for Charlie, and it's also bisqued.
• Bisqued and glazed my second fish, a kokanee salmon, with Rose's Red. This is risky because Rose's Red isn't terribly predictable. I asked the lab assistant to do everything possible to put it in a place where it'll get reduced so it'll be red, not off white or gray or light green.
• Also, we are doing the raku firing today! I am so psyched for that!

Note--->

• Paddled- you take a form or a piece of clay and use an object to pat it into shape. Such pieces are stronger because the particles of clay are compressed more tightly, and the piece has a different character than one which has been thrown or handbuilt.
• Slab cylinder (or whatever)- The clay is rolled out into a thin sheet and then shaped. Slab cylinders usually have a seam unless you're good at hiding it. Paddling hides the seam and makes it more personable instead of looking banal...and makes it stronger, too.
• Finger wiping- pretty much what it sounds like. You dip the piece in glaze, and then quickly make marks through the glaze as if you were finger painting. These areas look different. In shino, they're darker, like a dark apricot color, whic contrasts very nicely with the rest of the piece.

OK, I'm gonna run back to the ceramics studio....the raku firing will be beginning soon. :-)

By the way: for the celebratory goblet assignment, I finally found something worth celebrating- getting into the advanced ceramics class! Yes! I just used a lot of various techniques that we have learned or might learn in class, such as trimming, paddling, modeling, texture, etc. When it comes to the glazes, I will use more techniques there too.

The goat teapot: I started making another horn, and while putting it on, managed to break off the other one. Arrrgh! So instead, whittled the remaining stubs of horns into short spike type horns, which are more typical for a female goat anyway. It looks acceptable now. Not fabulous, like it used to, but still good. The only thing is, it now has no handle, because the long, curling horns were the handle. Grrrr.... I guess I could drill holes into the sides near the central opening and insert a wire bail?

And the sgraffito casserole with a goat handle perched atop the lid is sort of questionable. Specifically, the handle and lid are very nice. They are also very poorly matched to the casserole. They don't fit at all.

From such frustrations come experience.......