Whichever way you look at it… 3.14 = Pi… errr, Pie!!!
Coincidence?… I don’t think so!

And to celebrate… First Slice Cafe at Lillstreet is offering a great “Buy One, Get One Free Sale” on slices of pie all day today!!! Guess what I’ll be having for dinner… and dessert!!!

Good thing I started out today with another sunrise bike ride…
I’m pretty sure I will be doing some “damage” with at least a “few” pieces of pie!!!
I’m pretty sure there weren’t enough miles this morning to make up for the “damage”
I plan on doing today!!!

Soon enough the red skies turned orange…

Yet as the sun finally made it over the horizon, the sky continued to get a bit darker & more dramatic. A beautiful sunrise through all of its transitions.

Lining up. Matching up.
Stoneware. B-Clay.
Cone 10. Cone Six.
Reduction. Oxidation.
It’s getting kind of exciting…

A little sneak peek into a new box of “kiln candy.” More glaze tests!!!
Can’t wait to dig in & examine them closely. Hoping for a couple winners!!!
From first glance, it looks promising!

With an overnight weather forecast of “anywhere from one to ten inches of snow”… I was pleased to find only a couple inches of snow this morning. I will say it was pretty cool how the snow literally “stuck” to everything!!! But the real question here is HOW can “one to ten inches” be an allowable range for any reputable weatherman? Seriously?!

No bike ride this morning… at least not for me!
My bike is dry & warm at home.

Every session my Tuesday night Wheelthrowing Class “challenges” me with something new & different. It’s usually Week Nine when I get to do the challenge piece. We’ve tackled things from goblets to Menorahs, from oyster plates to lotus fluted bowls. Never one to turn away from a challenge, tonight we tackled yet another one… MARBLED CLAY.

So I did a little prep work ahead of time in my studio. I started with two different clay bodies that fire to a dramatic color difference. The clay on the left is Stoneware With Ochre which fires to a dark chocolate brown. The clay on the right is B-Clay which fires to a light gray color.

I cut thin slabs of clay and layered them together.
Trying carefully not to add air bubbles in between the layers.

Here’s the stack of layered clay from the side.

A quick pounding on the table, and a slice in half…
followed by stacking them one on top of the others.

I did some very minimal wedging to “mix” the two clays, but not enough to totally blend them together. Remember, we’re going for marbled clay. So I may need to deal with a few air bubbles along the way from not completely wedging the ball. But keeping a “good swirl” is more important at this point.

Let the throwing begin… slap it down, get it wet and start throwing!!!

Notice how the marbling effect disappears pretty quickly when it gets all blurred together with slip & slurry. If you look close, you can see a hint of marble… but not much.

Center. Open. Widen. Curve. Compress. Throw. Rib. Suddenly it turned into a bowl.
The bowl stayed loosely under wraps as I wanted it leatherhard for trimming in my class.

Fast forward to tonight… when the bowl had stiffened up to a leatherhard state…
ready for trimming. As you can see, the “blurred’ color mix”skin” is still there
hiding the marble effect.

So for one time only, I told my students they can trim the “inside” of the bowls. Generally the rule is they can only trim the outside & foot of a piece. Never on the inside!!! But for the marble effect to show, you need to trim off all of the “skin” from the pot. Luckily, I kept the bowl attached to the bat. That way, when I put it back on the wheel the bowl was still perfectly centered. So I started with my a wide loop tool to trim the inside. I wanted to make sure my loop tool didn’t have any corners.

After a quick trimming of the “skin” the marble effect is revealed. Keep in mind that I’ve marbled Stoneware With Ochre with B-Clay. So my hope is that the white clay will stay light, while the brown-ish clay will fire to a dark chocolate brown.

A quick flip, and I did the same on the outside and trimmed a foot ring. Let me just say, it was a little mesmerizing & a little tough to see as I was trimming the foot. Too many swirls. Too much contrast. Too many stripes all spinning around. Good thing I don’t have vertigo!!!

So there it is, my bowl thrown with marbled clay. I’m sure every bowl would turn out different with this marbled clay trick. It’s a matter of how much you layer, how much you wedge and probably even which way the clay is sitting on the wheel?! It’s a pretty fun trick… and my students were impressed. Especially when I threw a fresh, new bowl with marbled clay as a demo… and then did the “cooking-show-switch-out”… and produced the leatherhard one to do the “skin” trimming right in front of them!

The sunrise never quite came out today. It tried… it thought about it.

Instead, we got a kind of pastel, layered sunrise hovering low on the horizon adding to a beautiful reflection downtown.

The lake might have been melted around Montrose Harbor, but up my Bryn Mawr it was a much different story. Huge frozen shards piled up all along the lakefront… with more icebergs floating out past the wreckage!

The clouds moved in, grew dark and I got one last dramatic shot as I prepared to pedal home…

And therefore, a bunch of tiny pots needed a lot of tiny stamps!

Stamped. Trimmed. Handled. Slip accented. Drying…
and just in time for Mugshot Mondays on Facebook!!!