Did some trimming of my marbled clay pieces from class last week. When you’re done throwing, the outer skin is all kinda blurred from the clays mixing & blending while throwing. But when you trim off the exterior surface, the crisp marbled effect reveals itself in striking ways!

Spent the afternoon teaching a soda-firing class subbing for Levi today. It was a great group, but it was kinda killing me to see bright blue skies through the studio skylights… mocking me to go play outside! Luckily, we all got to “celebrate” NATIONAL OREO COOKIE DAY with single serving packets that I brought for them to take home!!!

The sun is shining again… the ice is melting again… and inside I’m ice-dyeing more t-shirts AGAIN! More colorful “magic” happening while the ice melts and the colors seep into the shirts!

Feels like Spring is coming soon… but we still have a lot of ice to melt away!!! Some really cool ice “sculptures” happening in my back courtyard.

I think there’s still stairs under there somewhere?!

Love the morning sun shining in on Allison’s mug… looks like Spring sunshine to me!!! This is one of my “wheelthrown-handbulit-combo” mugs… which I’m in the process of making more of right now!!! Thanks for sharing your morning ritual with us Allison!

With sun streaming through my dining room window, this sweetie just decided to open up today! A nice white Spring Cactus flowering right on time… as I’m more than ready for SPRING!!!

Today at Noon CST… I will be posting three sets of bowls on my Fire When Ready Pottery Facebook page! The first person to claim with “MINE” in the Comment section on Facebook will get the set of bowls! Full details about each set, dimension, prices, etc. on Facebook at noon! It’s that easy!

Click here to go to my Fire When Ready Pottery Facebook page!

BOWL SET A –

BOWL SET B –

BOWL SET C –

Once I had finished my class demos with marbled clay, my students got all colorful and started throwing their own marbled pieces! So much fun… as it’s kinda magical when the colors appear!!!

Just for fun, I followed up the first marbled clay demo with a simple two-color piece. Kinda looks right for the season… as the color reminded me of a yummy Shamrock Shake!!!

This week in my Beginning Wheel class we played with colored clay for “marbled” pots! I started by coloring some clay ahead of time for them with mason stains layered & wedged into B-Clay. We then layered regular B-Clay and/or Brown Stoneware with the colored clays… and then gave it two simple wedges to start the marbling. So much fun to see the colors presenting themselves as you’re throwing. When we were done, the pieces still have a “smudgy” layer of mixed clays like a dirty skin on the pot. When they get to leatherhard, we will carefully trim the entire surface off to reveal the clean lines of layered & marbled clays.

And yes, if we were doing more than one or two pots, I would have definitely used rubber gloves. But since this was a “quickie” demo and not a long-term pottery career of marbled clay… I figured it was tough enough for my students to throw their own forms, let alone to do it with gloves on!