And “speaking of spoons”….
For a little fun diversion in class this week, I decided we should stick with the theme and play a little game. We pulled names randomly out of a hat and matched up twosomes. The contest was to see who could suspend a metal spoon on their nose the longest. The winner of each match-up moved onto the finals. Some people had never tried this game before… some were good at it… some were not… but either way, it was PURE ENTERTAINMENT for ME!!!

Confident & never-wavering Helen…

Norah was so confident that she started using the time to check her phone, mails, & more… perhaps a strategy to psych out the others?!

While Molly was trying to find her Zen place…

After making their sets of four matching side bowls… I kind of figured that they now needed a way to get the food from the bowls into their mouths… so this week’s Flash Challenge was to make four “matching” utensils to go with their set of bowls. Spoons… forks.. sporks… whatever. They had sixty minutes to make all four pieces.. which sounded like a lot of time when we started… but turned out not to be so much as they time ran out!!!

And then Jen decided to go a different direction to go with her ramen bowls…
by making a set of chopsticks which just seemed fitting!!!

When they had finished making their spoons… we decided to play a little game…
keeping with the “theme” of SPOONS!!!

Save

Save

Save

This week in my LILLSTREET THROWDOWN class, my students brought their homework assignments back to class. They had been challenged to make a set of four “matching” side bowls… or at least coordinating to appear as a set if they didn’t want to decorate them all matchy-matchy. So much fun to see what they had come up with. Some more technically accurate, some beautifully designed & decorated. While others didn’t quite finish the challenge…. mwah, mwah, mwah…

Dana was chosen the top winner with her slip-striped bowls… which were incredibly matched in their shape, size & form… but she earned extra merit for the crisp, clean & colorful slip decoration too!

Melanie went a little lower profile with some layered slip accents.

Tracy threw beautiful terra cotta bowls and added a subtle & beautiful colored ombre inside.

Jen colored her large ramen bowls with color slip, brush strokes & splatters.

Christine made four little dessert cups with a LOT of slip fun going on…
colorful marbled slip inside and colored slip appliques adhered to the exteriors.

Norah continued her minimal design technique that won her rave reviews in the tile challenge!

Molly did some nice stamping on her bowls to tie them all together.

And oh, but wait there’s more…

Our little “over-achieveing” Christine decided to hedge her bets and make three sets of matching bowls! One set had a whimsical floral pattern made with white slip that she color-zed with Mason stains.

While the third set used the same “color-ized” slip to play with some marbled “tie-dye” effects that I introduced them to last week in class.

 

Save

Save

Save

I started firing the soda kiln early in the morning…
trying hard to “schedule it” so that my students would be returning in the evening at the “right time” to help add the soda mixture into the kiln. The firing was pretty smooth… everything going as planned. Cones were melting & dropping as planned. I was checking the kiln every half hour to make sure everything was good.

Unfortunately, when I went down to check on the kiln at 6:00pm…
it was OFF!!! Yes, the entire kiln was OFF!!! Shut down!!!

Of course… panic ensued. Students were arriving… asking how it was going… I was freaking out. Luckily, Fred & Levi were in the building… both skilled soda kiln firers… and they helped diagnose the problem. After at least 20 minutes of the kiln being off… plus the time it took us to diagnose & fix… Levi finally got the kiln turned back on!!! Whoo-hoo!!!

HUGE THANKS to Fred & Levy who finally got the kiln up & running again.

However, it took awhile for us to get back up to temperature… and then to get it to move even further. We were right around cone six going down when the kiln shut down. All of the workshop students were there waiting… watching… asking questions… but we all know… A WATCHED KILN NEVER FIRES! At some point, you just need to open up the air & gas and let the kiln do its own thing. FIRE!!!

So we waited… we chatted… we hung-out… we waited some more… Those who were Lillstreet students had projects they could work on while we were waiting. But Charles & Cassie were stuck doing nothing… until Jacob offered up two bowls that needed to be decorated. So he decided a little “collaboration” would be great… giving them each a bowl he made for the LILLSTREET THROWDOWN class and some black underglaze!

Finally we were up & running… temperature rising, cones going down. My students weighed-out and mixed-up the soda mixture of soda ash, soda bicarbonate, whiting & wood chips. As the kiln got up to the top temperatures, we started adding the mixture into the kiln using a long angle iron inserted through the peeps on the sides right above the side fire boxes. Safety fire gloves & respirators were added to keep everyone safe!!!

When we had finally inserted all of the soda mixture into the kiln, I let it fire for about a half hour longer so that the soda mixture could float around a bit longer to “soak” inside the kiln! They loved the flames shooting out of the kiln. A lot of reduction going on. A lot of soda flying about.

After that, I shut it down… on purpose this time! It was a VERY long day of firing with a bit of panic in the middle. My workshop participants were very understanding & helpful. All with fingers crossed that this kiln “issue” in the middle wouldn’t affect their pots in a negative way. I guess we’ll find out on Monday when we unload the kiln as a group.

Tonight was the kick-off of my 3-Night Soda-Firing Workshop at Lillstreet Art Center. I’ve been firing the soda kiln for awhile now, and it’s always fun to share some of that knowledge with my students. The first thing I always stress is that soda-firing is very random based on the air flow of the flames & where the soda mixture lands. So we can “try our best” to plan for want we want… but no guarantees!!!

We started with a discussion & overview of soda-firing… then quickly moved onto glazing & wading our pieces. It was great to have some of my current & past student sin the workshop, as well as a couple “newbies” to Lillstreet. The group bonded quickly and were very helpful – working as a team to get everything glazed & wadded.

Once we were all glazed & wadded, we started to load the soda kiln. Always an interactive project with all students taking time to understand the process, the placement and the hopeful results of how location in the kiln might affect their final fired results. And then the loading began…

We discussed air flow, and how it will affect their pieces. The importance of putting different clay bodies in different areas of the kiln as each kind has a different finished effect. Luckily, we had just the right amount of work to put into the kiln… with just a few of my own pots to help fill-in here & there!

Once fully loaded, we added in the cone packs and then started closing up the brick door. Brick-by-brick. layer-by-layer…

When the door was finally bricked & closed… we called it for the night. For tomorrow I will fire the kiln, with students coming back in the evening to help add the soda mixture into the kiln.

After decorating their tiles, I decided to do some quick demos for them on three basic bowls. I had the best intentions… but this time it didn’t go all that well. Valiant effort… loved one of the demos… ha some slip issues.. and some timing concerns!

Anyways… we started here with three basic bowls…

BOWL DEMO #1 –
My first”plan” was to take a bunch of colored slip and do some well-planned dripping effects on the interior of the bowl. In theory, it’s not that hard. However… the full layer fo white slip was great, the bands of black were good too… bu tthe green slip was FAR TOO THICK!!! It just kinda clumped on in place, and didn’t do any running down!!! And then to make matters worse, the red slip was far too watery!!! Yep, shoulda checked all that out before class, right?! If all goes well, the colored slips “glide” down the side and kinda pushes the colors down along the way. You can see a bit of the black bands being pushed down by the green.

But if you look closely… you can also see that there is a black drip in the lower right corner that is pushing UP!!! Well, after the demo wasn’t going to well, I decided to just push the pedal down all the way and let the slip fly!!! I expected the slip to blend more like old-school spin art… still too thick… but it did splatter & fly. Not into the splash pan… but luckily my shorts were there to catch the flying slip!!!

BOWL DEMO #2 –
My second plan was to do a “tie-dye” effect with colored slip… in honor of PROJECT RUNWAY!!! Yes, seems like this week’s episode of PROJECT RUNWAY was focusing on tie-dye becoming high fashion! Who knew that I’ve been a tie-dyed trendsetter for so many years and never quite knew it?!

Anyway… I should my students how to do some marbling with colored slips…
the closest I could come up with to be a tie-dyed effect! Just pour some “puddles” of colored lsip into the bowl, and then swirl. twist, squiggle and swirl some more… and then pour out the excess. Just that easy… easy-peezy!

BOWL #3 –
My third plan was to do several layers of color slips squiggled & painted on some newspaper. The plan is that the water seeps into the newspaper and lets the slip stiffen up. After several layers of slip, and enough time on the newspaper, you can cut out sections, lift them up carefully and place them onto the surface of the bowl almost like an applique. Sadly, I didn’t start the squiggles & layers soon enough… as I was having too much fun watching them play with their tiles… time got away from me… and my slip never quite set-up enough to cut * apply. So I told them we would try to do it again next week… and I would start a LOT sooner!!

Luckily, my students LOVED the marbled “tie-dye” effect… and all fun & excitement ensued!!!
And they were “tasked” with another challenge…. to decorate their “blindfolded bowl” with one of the tree techniques. And since only one of them really worked… there was a lot of marbling of slip!

While others were too busy finger-painting… and loving it like a four-year old!!!

So here are a couple of our “tie-dyed” bowls…

And one of the dripped slip technique… working a bit better than MY demo!!!

And does anyone see a face in this one, or is it just me?!!!

Unfortunately, one of the “blindfold bowls” didn’t quite survive.
It was far too wet going into the challenge.. and the layers of slip just didn’t help any!

 

Save

This week in my Lillstreet Throwdown class, they all returned with their “blindfold-thrown bowls” as they had to refine & trim them a bit. I think most of them thought we would be working on decorating them in class as “part two” of the assignment. Instead, I had them spray their bowls with water and wrap them up with plastic. We “might” decorate them… but not right away!

Instead we switched to tile-making!!!
They were tasked with making nine 4″x 4″ tiles in twenty minutes. The goal was even thickness, clean edges & good corners. So they started by wedging their clay, throwing slabs and then cutting them into flat tiles. It was fun to see them approach the task… most with rulers… none of them considering the slab roller… and Melanie making a template to use to cut them all nice & square!

After we critiqued & judged the tiles, they began to decorate them with colored slips. They had 45 minutes to finish all nine tiles… which sounds like plenty of time, until you start figuring out how many minutes per tile that works out to be! The challenge for this project was that their group of tiles should coordinate with a common color palette. Their tiles should NOT match as they had to utilize a different slip application technique on each tile. We were looking for creativity, technique, style, cleanliness and overall impression. Basically I was looking for people to embrace the spirit of the challenge… and have a good time exploring different slip possibilities!

Just a couple tile close-ups… loving the textures, patterns and techniques!

At the end of their time, we went around and looked at all of the sets of nine. Some people kept it simple with one color, some went for multiple colors. Some when over-the-top while others kept it minimal. Some kept exploring a common pattern in different ways, while others went for deconstructed versions of the same!

Alwasy fun to see how they all approach the project… and then what they come up with. And with a bit of a time-restraint, they also had to work a bit faster and not over-think things too much. Maybe have a little more fun… and trip upon some new, fun decorative techniques!

Save

Save

For subbing Lisa’s class, I like to do “demo-on-demand “…
which means I’ll kinda do whatever they want. So today Jeannine requested some bowl finishing tricks, and Julia wanted me to “throw something too tall to put on her class shelf.” Which turns out to be about 12-inches. So I did four quick bowls, threw a tall vase with just four pulls, decorated the bowls… and then chatted & solved all of the problems of the pottery world. As always, a fun class to sub for!!!

Ready for tonight’s class demo…

As if throwing mini’s wasn’t fun enough… we also went back to basics with some bowls. So they each wedged up two 3-pound balls of clay to throw a good, large bowl. Two balls of clay = two chances. No wedging up more if they both fail.

They were all set at the wheel… thinking we were ready to go…
when I pulled out another envelope… SURPRISE!!!

I also pulled out some bandanas to use as BLINDFOLDS!!!

So we were still throwing large bowls….
and being judged by a measurement of height plus width!
While blindfolded!!!

They all did a great job… pulling it out in the end. Some were slower & more focused…
while others just jumped into it blindly!!! So to speak… all pun intended.
I do think they had fun throwing blindfolded… I KNOW that I had fun watching them!!!