Another example of cool marbled clay after trimming! Lots of layers of colored clay all mixed together!!! Works well as long as all of your clay bodies have the same shrinkage rate!

Another marbled clay class demo… this time with white porcelain & green-stained porcelain! Looking a little blurry after throwing, but as I trimmed the interior & exterior “skin” away you can see the layers & marbled effects. Trimming with my DiamondCore Tools made it easier with their T2 Arc Trimming Tool that has a great curved blade to get inside with ease… worked outside too!

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!

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!

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!

So we did the same crackled slip demo in class… this time using the same black slip with sodium silicate over my newly green-colored porcelain. Not quite sure how I feel about this one. Kinda channeling Elphaba or some swamp creature… but who knows… we might still learn to love this, right?!

After playing with black slip on white porcelain, we started wondering how we could add more color to it. So we decided to try using some colored clay under the crackled black slip!!! And I started making a batch of GREEN PORCELAIN!!! Not really sure if the green mason stain would stain my hands or not… but I was willing to take one for the team!!!

And or the record… my hands are no longer green!

And the quest continues… my friend & master tile-maker Mike Skiersch fired some more cone six test tiles in his kiln for me. There were a few “duds”… but for the most part VERY encouraged by some of these new colors & combinations. I’m always looking for good glazes that pool & break in all the right places to accentuate the stamped patterns… and not cover them up!!! I think we’re onto something here…