Tuesday night during class, one of my students gave me one of the cutest gifts EVER!!! Catherine has been making these adorable porcelain lidded jars for awhile… and they keep getting smaller & smaller… and even cuter & cuter!!! Thanks to Catherine, this little cutie came home with me!!!

Another Mugshot Monday!!! And another batch of mugs…
this time in PORCELAIN!!!

I love making mugs… and when I don’t quite know what to make…
it seems like I always “default” to MUGS!!!

Let the stamping begin!!!
Suddenly these basic porcelain bowls are not-so-basic anymore!

Playing with porcelain again… starting with some simple bowls!

I’ve had some piles of dried clay in my studio for some time now. Bags & bags of dried porcelain scraps waiting to be reclaimed. And the BEST part?… it’s all FREE CLAY!!! Because this is not even MY reclaim scraps! Instead, they are scraps from a potter friend of mine up in Minneapolis who doesn’t feel it’s worth her time & effort to reclaim her own clay. So I get to pick up her scraps every Spring when I go up for the Minnesota Pottery Tour.         SCORE!!!

So I took all of the dried scraps out of the bags a started breaking them up. It was surprising to me how many large pots & pieces there were still intact in the bags? And what fun it was to bang them up & pulverize them into a fine powder.

I also cleaned out my orange reclaim bin… as I had “dirty” stoneware in there last.
And I wanted to start with a clean bin for my “clean” porcelain reclaim.

Once the clay was broken up & pulverized into small pieces. I started dumping it all into the bin. Good News. Bad News… BAD – There was more reclaim than my bin would hold. GOOD – There was more reclaim than my bin would hold so that’s A LOT of free clay!

When the bin was full of scraps, I added a few buckets full of water. The plan is to “submerge” the clay scraps under water. I then took a long stick and stirred it up as best I could.

This orange bin of goopey clay will sit and slake down for a couple weeks while I work on other stuff. I’ll stir it up a couple more times, add some more water as needed. When I feel that it has all dissolved… and the extra water has started to evaporate, I’ll turn it our on the a lrage plaster bat to help get the excess water out… then it’s a LOT of wedging… but then it’s also a LOT of FREE PORCELAIN!!!

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A sweet little stamped & soda-fired porcelain mug
with a wide range of colors & flashing effects to brighten your day!

Great to see my friend & former teacher Steve Lee
showing at one of the pottery tour stops on Friday.
Luckily, one of his inlaid porcelain plates came home with me!!
So great to have Talented Friends!!!

Our first stop Friday on the St. Croix Pottery Tour found us having a nice chat with sgraffito master Matt Metz. And then this beauty decided it “had to” come home with me to join my ever-growing Matt Metz Collection. First souvenir of the St. Croix Pottery Tour!

Playing with porcelain again… and a bit of black slip!
Pretty good chance that there’s some decorative sgraffito carving in my not-so-distant future!

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Stamped porcelain mug for Mugshot Monday.