Kicking off the morning with my favorite four letters!!!
Fresh new pots cooling for this weekend’s art fair in Schaumburg!!!

All lined up… ready for a quick layer of wax resist on the footrings… then some quick glazing before teaching class tonight. I’d love to get them in the kiln soon… as this coming weekend is the Schaumburg Prairie Arts Festival!!! And I’d really like to have some of these berry bowls ready for this weekend!!! Fingers crossed…

Here we go… wedged & ready to get busy!!!

Don’t you just hate when you forget to wire a platter off the bat… and then let it dry far too long to a very stiff leatherhard… and then still try to wire it off so you can trim it?! I thought I could do it… spinning it on the wheel while I pulled the wire tool through slowly & very, very taut. But then THIS happened… so much for this platter!!! And so it goes… into the reclaim pile!!!

This week in my SURFACE DECORATION class… we did a bit of simple faceting. Basically throwing “thick-ish” walled cylinders, slicing through them… and in some cases, re-throwing from the inside to bulge them out a bit. We also did some throwing with marbled clay… but my hands were too gooey with three colors of clay to get any good photos! Maybe after we do a little trimming to reveal the marbling better???

Finishing up a large batch of berry bowls… so much quicker & easier with my power drill. Just some quick cleaning-up of the tiny burrs when they dry. Soon enough they’ll be dry enough for the bisque kiln. Now I just need to make a bunch of drip plates to go with these berry bowls!

Time to make some berry bowls… so much easier with a power drill to do the “heavy lifting”!!! Plus, the range of drill bits gives you a good selection of hole diameters!

The morning after… trimming scraps ready to toss into my reclaim bucket!

Trimming some bowls with the perfect combo of trimming tools… my favorite trimming tool from DiamondCore Tools & my Giffin Grip. One holds ’em tight, and the other trims them smooth. Makes my job easy… even when my trimming tool blade is wearing thin. One of the benefits of DiamondCore Tools is that they remain sharp even while wearing down… and oh, but wait there’s more.. they even send you a replacement blade to switch out when this one eventually dies. But I still have a good amount of trimming with this one before that happens…

Well, it looks like I’ve got a good bit of trimming ahead of me today… hoping to get it all done before teaching class tonight?! A bunch of bowls at a good leather-hard state ready for trimming… one of my favorite parts of the whole process!