Playing with porcelain again… starting with some simple bowls!

Lots of patterns, stamps & textures…
drying slowly on some elevated plastic grid so they dry more evenly –
hoping to avoid any warping with even airflow on both sides!

Scratch, attach, repeat… repeat… repeat.
So I’ve been adding the textured tops to some ovals that I made a day or so ago.
They’re all closed up… and waiting for flower holes!

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So I’ve textured the slab with my STODOLA rolling pins, and now I’m attaching them to the tops of some ovals. I’m closing it up for now, but will be cutting some holes through the textured top to make these into flower bricks!

Now THAT’s a lot of pots… a lot of flat pieces AND a lot of shelves!!!
I’ve never fired a soda-kiln with so many flat pieces. I hope that they all get “kissed”
with some nice soda atmosphere for some fun flashing effects. Fingers crossed.

So I did a LOT of glazing & wadding… and filled my rolling studio cart. I added a few bands of masking tape as “safety belts” so nothing shimmies off the cart while riding the rickety freight elevator. I love this cart that my Dad made for me years ago. When I have it filled with work, it pretty much equals a loaded soda kiln. Fill the cart, load the kiln.

Just finishing off a quick class demo piece… a plain bottle that needed a little somethin’-somethin’. So I made a rectangle “stencil” using pieces of wet newspaper. I placed them on the leatherhard bottle and smoothed them along the edges. Then painted some thick colored slip over the rectangular void of newspaper, and then dragged my finger through it to make some patterns.

After the slip set-up a bit, I simply peeled the newspaper away…

...and voila’… a fun patch of colored slip with textural finger lines.

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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Glazed mugs. If all goes well in the kiln, these should turn out a nice watery green… hopefully accentuating the stamped textures with some glaze runs in between. Fingers crossed.

Time to start loading the kiln… firing & cooling just in time to get everything prepped, priced & packed for this weekend’s art fair in Glenview, Illinois.

In the middle of glazing…
one last kiln to be fired before this weekend’s art fair in Glenview, Illinois.