Same stamp on a large platter! More surface to decorate means more impressions! A larger platter with one stamp… pressed in one by one by one… over & over & over again!!!

Finishing up a batch of large oval vases. Just adding some accents of colored flashing slip in the stamped textures. The colors will show up better after soda-firing… this slip should turn orange!!!

Looks like Maryanna has been listening!!! Some newly carved mugs with colored slip backgrounds… using some great carving tools from DiamondCore Tools. Good to know my mantra is stuck in a few people’s heads!!! Ha!!!

It’s been another fun week of summer camp! This week I have 8-10-year olds… for wheelthrowing & handbuilding camp. Today we trimmed & decorated the pots they made on Monday & Tuesday. Tomorrow we start handbuilding! Then Friday painting everything with colored slips!

And I was SO impressed today by Nikko who did some amazing surface decoration using one of my handmade leaf stamps as a sprig to make a 3-dimensional vine on the side of his vase!!!

After a full day at the GLENVIEW SUMMER ART FAIR… with part of it during a downpour thunderstorm… I still made it into the studio tonight. I knew that I had some vases that were drying out & still needed to be stamped. So… no rest for the weary. The next batch of vases has now been stamped… and tomorrow more art fair fun!!! Hopefully a drier day???

As part of my slip painting demos for summer camp today… I introduced the kids to skip trailing. Going one step further with slip trailed flowers… “dragged” for texture… and drawn on the canvas table as that’s just where we were sitting!!! It’s just clay… it washed right away!!!

Just in time for the NORTHERN ILLINOIS POTTERY TOUR… a new glaze combination I’ve been playing around with!!! A drippy runny mess of color playing nicely with my stamped textures. Frequently, glaze tends to fill in all of my stamps. But this time, it’s dripping, running & making cool rivulets of color. Even the undersides have been turning out pretty groovy! We’ll see if people dig ‘em as much as I do?!

Big debut this weekend at the NORTHERN ILLINOIS POTTERY TOUR! C’mon by…

While playing with “slip inlay” last night in my SURFACE DECORATION class, I also did a demo for simple banded stripes with slip inlay. While trimming, I carved a few thin lines into the clay. Then filled them with slip… and a little bit more to cover them. Then, when the slip dries to leatherhard, you can trim off the top surface flush to the pot to reveal these colored bands… perfectly smooth to the surface.

Last night in my SURFACE DECORATION class, we did a bit of “sanggam” on these tiles to demonstrate the Korean decorative technique. I had prepped the tiles with stamps & slip ahead of time. And then my students “shaved” away the extra slip to reveal the pattern of now “slip-filled” stamps. It was a lot of fun as the images revealed themselves with continued scraping.

Scrape more Taylor…

EVEN MORE TAYLOR!!!

That’s so much better Taylor!!!

In preparation for last night’s class demo with my SURFACE DECORATION class, I made a bunch of stoneware tiles with stamped impressions. I then filled the stamps & slathered on some thick white slip ahead of time to get it all to stiffen up to leatherhard. The plan is to discus “sanggam” as a technique where they will “shave off” the top layer of slip to reveal the stamped pattern… leaving it filled with slip & flush to the top of the tile! More to come…