Gary Jackson: Fire When Ready Pottery
A Chicago potter’s somewhat slanted view of clay & play
Categories: mugs, soda-fired, stamped, textures

Always fun to see some of my new “hybrid mugs” thriving out in the wild… enjoying a picnic on the back porch somewhere out in the woods!!! “Hybrid” being a combination of wheelthrown & handbuilt parts… along with some amazing textures made with my MKM Pottery Tools hand rollers!

Categories: mugs, patterns, production, stamped, textures, tools

“Hybrid mugs” assembled, trimmed & handled… and the MKM Pottery Tools that did most of the hard work. Sure, I might have had a tiny-something to do with it too?! But having good tools always makes it more fun!!!

Categories: patterns, textures, tools

Getting ready to tackle another batch of “hybrid mugs” with some of my favorite MKM Pottery Tools. Great hand rollers for making textured slabs before I turn them into fun mugs!

Categories: color, food, textures

Looks like a colorful & tasty Texture Tuesday!

Categories: color, textures

Tons of textures & colors at the Shepherds Harvest Festival. Lots to look at… even more to touch & feel. Such a tactile explosion for those of us who tend to touch everything! Lots of wool & yarns… but also some things I never thought I’d see?! Like the last photo… fish skin leathers!!!

Categories: nature, textures

Celebrating a little TEXTURE TUESDAY with these crazy-cool leaves sprouting out on sumac branches in the neighborhood.

Categories: bowls, process, stamped, textures

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!

Categories: bowls, classes, stamped, stamps, surface decoration, textures, wheelthrowing

After class last Tuesday, I spent a little more time with my class demo bowls. Just did a little more stamping & detailing… making the bowls even more not-so-basicER!!!

And for now, they’re back under plastic for the night… going to have a LOT of trimming to do pretty soon!

Categories: glaze, kiln firing, mugs, textures

Another TEXTURE TUESDAY with some fun textures & glaze pooling effects on these soda-fired “hybrid” mugs! I’m always enamored with this glaze effect when it comes out of the soda kiln… and the glaze highlights & breaks in all the right places!

Categories: bowls, classes, surface decoration, textures

And then last night after “stamping”… we continued on to “sprigging.” Kind of the opposite of stamping in a weird sort of way. Basically it’s pressing clay into a textured mold, and then popping out a little “medallion” of clay to score & slip and attach to the bowl. So the sprigs kind of turn into “inverted-stamps” creating a fun texture pattern wherever you choose to place them. All from one little handmade sprig mold… and more fun for my SURFACE DECORATION class last night!