Under wraps for the night… so I can come back to them later to do a little smoothing & touching up. As well as adding some accents & details with a bit of colored flashing slips. Then they can be left out to dry… and then into a kiln!!!

After a productive night in the studio, we now have a dozen mugs…
ready for some colored flashing slip accents and then a quick trip to the bisque kiln!!!

Here’s the “fussy part” of doing handles… score, slip, attach, repeat.

I always start with the top attachment… then move on to the bottom attachment making sure it’s secure, lined-up and that the handle is a good proportion to the cup.

I try to smooth them in as much as possible… but know that I can do a little more refining when I come back to them. Thus another one of the reasons I keep my mugs under plastic again after attaching handles!

Making handles for the new mugs… starting with small blocks of wedged clay that I slam on the table to make these “carrot” shapes.

And then I pull my handles the old-school way, let them set-up and then attach them to my mugs!

Several steps & timing along the way…
all to make a cylinder become a MUG!!!

Another batch of mugs just in time…
hoping to get them through all the steps of the process in time
to get them into my next schedule soda kiln.

So tonight I did a bit of stamping… here are the before & after shots…

Mug #1 —

Mug #2 —

Mug #3 —

Mug #4 —

Mug #5 —

Mug #6 —

Mug #7 —

Mug #8 —

Mug #9 —

Mug #10 —

Mug #11 —

Mug #12 —

So for now they’re all stamped and back under plastic for the night. My plan is to trim them all tomorrow night… and then add handles… and then paint some colored flashing slips on them… dry… bisque… glaze… wad… all before my soda kiln deadline!!!

Adding a few stamps, textures & patterns to my latest batch of flower pots. Handmade stamps for handmade pots… pressed in one, by one, by one…

Okay, so my birds are still working their way closer to the soda kiln… I’ve added some colored details to the twigs & leaves! Not quite sure what I’m doing with the birds yet… I have too many options, but not enough decisions!!!

So I spent part of the night “processing” my clay… taking bags of kinda-wet reclaim, kinda-dry stoneware, and some random scraps of clay left over in a few bags sitting around my studio. It’s always nice to work them all together to make a “new” clay that is all evenly blended… and to get rid of a bunch of random clay bags lying around my studio!

Instead of wedging them all together, I like to alternate thinly sliced layers of each clay. Then I take the stack and cut it in half vertically… stacking one half on top of the other half. A little slam on the table, and then I repeat the slicing, stacking & slamming. Time after time. Eventually the clay layers thin out enough that the clay appears to be blended.

You can see that every time you slice and stack, the layers are getting thinner & thinner…

Sure, it still needs a little bit of wedging… but this is so much easier than wedging all of the clays together from the start!

Still under wraps… procrastinating as usual these days… but gotta focus and get these moving along! Using some photo references to formulate my plan. This project is gonna be “for the birds.”

And no… this is NOT an episode of “Portlandia.”

So I finally got “focused” tonight in the studio and started waxing the bottoms of a bunch of pots. I was kinda surprised… there were a lot more than I remembered making?! But they all look like mine…. so… I’ll keep waxing in preparation for a couple LONG glazing sessions to come!