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end of wet clay, quarter 3
May. 23rd, 2011 10:28 pmI realize people don't know I'm still doing ceramics, since I stopped posting about them so much. Unfortunately I kept having work stolen out of the studio, and while it seems highly unlikely it's anyone reading here it took the fun out of posting about it when the stuff would then disappear. I'm also not signing my pieces, and so far nothing's gone missing this quarter -- though now would be the time for it to happen.
I thought we had a little longer to work this quarter, but tonight's class was supposed to be the end of working with the wet clay; now we're meant to let everything dry and play with various glazes and such. I still have loads of clay left, as always. I get miserly halfway through the quarter and don't start making things for fear of running out of clay, then give in and buy another bag that I've run out of time to use. Three times is enough to recognize a pattern, but not to fix it...
This quarter we started out working with terra cotta, which is surprisingly soft and smooth (but makes your hands really orange). It's interesting because it never gets fired at a high temperature to become stoneware, so there are different glazes and techniques to working with it. I've made some weird stuff and learned I do not like coil building. (There are some people in my class who are amazing at it, and maybe I need to try the extruder to get even coils rather than my lumpy hand-rolled ones, but so far, frustrating.) A lot of what we're doing is using plaster molds to make basic forms and then adding to or altering those, and I made a couple of small press molds of my own, which was fun.
I was going to post some photos of items from last quarter that are now safely at home, but the camera needs charging before I can nab the pictures from it. Tomorrow!
Next quarter I don't think I'll have time for pottery; I'm going to have to work in a committee meeting as well as the conference I'm headed to, but more importantly I'm taking a real live university class on making scientific figures. Maybe I can use some of this clay at home over the summer and take a class again in fall.
I thought we had a little longer to work this quarter, but tonight's class was supposed to be the end of working with the wet clay; now we're meant to let everything dry and play with various glazes and such. I still have loads of clay left, as always. I get miserly halfway through the quarter and don't start making things for fear of running out of clay, then give in and buy another bag that I've run out of time to use. Three times is enough to recognize a pattern, but not to fix it...
This quarter we started out working with terra cotta, which is surprisingly soft and smooth (but makes your hands really orange). It's interesting because it never gets fired at a high temperature to become stoneware, so there are different glazes and techniques to working with it. I've made some weird stuff and learned I do not like coil building. (There are some people in my class who are amazing at it, and maybe I need to try the extruder to get even coils rather than my lumpy hand-rolled ones, but so far, frustrating.) A lot of what we're doing is using plaster molds to make basic forms and then adding to or altering those, and I made a couple of small press molds of my own, which was fun.
I was going to post some photos of items from last quarter that are now safely at home, but the camera needs charging before I can nab the pictures from it. Tomorrow!
Next quarter I don't think I'll have time for pottery; I'm going to have to work in a committee meeting as well as the conference I'm headed to, but more importantly I'm taking a real live university class on making scientific figures. Maybe I can use some of this clay at home over the summer and take a class again in fall.
