My Big Pot

I hope I get to take a ceramics course again this summer.  I’ve been taking it off and on since 2000.  Sometimes the guy that teaches it takes the summer off.  Click on the picture above for a good shot of a pot I made in that first class.  It’s one of the things I’ve made that I’m the most proud of.  It’s 18 inches tall, and about 14 inches wide at the broadest part of the vase.  It has a pretty uniform thickness ranging from 1/2 inch to 3/8ths.

I used two methods to make it.  The bottom part right up to where it flares out is all coil pot.  And yes, the coils were rolled out by hand.  We had an extruder that would make perfect coil ropes for us, but we weren’t allowed to use it for our first time pots.  The top part was done with slabs.  I built the central cylinder  out of a series of about three inch wide slabs.  One per night.  I couldn’t do it all at once, because the cylinder would be too heavy for the clay underneath to support.  Once that part was on I shaped and scraped it until it was as perfect and seamless as I could get.   I let it dry and harden up a bit for a day or two.

The next part was to put the triangular flare bits on.  I’d never done anything even remotely like this before so it was a bit of a puzzler.  I rolled out a slab, cut some pieces out and played with them for awhile.  I developed a game plan and went to work.  I got all six pieces on in one night and pretty well shaped up.  I let it dry for a day and finalized all the outside shaping.  I let it dry another day and then cut out part of the inner cylinder to open up the top.  The next couple of nights I worked on burnishing the outside and working on the small details. 

Finally, there was nothing else to do but let it dry completely.  This is the first real test of one’s craftsmanship.  If I didn’t maintain a consistent thickness, or changed thickness too quickly, or didn’t join a seem correctly, a crack could appear during this period.  Sometimes these cracks can be fixed, more often they can’t.  It passed – no cracks.  The next is the trial by fire. 

Finished ceramic pieces usually get fired twice.  The first is the bisque firing.  No glazes are applied – the raw piece goes into the kiln and is fired somewhere around 1900 degrees farenheit.  The precise temperature depends on what clay recipe you’re using.  The heat puts great stresses on the structure of your work.  Again, if you crafted the piece very well, no cracks appear.  Some pieces actually shatter during this stage.  Happily, neither of these things occurred, and I was greatly relieved.

Next step – glazing.  HOO-BOY!  This is a biggie.  You can make a beautiful work of art that will turn to crap if you mess up the glaze.  I thought long and hard about the glazing options open to me and consulted with the instructor.  Glazes are a subject you can study your entire life and never be absolutely sure of the results, particularly in a communal kiln.  Check out the glaze link to get an idea of the complexity here.

During my discussions with the instructor he made the point that my piece had a very strong design and didn’t particularly need fancy glaze work.  He also recommended that we go with a low fire glaze.  Low fire means lower temperature, so a great deal less stress.  Pieces that make it through bisque firing can still crack and even shatter at the high fire temperatures.  I agonized over the decision until the last day we could glaze and fire because the class was coming to an end.  I chose a streaky black glaze that showed the terra cotta color of the clay in the thin spots on the bottom portion that ran into a speckly greenish black glaze on top.  Inside I did a clear glaze that makes it water tight.

The above picture shows what awaited my delighted gaze a few days later.  Peacock tail feathers set off and complements the glazes and form beautifully.  My parents gave me some when they moved out of Las Vegas years before, and I just happened to think of them when I got it home.  We had a final night at the class and we all brought our stuff back for a final show and I threw the feathers in.  The instructor saw it and remarked that it looked like it was designed for peacock feathers.  

So there ya go.  The last couple of times I took this class, I’ve focused on learning how to do stuff on the throwing wheel.  The next class is going to be primarily oriented on hand-building larger stuff.

***Update***

 Just googling around on maybe doing this stuff at home:  Home Raku.  Oh, sweet.  Raku can be tha shiznet.  It’s totally do-able, and not that expensive really.  It was the raku process that I used to create the sleestak Skull that I gave to a formerly frequent commenter.