Dinner plate, salt dish, and wine pitcher in temmoku.
This serving platter is about nine inches across, and is in a favorite glaze, Malcolm’s shino. It will be among items on sale tomorrow at Off the Beaten Track, 2414 Douglas St. NE in Washington DC.
Photo my me, 1 may 2015.
Ash glaze bowl, top and bottom.
With a bit of that blingy Pinnell’s red.
Cookies and milk? Rye and cashews?
Small vessel and plate in Pinnell’s Red and gunmetal.
Sometimes when I have a bit of extra clay I model a hand or a foot, never a pair for some reason. My own limbs are the model, so the hands are chubby, the feet are peasant-like with bunions.
I make the palm or full foot first, excavate little hollows for the phalanges, then add the digits, long clay fingers or bulky toes, instead of just squishing them into a form. I add lumps for the ankle and wrist protuberances, and for the knuckles, then smoothe them out. If I were I think about onogeny replicates phylogeny, I guess I would make some fins first, the some chubby little Mickey Mouse hands then evolve them into fine fingers.
This hand was coming along, but before I finished smoothing out the skin to make a lovely ideal hand, I dropped it on the dusty floor of the studio. It wrenched into a mature twisted appendage, wrinkly, knarly.
This pot, a three-legged teapot, sold yesterday, will be going to someone’s mother for Christmas. It has a matte glaze (called “moonpax” at The Clay Queen studio in Alexandria) and a purchased bamboo handle. Forty dollars.
It was my attempt to copy a pot by Glenn Dair, without any of the grace or elegance.
This covered jar/bowl is seven inches tall at the shoulders, standing on an eight-inch broad frozen sea.
Detail of its precarious footing.
Photos by me.
A little clay sweater in the works.
Words have meanings. For almost anything you might want to think about, a word — or in English, likely more than one — already exists to apply to that concept or object. A term of art for a stemless and handleless glass used for drinking is a “tumbler.” At the pottery studio, “tumbler” would be used for a clay thing to drink from, since it’s not a glass “glass.” But why is this a tumbler, when that’s exactly what you want it not to do?
Thanking all that is holy, I have on my shelf a hand-thick (look up “hand” as a measurement) unabridged dictionary, which tells me that originally this drink holder had a “rounded or pointed bottom and could not be set down until emptied.” I get it now. The word still applies, but with a shifted meaning.
Here at the greenware stage is one of a set of tumblers, close matches, as measured by my fingers and other handy tools. Should this be a watershed logo?
All of her sisters will go in the kiln with her. I hope to show the later stages in due time.
Watershed Clayworks 