Gettin' Fired Up

The last of the Tile White ^05 clay was used up yesterday by deciding to make a few more slab trays to continue working on my sgraffito technique. Though I haven't found my sweet mini ribbon tools, I did bring out a whole set of sculpture carving tools I had kept with my sculpture supplies. The steel tools are used for working with hard surfaces but worked wonderfully on the new sgraffito pieces I made. I also pulled out some old issues of Pottery Making Illustrated and was inspired to try some cone shaped handles I saw in the September/Ocotber 2009 issue. In the article, artist Lana Wilson had created highly textural pieces and made these really cool looking cone-shaped handles from textured slab pieces. I didn’t have the right proportions and I think my cone-handles look a bit turd-like on the larger Raven tray!

Once the proportions are right, the cone handle process is really fun and artful looking. The sgraffito images I’m going to use on these new trays are going to be more colorful. I remembered

I had a small bin of various underglaze colors that I bought with that lot of used clay supplies last year. They are the right cone temp for this lower fire clay and should be fun to experiment with. While the new slab trays are slowly becoming leather hard, I have to fire the welder up to make a steel Octopus sculpture that’s going to be shipped to Louisiana. I wasn’t

thinking I'd be welding this week or even working in metal but the client needs the piece shipped by the first of February. It will all work out because I need to get the dust covers off the kilns and better organize the shop area where I weld and fire, before I fire the kilns again. It’s been so long since either of the kilns have been fired, I’ve broken one of my rules to not stack anything on top of the kilns and noticed there are quite a few specially cut metal pieces that I’ve “set aside” ON TOP of the kilns…