torsos!

This is Mark, looking like a Michael Jackson spaceman.  This one's called Spaceman Michael Mark.

This is Connie. She started slumping halfway through so I switched colors.

glazing forever!

I have been trying to find a glaze that works for my tea set for a very long time.  I made six tests of green and white a little while ago, and none of them melted.  So that was disappointing.  Now I've been looking through all sorts of glaze books to try to find one that works. This book doesn't have any pictures, so I'm kind of just kind of shooting in the dark with my new set of glaze tests.  I'm planning on mixing a green glaze for the leaves on the set and a white glaze for the body of the pieces.  I want the colors to be kind of flat to go with the almost cartoony-ness of the tea set.  I also hope that I'll be able to use the new glazes on some of my other unfinished projects, which seem to be stacking up as I wait for a successful test firing.  

These are my glaze tests!  I finally finished mixing the bases for all of them.  I'm trying three different kinds of glaze, and I mixed two of each, one for the white test and one for the green test.  They're called Clear Smooth Mat, Clear Satin Mat, and Clear Mat.  I don't really know what kind of difference the satin and smooth are going to make, but hopefully they'll come out differently and successfully.  I hope at least one of them works out, anyway.  It feels like I haven't actually been doing anything, because I just go into the glaze lab every day and mix these up, and I haven't actually been able to use any of them yet.  I threw a bunch of test cups, so hopefully I'll be able to fire them soon!

This one is a mug I glazed using Chun and Iron Saturate, which are glazes that we already have in the studio.  It was kind of nice to actually be able to glaze a piece.  I missed the gas firing, though, so this won't be fired for a while.  Hopefully by the time the kiln is ready to go I'll have a lot of pieces for my project.  I'm making functional ware, and mostly dinnerware.  Actually, mostly mugs.  I'm going to try to find a shape of mug that I like the most.  I feel like they're a really basic part of the ceramics world, and I'm not super comfortable with making them.  I think I just start too small, and then they shrink, so much.  I'm trying to go bigger with these, and I'm going to experiment with round and cylindrical shapes.  And handles.  I'm not great with handles, but I'm definitely going to make an effort to include them on most of my mugs.  But I think it's okay to make a combination of those and tea bowls without handles, too.