Today
was rather unproductive. I had my world
religions class block seven, and then during block eight I did some homework
that I needed to get done. I spent
blocks one and two trying to throw some more platters. The one I threw yesterday wasn’t ready to
trim, so I tried to make a few more, but none of them came out. I was throwing too thin. I think I was just being too ambitious,
because I was trying to make a platter that was bigger than the one I made
yesterday. I can fit a sixteen inch
platter in the kiln, so I was trying to get as close to that as possible, but
the biggest wheel bats that we have are only like fourteen inches, so it was
hard to find the limit of how big I can throw.
The platter I made yesterday was a pretty good size I think,
anyway. I don’t need to make a sixteen
inch one, but I just thought I’d give it a go, or three or four. It’s really annoying to use porcelain because
when you throw something that doesn’t work you have to wedge and reuse the clay
right away instead of just tossing it in the pug mill and getting new
clay. It’s especially annoying when you’re
awful at wedging. I think I just need to
take a couple of hours and wedge a bunch of clay and try to get a better feel
for it. Today, every platter I tried to
make was worse than the one before it because there were more and more air
bubbles. Tomorrow when I try again I’m
definitely going to make a more conscious effort to wedge all the bubbles out
of the clay. They’re really becoming the
bane of my existence. Everything can be
going along fine and then all of a sudden everything is ruined because an air
bubble decided to show itself.
A wheel bat is the little wooden or
plastic circle that you put on the wheel so hat you can take your work off the
wheel. And a pug mill is a little mixer
that you put used clay into and it pretty much wedges it for you. I’ve come to realize how much of a luxury
that is. It would be worth a few
thousand dollars to get one for porcelain for my remaining weeks with this
project.
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