May 13

I started making tiles today!  It’s so much work.  Even more than I was expecting it to be.  I’m using a whole thing of porcelain.  The porcelain comes in twenty-five pound bags, so I’m using twenty-five pounds.  Plus I had to wedge a few pounds of porcelain grog into it.  It took all morning.  I felt like I was doing push-ups.  Grog is porcelain that has already been fired and then ground up again, so it doesn’t shrink at all in the kiln.  You wedge it into the porcelain so that the tiles won’t warp at all.  It kind of just feels like sand.  It was really easy when I started each chunk.  I split the bag into five-pound chunks and wedged as much grog as I could into all five.  But it was really easy when I just started wedging each chunk, and they clay was still soft and just absorbed the grog, but then after there was a lot of it in the clay, it was really dry and dense and super hard to wedge.  Then when I finished wedging all of the clay up and back into one big twenty-six pound ball, I started making the tiles.  I wasn’t really able to make tiles, because there’s some thing that I need that Mr. Barmonde is going to bring in, but I don’t really understand what it is.  It seems like some kind of a mold or something.  I don’t know why I just wasn’t understanding when he was explaining it to me.  But yesterday I just made a bunch of slabs.  Which was also a lot more work than I thought it would be.  The porcelain was so dry and cracky because of all of the grog, so when I rolled it out it kept splitting and being uneven.  But I think I got some good ones.  I’m making six inch tiles.  I’m worried that some of the slabs aren’t going to be big enough for that.  I think they’re all six inches, but because they clay shrinks about ten percent, you have to make the tiles six and 5/8 inches instead of just six inches.  I can totally see why handmade tiles are so expensive, though.  They take so much work.  You have to handle them a lot more than something thrown.  And that’s no good either because if you touch them too much, they’ll warp too.