Continuing in Fredi's Course

I am learning so much in Fredi's course, and today I had a very productive second class.  I finished off the 8 items I threw in last class, and threw another 5 more.  Not to mention, I mixed and revived a number of partial bags of clay.

The vessel with the hearts, I finished off the sides with the surform tool, which exposed the rich brown clay, and also added an interesting texture.  The vase beside it, I played with adding thick white slip, with my fingers.  I'm very pleased with the result.

The one on the left, I also added white slip with my fingers, and played with a wavy pattern.  The vase on the right, I was so tempted to decorate it more, but it was such a beautiful shape, and so light (I'm so pleased with my progress in throwing!), that I decided not to muck with it.  Maybe it will give me some beautiful variations in the soda firing.

The one on the left, I also resisted playing with it.  I could always try some creative glazing.  The one on the right, I messed around with scraping it, so that the rich brown clay showed through more clearly.  If I need to, I could also sand it a bit after the bisque firing.

This sweet spherical shaped "topper" for my totems, I decided to decorate with bees and honeycomb.  I'm really happy with the effect.  I may even send it through a soda firing.

Finally, I decided to play a bit with the more runny slips.  This one I added turquoise slip, and then while it was still wet, loaded black slip on the rim until it ran down the outside and also inside of the vessel.  I'm pretty happy with the drips, and will probably try something like this again.  That was the first 4 hours (almost 1 hour of which was settling in and watching a demo from Fredi).

In the final 3 hours, I threw these 5 pieces, which I will trim or just smooth out the bottoms and maybe decorate, next session, which will be either 2 weeks from now (due to the Easter holiday) or during one of my Wednesday classes.  We'll see.


Here they are, in closeup :

The one on left is another attempt to make a pleasantly shaped vase, which I could either decorate, or let the soda firing do some magic for me.  The one on right is something I had a bit of fun with.  It started like this :

...then I pushed out the shape.  Since one part of the rim split, I decided to split it in 3 more spots, and make it look intentional.

I played a bit more with spherical shapes.  If I can make them big enough, I would like to carve one into a candleholder.  The one on the left is a near-perfect sphere.  I love that shape.  The one on right, is almost spherical also, but finished as a vase.  Mostly for decorate purposes, with that little opening.


I would love to have decorated these will pressed leaves, but the leaves are only budding out at the moment.  I'll have to wait a few more weeks before I can make more of those.

Finally, this fairly large spherical vase.  It was thrown from 2kg of porcelain clay, quite a bit more than the 1300 g used in the previous two spherical shapes.  So I was disappointed that I couldn't make it bigger than I did.  But I think being the last one in a very long and busy day, I was getting tired.


I am so pleased by all the progress so far.  A few of the pieces I picked up today to finish, I could hardly believe they were mine.  They were so light, in comparison to what I've done in the past.  I hope I have compressed the bottoms enough that I won't get any cracks, as all of these pieces are quite dear to me.