My First Commissioned Piece : Mickey Urn

Sadly, my first sort of commissioned piece was an urn for my sister's beloved canine friend, Mickey.  Since my sister is a Mickey Mouse fanatic, and her dog was named after Mickey Mouse, she looked long and hard for a Disney urn for him, but couldn't find anything suitable.  So she asked me to make him one.

I knew it had to have Mickey ears, and be the red and black Mickey colors, but I was really pleased that I could also use Mickey font and add my own handmade paw print stamps to it, for a really special result (with sincere apologies to the Disney Corporation for license infringement, I would never have done it except my sister was desperate and had searched the entire magic kingdom to no avail) :

 

It turned out even sweeter than I had hoped.  But then in a nasty twist of fate, the wax with alumina hydrate which I used between the lid and the vessel, which was supposed to keep the two pieces apart, didn't work.  So I ended up with this absolutely adorable pet urn, with the lid fused solid to it.

Over a series of evenings, I tried everything I could think of, or read about, involving tapping, freezing, thawing, freezing and dipping the lid in near-boiling water, spraying with WD40, and praying, and more tapping.  I only came short of using a blow torch on it, since I don't have a torch (although a friend of mine is offering a dessert torch to try).

So I'm afraid unless a miracle happens, I may need to start over again, and make another urn for my sister, this time a functional one.

At least on my second try, I think I'll keep it simpler, as on the first one, I had carved the name, and then finished all the black parts in black slip, before I started to doubt that it would be black enough, and then repeated them all in black underglaze.  The next time I'll keep it simple, and go straight to the red underglaze and black underglaze.  And I'm pretty sure I'll fire the two pieces separately in the final firing, taking the chance of warping over the chance that they may fuse again.