Surface printing on ceramics

It's great to be back in the ceramics room at City Lit - and 8 weeks of the course remain, Monday evenings; the tutor is Robert Cooper. The course description states: "Working with silkscreen, paper stencil, block and potato printing on unfired clay, biscuit and glazed surfaces, you will create pattern and narrative images with slips, oxides, glaze and on-glaze enamels on simple mould forms and tiles."

Lots of possibilities! My first thought was to develop the "tiles" I made for the "journey" piece on the foundation course; my second thought was to experiment and see where that might lead.  Looking back at the ceramics I made during the foundation course, there's some unfinished business ... those corners ....

In class we did some sponge printing with slip on slabs of clay - pure pleasure -

I may have ruined it by pressing in circles - they would have been better as almost-circles rather than perfectly round ones. Never mind, we'll see what happens when it's fired and given a glaze. It's in the mould to give it a bit of shape -

The simple triangle is a fascinating shape once you start making patterns with it. Serendipity sent this pattern along just as I was about to write this post -

Laotian pattern (image from here)

Next, slip trailing. Robert's demo included moving the pattern around by tilting the board -

 My own attempt at tilting didn't work because the slip was too thick, so I went for a profusion of embellishment -

 Once it's dried a bit, the edges will be cut off and ... what?