Ceramics - last weeks

Last week, what came out of the kiln was my experiments with on-glaze enamels. They were mixed too thinly and mostly didn't work, but these two turned out ok -

I had lots of bisque-fired clay books to glaze, and used just transparent glazes, a matte and a shiny. Keeping track of what went where got confusing, but I have a photographic record -

This is what went into the kiln last week -

and this is some of what came out - white clay, bisque fired -

There isn't time for glazing, but I like it just the way it is. It'll get a coat of diluted pva to seal the surface. And I made some more, to be collected later -

My accumulated work this term -

That shark-like thing on the left uses a tile that split in firing (to be glued together with Araldite, but not the fast-drying variety). A close-up -

and a glimpse of the exciting things other people were doing with printing and glazing -

I'm excited about the fat white books, with their unique sequences of numbers that look like the windows of a building ... as though a book might be somewhere to live. People gave me wonderful suggestions and ideas - how the white books look as though they were glued together by being soaked with water (which reminded me of the Flood Library project) - and also how they needed tiny wire people scattered among them, or climbing ladders (which got me thinking about stop-motion animation). So rather than feeling sad at the end of a very enjoyable course, I feel excited by these new possibilities.