Studio Saturday

Gosh another week gone, three sessions in the studio and a couple of hours every morning spent sewing new pots while catching up with favourite radio programmes and podcasts, including: 99% Invisible, Five Live Science, The Inquiry, In Our Time, The Living World, Words and Music - so many interesting things are available! 

I also have the earphones in during the walk between home and studio, but in the studio I like to pay attention to what I'm doing, because the dipping and "tidying up the pot" are still fraught with little problems to solve. Once the problems are all solved, it'll lose interest??

While sewing is in progress, at home, the new pots tend to spread over the table -

New coffee cup, among the pots-in-progress

Monday - These four have dried and the bases have been trimmed, but a few cracks need filling -

Large plastic bottles are proving very useful - firstly, for holding my cobbled-together suspension system for holding up the floppy pots till they've dried. The strings get suspended on the skewer, the pot is carefully balanced. Ah yes, first the height must be adjusted - tiles under the (weighted) bottle do that -

And the notebook is for trying to remember to Make Notes

 These were destined for dipping -

 and kept under plastic to dry more slowly, in hopes of preventing cracks -

Wednesday - the bubble wrap had stuck to the wet pot and left some texture - let's see what it looks like after firing -

These are all stitched up and went to the studio -

and some larger pots were destined for dipping -

 What happens if some of the fabric is wet - will the clay be thinner?

 Careful with placement of plastic -

Friday - what came out of the plastic was ...

 The strings are carefully removed and the excess clay is chipped off the base and smoothed away with a little sponge -

Sometimes some of the fabric appears in a ring round the base ... what will happen in the kiln, will it fall apart? -

 Today's candidates for dipping -

 Experiment in double-dipping, to try to get rid of a myriad of cracks -

 The fabric for this was a thick cotton; the thin silks dipped at the same time didn't develop cracks. So does the slip need to be thicker or thinner on the thicker fabric?

Another use for cut-down plastic bottles: to cover individual pots and slow down the drying -

Diversion - What on earth is this then? The thread snippings fell into what resembled a primitive horse, a winged horse (maybe reminiscent of this "geometric" style) -