Thursday 26 March 2009

Ist clay pit pot

More pots out of the kiln today. Most of them were work I did with my youth group-we had an egg cup making competition. Next week they get them back with a Cadbury cream egg in them. I did have a few of my own pots in the firing though. When I finished this bowl I was going to break it up as I wasn't very happy with it but I fired it anyway. My college tutor always said you should live with a pot for a while even if you were going to destroy it and see what you could learn from it.
This is the first pot made with the clay from the pit. It's here for Melvyn to see his clay all fired up. I have split this with some of the standard clay I use. The other pots are now in a biscuit firing. The pot above is actually the same one as in the picture below but the flash seems to have lightened the colour. It's a bit on the heavy side as I was nervous to throw it too thin because some of the 'bits' were quite large. The clay body is a lovely warm terracotta and I wish that I had left some of the clay 'naked' now. I've still got some to glaze so I may do that with them. I like this clay very much but I am not too sure what I can do with it without working out a way of extracting some of the larger grit. I have enjoyed using it very much and it has been refreshing to try a totally different clay.

1 comment:

  1. Lovely pots. It's really hard to throw gritty clay thinly - I gave up trying and just make heavy pots! Funny how different clay leads to different pots. Very lovely work as ever.

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