Jubilee Monday #13: Pottering Around

One of the aspects of Jubilee that I've mentioned is going back to dreams...this was one of those 'Things I've Always Wanted to Try'.

Saturday morning, I got up and made a drive from the south side of the Rocket City north to just over the Tennessee border, to the home of Mr S., the pottery artist who attends our church and who has been coaching the Flute Player in beginning pottery during our Night of Worship services. He has a 'Life Interest Group' (which is technically what my sewing group is, too) for folks interested in pottery that meets once a month, and the Flute Player wanted to do it, so I signed up, too. She was on her way back from visiting her grandparents on Saturday, this month's meeting date, but I went ahead without her.

Gave me a chance to try it without being outdone by my own kid. :)

Anyway, it was really fun. Since there were three of us who'd never done any clay work before, we began with a quick demo by Mr. S.

He began by slicing a slab of clay off the block, then throwing it onto his work bench several times to thin and stretch it.

He pressed slices off that flattened piece into a mold and dried it just a bit w/a hair dryer. Then he popped the bowl out of the mold and showed us how to build up the rim and add our own design interest. Here, he demonstrates inserting a design feature into a bowl:

















Then it was our turn to try. He threw one slab a little for me and I *tried* to throw it the last couple of times...um, that's definitely a trick I'll have to practice! I ended up using a rolling pin to flatten out the folds I put in my slab...


I looked over the molds that were available. I wanted something kinda graceful, and I picked a mold that I later found out was supposed to be the top of a jar...a chimney sort of thing. And it was so small I had difficulty getting the clay into the bottom of it. But when it was done, I had a nice flowing little cup. Now what?

As I looked at it, I mentally saw flower petals coming over the sides. So I kinda experimented around and finally found that if I started with an uneven parallelogram type slice from my clay slab and shaped the edges a bit, I had a nice looking leaf/petal.

So I 'flowered up' my little cup, and I finished it off by adding some stamens, which I really hope won't look like worms when it's glazed and fired!

I had a little time left before I needed to leave, so I thought I'd do what I should've done to begin with...an ornamented basic bowl. I used a small bowl mold, and this time I just added a decorative band to the top. I came up with the idea of braiding rods, but I had problems rolling out long, even rods.

When I asked Mr. S. if there was a trick to making long, even rods, he showed me his 'Claystruder'...a wall-mounted Fun Factory! He pounded out a chunk of clay, put it in the extruder and made a pile of long rods for me to braid (several other folks made use of the rods, too).
I just about ruined it, though, when I tried to put a bow on the seam of the braiding. The braiding looked cool; the bow looked cheesy. I pulled the bow off, but the 'knot' was stuck tight. I looked for something to use to set a design on the 'knot' to make it look more, um, intended, but didn't have any luck. Finally, I copied a couple of other folks who were imbedding ferns into their work to make some impressions and took a wee bit of a fern leaf and embossed it into the 'knot'. It'll burn out when the piece is fired; hopefully it'll look intentional ;).

Next month we will glaze our pieces and in December they'll be raku-fired. So I still don't know what I'll end up with.

Restful recreation...check....doing something I'd wanted to do for a long time...check...Jubilee? definitely check.