Slowing down, testing glazes, & introducing Flossie the teapot

When I'm creating, whether it be with fabric or clay or even food, one thing is common. My work is feverish, focused, intense. When I'm free-motion quilting, the whole house shakes. When I'm on the potter's wheel, chaos can surround me and I won't hear it. It's a great way to really understand your medium, but sometimes I get so focused on what I'm doing - I'm so in the moment, that I forget to step back and consider what I'm doing.

What throwing pots is teaching me is that I need to slow down. When I first started working with clay, I would be speeding around the studio, knicking the clay with my fingers, dropping things, making mistakes that could have been prevented by just slowing down. I'm learning how to harness that passion, and be a little bit more reflective of what I'm doing.

For example, take my two whimsical pots. I threw the body of the teapot at the end of one class where I was using a clay pad for trimming; the pad became the pot body. The next week I threw four or five spouts and a couple of lids. I loved the teapot's shape, but the plate was just an excercise in carving; I was trying to disguise a lopsided plate with a bottom that was way to thick, thus the carved bottom and egdgework. The week after I was working on carving the sunflower plate, and in the last five minutes of class, decided to carve the floral top on the teapot. The next week I painted the yellow and red and green with underglaze -- many coats. I was so excited to glaze them and start using them.

When I came in the next week to glaze, my teacher, Lizanne Donegan, suggested that I glaze the sunflower plate first with the opal glaze and see how that came out. I only take classes once a week, so this was hard advice for me to follow; I wanted to glaze that teapot! I dipped the sunflower plate in opal (using tongs) and then painted on randy red in swirls in the center. I was thinking it would be a very transparent glaze, glossy, with just a bit of bluish-purple sparkle. But when the plate came out of the glaze kiln, it was much less translucent than I thought it would be, but I do love the results.

The teapot, now that's a different story. I loved the fleshy shape of the pot -- like Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast. We even named her, Flossie. I tried clear on the teapot, which came out great. One problem, which you can't see in the picture is that where the clay is thin (on the spout) and the underglazing is thick, the glaze had trouble sticking.

The teapot pours without dripping, and holds at least four good-sized mugs of tea. My daughter and I had a wonderful tea party with Flossie during the premiere of America's Next Top Model. What could be better than that?

Pottery in Process

About four years ago, I decided to try my hand at pottery. I found it a great way to take a little vacation from the trials and tribulations of everyday life, because it is a craft that you have to really pay attention to. You have to be respectful of the clay. You have to move slowly and purposefully. You have to be patient, waiting for the pottery to dry to leather-hard, waiting for the pottery to be bisqued, deciding the glaze colors and how to apply the glaze and so on

I'm a creative sort, and usually catch onto new crafts quickly. But I made ALOT of mistakes from my pottery. Mistakes on the wheel. Mistakes in how I covered the pots to dry. Mistakes in carrying the pots to the shelf. Mistakes in how I glazed. But every mistake made me see what I could do with the mistake. I went in another direction with my art.

So today, I worked on two pieces that started out as something else. The teapot began as a large flat pad that I threw when I was trimming some plates. It was more bulbous than I wanted, but I saved it anyway. The fleshy spout was also a mistake -- a little shorter and wider than I was thinking. There were three weeks between classes, so it dried out more than I thought it would. But I carved the floral lid. I decided to underglaze it in red, and as I painted, I came up with the polka-dotted body. I had no idea that it was going to look like this when I started this!

The same is true of the sunflower plate. When I was throwing this, I rushed through it, and it got a little lopsided. I made a very thick bottom, so when I was trimming, I had a very large foot. After I finished trimming, I took out the knife and started cutting out the petals- though at that time I was thinking about crowns. (The bottom has the same crown looking carving). When I finished the spotted teapot, I was inspired to make the crown plate into a sunflower plate. Now where did that come from?