Plotting & Planning...

So one of the things one has to keep in mind with ceramics is timing. Really timing is almost always about drying time, occasionally cooling times.

So you have to plan ahead to ensure things are dry in time to get fired and cooled, and glazed, and fired, and cooled for... the ultimate deadline.

So, I am planning on Mother's Day.  I have three pieces for a dinner set for four.  I have two done today. The deal with trying to make "matching" pieces is making them the same.  Ya, no duh. but that can be difficult. It helps to make more pieces than needed and pick the one that look the most similar.

With this in mind I made more pieces than I need, and will sell the others as "one offs".  I will also make a very different type of glaze. I need red for this, but it needs to be durable. So the easiest move is to do a Mason Stain.  Really not how I tend to glaze, I like being able to make it all from scratch. But for this, well I need it to be red and that is a hard color to achieve to get a true red and for it to be a durable glaze.

Here are some pieces I threw this past week. Two large bowls, 7# each. I also explored a new shape to be a pasta bowl.

So today I worked on the dinner set. I decided the pasta bowl was a good shape and it will be a part of the dinner set. I will also have some flat but rounded plates, they are flat so you can cut meat on them. But rounded to hold in sauce.  It has more of a bowl feel to it at this point.  I liked eating out of these before.

So I needed to make clay. I think I made about 70# and threw 44# today.