Pitcher - horsley clay, oxidation fired, wheel thrown and altered, soda ash over choxils

This pitcher was faceted after the spout was added with a wire immediately after throwing when the clay was still soft and wet. The handle was paddled to add a faceted appearance to match the pitcher.  I used choxils (underglaze pencils) to shade the facets to create a pen/ink drawing aesthetic.  I wanted to highlight the facet shapes and this technique is good for that.  Brushing a few layers of soda ash solution over the choxil gives a soft gloss / glassy finish to the piece.  It also softens the roughness of the choxil marks on the bisque surface.  The attachment points of this handle is lower than others (near the rim of the pitcher).  It seems to work / feel ok for those pitchers smaller in size.

Pitchers - thrown, recycled clay, reduction fired

 The handle for this pitcher is tooooo long!  The apex is too far from the wall of the pitcher and too small to grasp with three or four fingers comfortably and makes the jug too heavy when lifted.  I do like how the texturing of the pitcher surface turned out - I used a trimming tool to produce this scalloped look, and also used the same tool to texture the handle as well.  Glaze is woo interior with clear and pearl over woo exterior.  Waxed over the pearl/woo area and then dipped in clear.

 This was the first pitcher that I threw and I knew it was too heavy with thicker walls near the base so I used a coiled spring to scrape out textured facets in the walls of the pitcher.  It gives it an interesting geometric shape, but unfortunately the pitcher is still too heavy.  I stained the exterior with iron oxide and then dipped in spodumene white which gives it an aged look - the thin areas are brown and aged, while thicker areas are white and matte.  The interior is bermuda.

Jugs - reduction fired, wheel thrown and altered, pulled handles

 More practice pulling handles - by making jugs / pitchers!  The shape of the pitcher is really important and you need to kind of visualize how it will look with the spout and handle.  Before adding the spout and handle, the jug looks like a odd / boring vase.  I need to work on throwing the walls and base thinner since you don't trim the base to add a foot.  I find it difficult to get the walls thin because throwing too thin a cylinder will not give enough integrity to stretch and collar in to shape the vase.  So I end up throwing too thick to allow for that - more practice of course to get a better sense of this - it will depend on the type of clay too!  This first pitcher was my first piece throwing with Dundee dark red clay - this clay has a nice rich red color (cherry red) and leaves your hands stained reddish!  The spout is added by pulling it out with wet fingers immediately after throwing.  It's difficult to get the spout symmetrical since your fingers are all different lengths.  The handle is pulled and attached once the pitcher is leather hard.  You need to time all these steps so that the pulled handle dries to approximately the same wetness as the pot when attaching.

The glaze is bermuda outer and sky celadon interior - both these glazes show the dark clay color underneath which is nice.

The bottom pitcher is thrown from recycled clay.  I had forgotten to add the spout after throwing and the piece dried so I had to cut a V in the neck and add a hand-built spout.  This proved more difficult than anticipated since the 3-D geometry of the spout is actually quite a complex, especially when you want to fit it to the neck of the pot.  Anyhow after a bit of fiddling I got the knack of it and it looks decent - like a penguin beak.

The glaze for this pitcher didn't quite come out as I expected - I was trying to use the glaze tests of a fellow student who had gotten brilliant results with layering turquoise and other glazes.  Unfortunately the recycled clay seemed to dull and make these glazes more earthy - which is still nice, just not what I expected.    The interior is turquoise with toffee brush strokes around the rim.  Exterior is temmoku / turquoise (rear), turquoise/temmoku (middle) and  turquoise (front).  The drippy thick turq/temmoku glaze border contrasting with the rough thin layer of turquoise is quite interesting.