Week 2

Pots from the last firing. 

Here are some pots I threw on Tuesday. 

Glazing pots. 

Here's me sifting a glaze. Dale taught me how to mix an old glaze that'd been out in use for a while, with a new batch of that same glaze. After the first glaze, I started figuring things out and kept thinking about how much work goes into making a studio space ready to use. 

Before loading the kiln. 

After! This took much longer and was a much more involved task than I'd prior expected.

Here's me adding the finishing pieces to this puzzle. 

    This past week at OCAC, I continued throwing pots, glazing, loading and unloading kilns, and I learned how to stir glazes. Althouh last week I unloaded several kilns with Dale, this week I learned how to load one as well. This seems straightforward and simple, but loading this full kiln pictured above took us over 2 hours! I found it fascinating that despite all the technology around us, the system for loading a kiln seemed so "old fashioned" because of the way the shelves were stacked by hand. I learned the nuances of loading a kiln, like how depending on the firing the temperature may vary dependindg on how you stack the shelves, that a glaze may turn out different depending on where in the kiln it's placed, and I learned how important it is to make sure all pots have a glaze-free bottom, so the glaze doesn't run and then cement itself to the shelf. 

    During my time spent throwing, I experimented with leaving the bottom of pots thicker, so I could trim more of a foot for the bottom (which I find more aesthetically pleasing), and tried to throw some shapes I don't spend as much time on. One day, I was trimming a large plate I'd thrown, and it got launched off the bat and against the splash-guard while I was trying to center it, and so I thought that was the end of my bowl! Dale assured me I should still trim the bowl, and see what the end product is like, because maybe I could bring it back. To further explain, the bowl got all warped and indented, and I thought it was unsalveagble. This was a great learning experience, because after trimming the bowl, I decided to apply slip (wet clay) into the indents and scrapes to fill them; after this dried, I scraped the excess off, and was left with a somewhat normal looking bowl :) 

    Last week, and early this week, I was feeling really good about my throwing abilities, as I'd only had a couple pots collapse on me out of the many I'd thrown. So, this Thursday I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone and try to throw some more bigger bowls, and tall cyclindrical shapes. I prepared around 8 large lumps of clay, and as I began throwing, nearly all of them collapsed on me. This was really frustrating because it felt like all the progress I'd made was gone! Whether this was because the clay I was using was much softer than what I'd gotten used to at OCAC, or whether I was too tired or confident to pull off these more challenging pieces, I'll never know... But, I do know that this day humbled me quite a bit, and made me realize just because I'd been throwing so many (in my opinion pretty succesful pots), this doesn't mean the clay 'owes me' more success...    

    One day when Dale was showing me how to trim a certain pot that couldn't be trimmed the usual way, I was really surprised at how long the process of setting it all up took, and I said something like "Wow, how I glaze this better end up looking good because otherwise this will all have been pointless." To that, Dale wisely said something like, "Remeber the old saying, it is not the pot that's shaped, it's the potter." However cheesy this may sound, I've thought about this a lot! After my frustrating two hours of 'wasting' an unspeakable amount of clay as nearly all the pots collapsed, I thought back to this saying.