Dreaming About Dishes

I used to dream in German when I was studying the language in college. Now I dream about pots on occasion, and sometimes the dreams are so vivid they stay with me and then I have to make them come true.

 I have been thinking about Helios clay from Highwater Clays and the fact that it salts well. So, I had a dream about a few tests with low, somewhat wide dishes with no glaze on it when it goes in the kiln to test how well the salt may sit on a flat surface of Helios.

I also wanted to see what the cobalt slip would look like in an abstract pattern, and to top it off, made a ruffly rim. If all goes well, I will fire the kiln up in a few weeks and see what happens!

Glazed too late and the wall separated

Glazed the interior and exterior too soon and the wall collapsed

It's nice to be dreaming about pots since my pots have been putting in my place in my studio. The battle of the heat vent has been going on for some time, and trying to keep things just right under the plastic has been somewhat disastrous. I posted the above photos on Facebook recently of what happens when you a.) let a pot sit too long and then glaze it and b.) rush things and glaze the interior and exterior too soon.

Nice, thin wall!

The plus side of that was getting to see the nice, thin walls! In closing, I dreamed about a pitcher/vase form the other night so stay tuned!

Patience.

"Patience is a virtue" is the old adage that I did not pay any mind to this morning. My pottery is single fired, meaning that I glaze raw pots without bisque firing first. This brings in the conundrum and graceful dance of putting moisture (in the glaze) back into a drying clay vessel. The walls soak up the wet glaze pretty fast and can become very flexible, very quickly. I make my pots pretty thin and this usually works out just fine. When I put glaze on the inside and the outside of the piece I usually need to wait between glazing the inside and glazing the outside in order to let the walls set back up a bit. I was rushing to get ready to go to the museum for work this morning and thought, "maybe it will be okay if I just go ahead and double dip these mugs now." WRONG!

I arrived home this evening to find the handles collapsed off of the sides of the mugs and sitting in little, sad pools next to the vessel. These are the lessons that keep me humble.

The nice thing about single firing is that when I screw up a pot, it goes back to the pile of scrap clay to be recycled for future use!