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A ceramic adventure

For our ninth wedding anniversary in May, Patty bought us a joint gift of a 4-week course in hand building at Chicago's Lill Street Art Center (because pottery is one of the gifts that goes with the ninth). I finally got my hand built stoneware pot back from the kiln, and it looks like this:


Hardly the best thing you've ever seen, I'm sure, but I'm putting it up here because, well, it's my blog. And the glazes are really quite lovely. It has two contrasting glazes of antique white, one on the outside and the other on the interior. The 'coal circle' pattern is one of those Asian iron-based pigments, which fired to a nice green-brown colour.


The surface is very smooth, and glassy, but with the suggestion of a lot of texture. And the circles, which when painted on looked like dark red, almost black-red smudges, fired to this set of patterns with interesting variations in tone.


It's nine inches high, and about 3.5 inches in diameter. If I ever get the time, I would like to try and make more of these, and perhaps with more refined shapes (though that is not so important to me aesthetically).

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