It's Mugsy to you, see?!

After this mug, there's one left to complete (needs a handle). I like this shape.

Back from bisque!

One remaining bisqued mug wasn't yet out of the kiln. And I turned in a bunch of pieces for bisque and for firing. Very excited to see how the fired pieces come out!

For bisque and fire

Two Mug Crew, ready for bisque (oh, and a plate)


And my first three items ready for glaze firing:


These three have been partially glazed with Laguna's Robin's Egg cone 5 glaze, which I mixed from powder I bought umpteen years ago in Arizona. I hope my hosts won't take issue with my usurping a number of kitchen items to mix and pour my glazes! Shh!

One more mug for the road

This will likely be the last mug in this order for my brother.

I enjoyed throwing a variety of shapes, and I hope he likes them too. I'll pull a handle for it tomorrow. You can see the next large plate I threw today in the background. And I have one small plate to trim later today.

The latter platter

The best plate so far.

So far in the drying process, it's down to just under 10 3/8" diameter.

Good shape, not too thick, and not as much damage done in trimming it. That's the pisser, that every time I trim these plates, I damage the rim. I realized that there were two sources of the damage. One is simply the fact that the plate is upside-down, resting on its rim. I prefer tilted, flat-surface rims, so the upside-down plate rests on a narrow edge at the extreme of the rim. So as I slip it into the proper position on the bat, or the Giffin Grip, the clay scrape along the surface. Even if it's leather-hard, that scraping contact is going to produce some damage. The other source of damage seems to come from using the Giffin Grip itself. The three small pads designed for gripping low items like plates amount to a very limited contact surface area, meaning more force is transferred to the points of contact, thus deforming the plate more noticeably than a wider area of contact would do. So on this trim, I went back to using lumps of clay to hold it down. I used six pieces, with a total contact area of perhaps a third of the rim circumference. While I still ended up with some damage on the topmost edge of the rim, from scraping, the outer edge is in much better shape on this one.
Live and work and learn.

Work them cylinders!

Another mug.

Mug 5 of 6. Tankard style. This time, I tried pulling the handle at about the same time as throwing the mug, and letting them dry very slowly together, under a cover, for a couple days. The clay was still a bit too wet when I attached the handle. Rather messy and required a lot of correction and fussing. Still looking for that golden hour when both pieces are the right dryness to work well together.

Pigtail

Since making six of anything look the same seems, at present, a nearly impossible task to me, I've taken the liberty of playing with a variety of forms. Here's the latest mug.


I'm still not getting the timing down right, of when to attach handles to cylinders. I think I waited a bit too long to attach this pigtail handle-- it was edging past leather hard when I put it on the mug. I would have preferred to blend the attachment points a bit more flush with the mug surface. But it's fun and funky nonetheless.

What lies within

I'm finding plates to be quite challenging. Who'da thunk? This cross-section photo shows some of my trouble. There's a hump in the middle! It's a strange phenomenon, but each time I throw a plate, somehow the thickness dips down as I near the edge-- but before I've actually formed the edge, so there's still a good bead of clay to form into an edge. That crown is mysterious, and so far I've yet to find out how to move it outward. I'm using a wooden rib to flatten the upper surface and I can feel the downhill slope as I move toward the edge, but can't seem to convince the main body of the clay to move outward, only some of the upper surface is mobile.
I sent a bunch of new pieces to bisque yesterday. I've had better luck with smaller plates (up to about 8"), but these large ones have a steeper learning curve.

Periodic tableware

For his table settings order, my brother wants symbols of six chemical elements to appear on the large plates (at least; if I feel ambitious, I can mark the small plates and the mugs as well). The standard-issue atomic symbol, number, and weight, arranged in a bounding box, will suffice. Here's the basic design, for hydrogen, cobbled together in Photoshop:

The next step was figure out how to transfer this image to the bisqueware. I chose to cut out key portions of the drawing, such as corners of the square and the big H, and the entire numeral 1 of the atomic number. Cutting out the decimal number of the atomic weight seemed like too much trouble. Then I taped this stencil onto the plate surface with masking tape. Using a #2 pencil, I marked the key points onto the clay, removed the stencil, then drew on the rest of the design freehand, including the atomic weight numerals. Here's how it looked:

I had recently purchased a small plastic squeeze bottle of black underglaze that has a metal applicator tube, made by Leslie Ceramic Supply Co. I squeezed the underglaze on by hand, but you can see my work is a bit shaky. Running the metal tip over the rough clay surface will do that.

I did another test later and found that I could make the lines neat and straight if I were to use masking tape to define the edges. The underglaze didn't bleed underneath the tape edges. Though such an approach appeals to my sense of neatness, it also seems like a lot of extra work. (Remember airbrush friskets? They would come in handy here!) Besides, a hand-made look may be preferable. I'll fire this as a test (the plate isn't usable for this project) and see how I feel about it afterward. Just need to dip this in some clear glaze.

Bisque bonanza!

I love picking up pieces from from the bisque! Here are all my (surviving!) Chico throws, most of them tests. I think I can use the two mugs for this present order, at least. Don't you just love the ting! sound they make when you tap them? I do!

It's getting a bit muggy in here.

Speckled Buff, 1# starting weight, greenware (not yet fully dry).