Category: Pottery

I saw some little ceramic ghosts online, and it inspired me to try and create some of my own. They were great practice for learning how to close a hollow form on the wheel, which isn't something I've really tried before.

Trying out some new glaze combos on some mugs - I've switched over to Mayco glazes this year and have been pretty happy with the results I've been getting. I also made some big serving bowls using some of these same glaze combos, but forgot to take a photo of them before they went to their final home.

I've switched to a new type of clay recently, and have also switched to a different brand of glaze. So I figured it was time to do a whole bunch of new test tiles. For this experiment I tried every glaze on top of every other glaze - essentially every possible combination. And where I've got 12 different glazes, that amounted to 144 test tiles! There are some pretty interesting combos that have come out of this test, so I'm pretty excited to try them out on some real pieces.

I've been working on a batch of mugs lately - this is a set of twelve that I threw last weekend and I'm waiting for them to dry. One or two have some cracking on the handles where the lower part of the handle connects to the mug body. That seems to be the spot that I always get some cracking - I need to figure out a better plan for trying to avoid that. I think some experimentation is in order.

A lot of our plants have been doing great with all of the extra sun they've been getting since I finished the planter stand for our big window. So I made a bunch of new planters that I could repot some of them into, as they were starting to outgrow their pots. This is just a sampling of some of the new ones.

We've been trying to start a bunch of plants from seed indoors - mostly fruit trees. So far we've planted lemons, clementines, mango, and avocado. Once the seedlings start to grow I'm going to need to move them out of the tiny pots they're in right now into something larger. So I've started on throwing a bunch of bigger planters to be ready. Here they are drying after being thrown - so they still need to be trimmed, bisqued, and glazed. I'll try to post new pics once the glaze is on there.

I made this little salt cellar to go beside the stove - it's glazed with the same glaze combo I used for the set of plates I made recently. I need to make some more of these little covered containers, as Lori wants a sugar bowl to put next to the coffee maker.

When testing out some glaze combinations, I came across this combo - which I quite like. I made us an entire set of dinner plates using this glaze combination, to replace our old, cheap, storebought ones - which were getting pretty chipped and worn anyway.

I've had a lot of free time during the Coronavirus shutdown, and have made a bunch of pottery. Here's an example of a recent glaze load I pulled out of the kiln. My wife and daughter specifically requested that matching set of bowls, after they saw my first test of that glaze combo.

I used to make little test tiles for testing pottery glazes, but often the way things looked on the test tile didn't end up really being very representative of how it would look on a real piece. So I've started making little shot glass-sized test cups for testing glazes. It's worked out much better. I recently built this rack for displaying them in the pottery studio, so I can look at them when I need inspiration while glazing things.