More Big Pots. Canterbury earthquake.

Laura took some photos of me working on a couple of large pots last night. In the photo above I have just attached a coil of clay and am now carefully throwing it upwards with light pressure from my finger tips. Notice almost no water is needed for this.

I am truing up the top of the pot by removing a little "worm" of clay from the rim with a needle.

I am folding the top of the pot over to form a nice thick rim. Wheel thrown flower pots can have a nice thick rim built into them by folding the top outwards and down, then carefully pressing it together (without trapping air) to double the thickness of the pot at the rim. This feature is just not done these days with press molded flower pots, although some of them do imitate it.

I brushed white slip onto the pot after I had finished it, then I scratched patterns into the wet slip with a home made comb.

This pot is 16.5 inches high (419mm), and was made by throwing a largish lump of centered clay as high as I comfortably could, then adding coils of clay and throwing them higher, after first allowing the base of the pot to stiffen. This pot has a nice even wall thickness and feels well balanced and quite light (to me) for its size.

Here I am brushing white slip onto another large pot, this one is about 15.5 inches in height (394mm).

I scratched a decoration into the slip on the following day (today!).

I added some "sprigged" decoration to this pot.

I have made various bisqued clay stamps and molds, and sometimes use them to decorate soft clay. On the left the raised decoration is in the form of a crown. I took a clay cast of a little metal box lid that someone found under a house near here. The box may have been for snuff, and it had a rather nice crown embossed on the lid. The raised decoration on the right is something I made when I was going through my "bronze age" period. It is a bit like a bronze age shield.

These pots are made out of earthenware clay, and will have a simple clear glaze put over the slip. The pots will be fired in my wood fired kiln (I haven't any other kiln big enough to take them... even if I wanted them done another way!).

Quake Update.
Thank you to those of you who thought of us when New Zealand was shaken up early on our Saturday morning. We are about 4 hours drive South of Christchurch and, fortunately for us there was no damage, although the shake was bad enough here to make the blinds clatter, the bed shake, and the lights swing violently. There was a lot of damage done in Christchurch and in the surrounding towns. Some buildings fell down, or were so badly damaged they have had to be demolished. Hundreds of aftershocks continue to keep people in a state of tension and some are strong enough to cause more damage, especially to buildings that are already weakened by the initial 7.1 quake. Whilst some of the City now functions... many people have not been able to return home, or go to work. Most schools in Christchurch have been shut, but may open next week. More than 80 workers at the Kaiapoi New World supermarket have been told that they are to lose their jobs. The supermarket was wrecked in the quake.

The two images that follow are from www.geonet.org.nz , these should give a fairly good idea of the wobbly nature of the Canterbury area of New Zealand at the moment.

This image shows the 7.1 quake and the aftershocks in the days following it.


This image is the recording from the Seismograph drum that is located at McQueens Valley, Canterbury, quite close to Christchurch. The image shows the size and number of aftershocks that have happened over the last 24 hours. Where the shock is very large, the trace is marked red and is clipped in size to stop it overwriting too much of the surrounding image.