Spring is here, we are having a few more visitors to our gallery, and I am making some new work to go on the shelves!

Yellow Cat (approx 7 x 4 inches 180 x 100mm)

Well, it is that time of year again, spring has sprung and the chill of winter has mostly departed. Although, to be fair, there are some days where we are blasted by Southerly breezes that still bring a dash of air that has streamed up from the Antarctic.  

 

Our magnolia is in flower, and the petals of its white flowers, with their delicate pink underside, seem to dance and tumble like a late fall of snowflakes.

 I have been in the studio preparing clay and also making and firing some mugs and bowls in preparation for our summer season. I was pleased to start to replenish the shelves in our little gallery with new work.

 

Some bowls are glazed simply and others are more complex with layered glazes or with majolica style decoration that I do directly on the unfired glaze before the work goes in the kiln.

 

This bowl has my own clear glaze over it (my "One Over the Five" clear, you will find the recipe in the previous blog post), with additions of cobalt oxide, manganese and ilmenite. I sieved the clear glaze ingredients with the cobalt and manganese through an 80 mesh sieve, but added the ilmenite last through a 40 mesh sieve so that it would speckle. I also splashed a white glaze over half of the bowl, which is why the top half in the photo is so different from the lower half.

 

And I have been making a few sculptural cats. These I started "for fun" to get me back into practice on the wheel after a fairly long break from the studio in the winter.

 

Here is another view of the yellow cat that also appeared at the beginning of this blog post. The cat was made from 3 shapes that I made on the potter's wheel, then joined together. The tail is a long hollow cone, the body is a deep sided upside down bowl, and the head and front of the body is really an open ended cylinder. It is amazing what can be done with simple wheel thrown forms.

 

The glaze is actually made from two different glazes that I discovered make yellow when they are layered over each other. The first glaze is a chrome-tin pink, that doesn't give much colour for me, but when I put the pearly white glaze over it, a rather nice yellow happens. The pearly white glaze has rutile in it, which is responsible for most of the magic that happens here! Rutile is a really useful thing to have in your "glaze kitchen pantry" as a dash of it in a glaze will often make it more exciting. Rutile is mostly Titanium oxide, but it also has some iron and other impurities.  As little as 2 or 3 percent rutile added to a glaze will make an obvious difference...., but you can add far more than that!

 

 

It is nice to have a few more people visiting our gallery again, things are starting to pick up as the weather gets more cheerful!

 

Tomorrow I must make some more bowls!