What did I do in May? When I carried pots down to the kiln shed for their bisque firing on the first of June I was slightly horrified to see that I hadn’t fired the kiln since late April. After the excitement of the last soda firing it took me a while to get started on the next batch of earthenware work.

I began by using my slab roller to make slab plates. They’re quick and would encourage me to think about colours again. The first was a loose application of ochres, greens and browns, and the next was a familiar idea, using geometric shapes as a study of depth. These plates are roughly 9″ x 8.5″.

I happened to watch Carole Epp as she showed us her first experiments using Tyvek as a stencil resist medium. She had taken an online workshop with Diana Fayt and planned to take the advanced one too. I was just painting some of my jagged leaf shapes and thought I’d do a stencil but for this one I used latex. You have to make sure the areas you paint with latex are all connected or really remember where they are or you’ll lose them, the slip gets bisqued over that area and dreadful bubbles appear after the glaze firing. I’ve had that happen in the past! Here is the first Rainforest plate in this little series. Alan and I have often walked in our local Chines recently. We have watched the first marvellously pale green leaves appearing on the Big Leaf Maples, amongst the tall bare tree trunks and ancient stumps.

Then I bit the bullet and paid to take Diana Fayt’s workshop myself and prepared some more slab plates. Son Steve acquired a sheet of commercial Tyvek (it is the paper-like material containing fibres (so that it doesn’t tear) that is used to clad and waterproof wooden buildings before the application of the final siding). I watched Diana apply her cut-out designs to leather-hard ware, using water and a sponge and a soft rubber rib. It’s tricky and it’s important to be sure that the stencil is really attached before you apply slip or underglaze over the shape. Diana also used the stencils to wipe away the surrounding clay to leave a raised design, but that idea isn’t for me.

https://dianafayt.com

I tried to do too much on the first one, layering jagged leaf shapes over a tree skeleton and had to do some cleaning up of errant slip. For the next one I used the same tree design (the cool thing about Tyvek is that the shapes are endlessly re-usable) and opted to paint the rest by hand.

The tree appears again on a large wheel-thrown pasta dish.

I tried loose bendy shapes on another slab plate and cut out a bird design for a wee blue plate. Comments on this process and my colours would be appreciated.

Finally, I relaxed over the painting of the final piece, a mug, using ‘pow!’ Tyvek shapes and I have used it for tea and coffee every day since opening the kiln. My colours..

Two more large pasta plates, each 10+” x 2″, have joined the one above to fly to an old friend in Calgary this week. Sarah would like three more, so it’s time to fish out the clay, instead of fussing over weeds in the garden.

On another topic I should mention that I shall be making lots more plates over the Summer. For my sins I have been invited to join the board of the North-West Ceramics Foundation. The group usually meets in Vancouver but it was felt that, as they were meeting via Zoom these days, I could participate from Port Moody. Fund raising is the means by which the Board of 10 volunteers  supports education, excellence and accessibility for BC ceramics, whether it is funding to worthy studios, education for emerging artists, offering free lectures from world-wide Ceramics experts or honouring our finest ceramicists.

Instead of the well-known ‘Oven and Kiln’ gala event of the past, this year the plan is to organize ‘That Pottery Thing’! The link explains more about the foundation and upcoming initiatives. Here is the link to the Events page on the NWCF’s smart new website:

https://www.nwcf.ca/that-pottery-thing/

I plan to donate one of my soda-fired Jugbirds to the associated Gala Auction in September as well as a number of jolly plates for attendees.

For my readers who don’t follow my adventures on facebook or instagram I’ll include a photo of our family, taken on our 51st wedding anniversary. We invited the clan here for an outdoor supper and cake to celebrate my birthday two days later. It was a very happy afternoon and, with our second shots booked for June 19th, there really is a light at the end of this ghastly Covid tunnel.

In my next blog I shall show photos of new earthenware jugbirds that were also in the early June firing.