I can’t resist a challenge so when I read that the Potters Guild of BC were hosting a one-day show of plates during the Canadian Ceramics Symposium I needed to quickly make a dinner plate. Having already made enough pots to fill my reserved two cubic feet of space in the soda firing I decided to experiment with sgraffito again and booked a space in the next gas firing at Mergatroid.
When I had trimmed this plate to a thickness I like I painted it with my Peacock-stained earthenware slip, above and below. Then I entertained myself one evening by carving yet another folksy bird, with ‘dazzle’ leaves and sgraffito lines as the background. I could hardly wait to see how it would look with my satin Celadon after its cone 10R firing. It turns out that the cobalt in the slip’s stain is dominant and the decoration on this plate is more blue than peacock.
I carved this little slab-built dish without applying any slip first and bisque-fired it. Then I painted it with black underglaze, wiped it away and glazed this piece with celadon glaze too. The interesting result is that the drawing line on the ‘blue’ plate is white, and on this dish it’s black/brown. I did a little social media survey and most people prefer the dark drawing.
Here is the comparison. Do leave your preference in the comments below, if you like. Now I feel a need to throw another dinner plate and little dish. I prefer to have a stronger rim on the little dish and throwing suits me better than slab work. I like trimming.
I had thrown a couple more of those grooved pouring bowls and was interested to see how they’d fare with glaze all over instead of using flashing slip and liner glaze as in the soda firing. Plus, my sister Mary keeps reminding me how much she likes a temmoku-glazed pot from many years ago. Then a happy collector in Maryland sent me a photo of some of her pieces, including a mate to the one my sister owns. Here it is, along with pots by other Canadian potters Steve Irvine and Pat Webber.
A couple of mugs I’d made for the soda firing and had sprayed with blue flashing slip and titanium dioxide didn’t make it into the firing. They had already been glazed inside so I dipped their outsides in the same celadon and added them to the gas firing. That blue looks good.
There was a large bird vase, also glazed in celadon, in the gas firing too, but I’ll keep him under wraps pro tem. I did enjoy driving in to East Vancouver’s Mergatroid building on two consecutive Saturdays. It’s a fun time to chat with other potters. Thank you for careful firing Amelia, Cheryl, David, Diane and Heather. I’ll join another firing one of these days.
This was my view from an upstairs window yesterday morning. Come on Spring! There’s even more snow forecast for this week.
Kathy sent me this photo of daffodils in her ‘historic’ salty basket/vase of mine to cheer me. The other photo shows a big plant she chose to live in my ‘Towhees in Trees’ vessel.
