Pottery

 Creating pottery takes a lot of time and effort. In order for myself to 
become a decent potter, I had to learn many new techniques as well as dedicate many hours of my time. While making pottery comes with many trials and tribulations, the final product of the pieces that I make are worth every hardship that comes my way.

The materials that I used were: a sponge, rib, wire, wooden tool, needle tool, bat, potters’ wheel, water and clay. Since there are many materials that are needed, in order to stay organized, I placed all of these items together in a bucket. This material bucket will make an easier and more effective way to find the tools in a timely manner.

When beginning my first piece, I was hoping that everything I had learned in high school would still be fresh in my memory. I started to center the cone five clay (which is a clay that is fired to a certain temperature and will eventually begin to melt) on the potters’ wheel. This is where my first problem occurred. The problem being that since this was a different clay that I have used in the past, I wasn’t able to center it the way that I had hoped. Eventually I became familiar with the clay and was able to center it the correct way.

The first step towards making a good pottery piece is centering. Centering is maneuvering the clay around so that it evenly distributes itself throughout the center, making the piece easy to form. Personally for me this was one of the longest steps because in order for the piece to look good it had to be centered.

Once the clay was centered on the wheel I started to make the hole and widen out the clay so that I could make my piece. Once I was able to get the clay as wide as I wanted the bowl, I stated to raise the edges with a sponge to keep the clay smooth.

This step can be difficult because if I raise the clay too fast or start to widen it while I'm raising it, then I could rip the clay or put a hole in it. Therefore I have to be sure to be slow and steady to refrain from disaster.

Once I had the clay as high and as wide as I wanted, I started to shape it to make it into a bowl. Shaping it can take a while if I’m being very particular about the piece that I am working on. When the piece starts to form into a nice bowl, I started to try and add a little personal touch by using a rib which is a soft piece of metal to smooth out the edges and just make the piece look better by adding lines along the edge. This ended in a disaster! I completely missed the edge because I was not paying close attention and indented the top of the bowl making the piece unusable.

I was so aggravated because I thought that I was going to be able to make a decent looking piece on my first try! This was obviously not the case. I then got more clay from the bag that cost me $2.50 from the guy at the desk. Once I had the clay wedged and ready to go I started to center this next one. As I was centering it, I noticed something odd about it. I could feel the clay moving where it should be. I decided to just keep going but, once I got to the point where I was ready to widen and give height to the clay it ripped almost near the bottom. What I had suspected would happen did. I had an air bubble in the clay from not wedging it enough so before I could eve start to make a vase it ripped. I now have two destroyed pieces sitting in the wheel.

After taking a breather and a small, but much needed break, I decided to try again but this time with a bit more clay then what I had been using. I was only using about a baseball size piece of clay so I moved up to about a softball size. Sometimes it’s easier to work with more clay. Once again, I started centering. Since I’m working with more clay I have to use more strength (which I don’t have much of) and it just takes more time to work with more clay. After about fifteen to twenty minutes I finally got my piece to be perfectly centered. Once this happened I opened up the piece and made the bowl just how I liked it. I made sure to be extra careful when I was ribbing the piece this time because of what error occurred before.

I was so excited to finally get a decent looking piece that I was so cautious when I used a wire to cut it off the bat. I didn't want anything to mess up this piece. I covered it partially so that it would not dry out to much then, I started working on my next piece.

For this piece I decided to go with a vase because I didn't want to make another bowl. For me, vases are hard to make. I always struggle keeping the piece centered when I'm trying to make the vase form. I knew it would take me longer to make this piece and that's exactly what happened. I started working on my vase and as I was trying to make the form I could feel it starting to wobble. I got super nervous at this point because I was on the last of my clay with this piece and I didn't have any more money to buy more so, it was do or die with this piece. I continued to try and keep the piece centered but it did not work out like I had hoped it would. So, the final product of this piece is not the best. It’s off centered so one side is fatter than the other. It just doesn't look as good as I had intended or hoped it would.

The next day which was Friday November 7^th, I came back to trim and decorate the pieces. Once I got to the craft shop I realized that I had actually covered my pieces too much and they were still completely wet. It was like they had not dried even a little bit. So, I loosened up the wrapping even more and left. Saturday, we had a football game and I was excited about that so I completely forgot about my project till that evening. I hoped that on Monday the pieces would not be too dry to trim and carve.

I got to the craft shop on Monday with my friend Alex. I grabbed my pieces to trim them but they were a little drier than I would have wanted but I was still able to trim without worrying about cracking them. My bowl was very easy to trim because it was very well centered so I didn’t have to spend much time trimming it. The vase on the other hand, was a pain. No matter what I did I could not get the foot to look right. I spent at least 30 minutes trying to trim it but, not go too deep or make it look even worse than it already did. So I just decided to leave it be and realize that there was no possible way to make it look like the bowl did.

After trimming, I was onto my last step. I decided to paint underglaze designs on my pieces. For my bowl I carved out polka dots. The polka dots are all different shapes and sizes and some are even deeper in the clay then others. This is because it’s hard to make everything the exact same size especially when working with a digging tool. These tools are small with a wooden handle and the top is metal shaped like a crescent moon. Making my polka dots was easy because this tool already has the edge of a circle so it just went around nicely. After that I used slip to paint the polka dots. Slip is just extremely wet clay that can be made into any color by just adding a mix. For my polka dots I just used plain white slip.

           I could not decide what design I wanted to do for my vase. All I knew is that I wanted something that would distract from the awkward shaping of it. I asked Alex what she thought I should do and she said to do cheetah print because it is an intricate design. The base coat of paint was a light brown color while the cheetah print was blue with the spots on the inside being a yellowish color. This cheetah print design took me an extremely long time it took a little over an hour. I feel like it took me so long because the under-glaze was in really bad shape so I had to be careful with the runniness of it.

Because there was not enough pieces to do a bisque firing my pieces were not fired in time to be done to get the final products to take a picture of but I did take a picture of both of them on the shelf waiting to be fired.