Ceramics by Cathy Gee

Today I've spent the morning glazing 6 more of the porcelain bird bowls as you can see from the piccies above.  The far left pic shows the pendants I was working on last week (see my earlier blog on ceramic pendant making).  The pendants in the state they're in right now are considered greenware (air dry but un-fired) - this is an ideal time for underglazing because if you make a mistake, you can rub or erase out the line.  The 6 bowls however, have already been fired once, or bisqued, and so if one of my lines goes wrong at this stage, I'm screwed :)  - I use a black underglaze that behaves very much like black ink.   To take a more positive spin on it, I have to come up with a very creative way to cover my mistake(s)....I have good and bad days on this of course. Today I wasn't having a very painterly day and my hand wasn't behaving well, so I had more than one wobbly line, and more than one blob of black in the middle of a field of white that posed a bit of a problem.  Ah well, from mistakes sometimes come lovely accidents.  Also, I don't use a pencil or anything else to sketch in my drawing first, so I'm relying totally on getting it right the first time.

After working on this site all day yesterday, building some pendants this morning, hoping to clean them this afternoon before leaving to pick up Quinn.  It takes me about 35-40 minutes to very roughly fashion about 14 pieces.  This includes wedging the clay, rolling it out to about 1.5 cm thick....I use anything around the house to print a rough shape into the sheet of clay (Today, for instance, was the ring off a mason jar, the rectangular bottom of a Keens dry mustard tin, and the squarer shape of a tin of smoked paprika :))....I then cut out these rough shapes using an exacto knife. 

Score the edges where I want to join clay to clay and use some slip in the join,  roughly smooth this out and then lay on a sheet of drywall to dry for about an hour or so.  Then, I'll do the first cleaning - which includes cutting of rough edges and refining the shape a bit.  Let the piece dry some more, and use some of my finer clay tools to finish defining the shapes and shaving it down, then a damp cloth to smooth edges.