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Grow Your Own Plants for Clay Imprints
In this post I’m going to share some of my favorite plants to use with clay — all of which grow well in my home garden, which is zone 7b and follow up with tips for making imprints with leaves. This blog space may come off as being scattered across multiple hobbies and interests, but it’s an accurate reflection of my life. My day to day time is split up between family and home routines, teaching online graduate classes in…
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How to Underglaze Imprinted Clay
This is a simple method to underglaze an imprint in your clay piece, which is a great method for decorating ornaments with vintage letterpress, lace or other one of a kind textures and making the patterns pop. You need an imprinted and bisque-fired piece of pottery, a paintbrush, underglaze, water, and a sponge or rag. While this does waste some underglaze, the underglaze is watered down, so it spreads well. Imprinted clay, bisque fired Watered down underglaze…
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Spring Gardening
I’ve been in a major rut when it comes to writing about our latest endeavors, but in my defense, the kids were on spring break this week, and one of the boys had a stomach bug and then strep throat. This was all after I had been sick with fever and chills for three days. Early in the week, I finally fired a load of bisque, so whenever I get back to Pullen to glaze, I should have a fun…
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It is a Hobby or a Business?
As I move into my eleventh year of making pottery, I want to reflect on the things I do well and the things I do poorly and ask myself if I’m where I want to be – commitment level, skill level, etc. But before I can fairly assess my own performance, I have to know what my goals and intent were. I actually teach a class on stream restoration structure risk and failure assessment, and the underlying message is essentially…
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First attempt at pour bowls
I love being asked, “Do you make…”, because chances are good that I don’t, but am about to have fun trying something new. I also appreciate being able to post a question like “Do pour bowls need handles?” on Facebook and get an answer with in a few minutes. This was my first(ish) attempt at pour bowls, and I like the way they turned out. I made one many years ago that was completely ugly and now holds odd bits…
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How to glaze the whole ceramic spoon
There’s one question I keep getting via Etsy, on this blog and through email. “How do you glaze your ceramic spoons and keep them from sticking to the kiln shelf?” Clearly, there is a lot of interest in handmade spoons! So how do you glaze the entire ceramic spoon? I use kiln stilts! Kiln stilts consist of metal rods that prop up a piece off the shelf, and a durable one may be used multiple…
