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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 engineering, home gardening and making pottery. Those last two are hobbies that have begun a gradual marriage. I make planters for small jades, succulents and indoor mini-gardens, and I grow…
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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 (this is Sea Blue by Speedball) Paint on the underglaze making sure it gets into the imprint. If you are underglazing the imprint in a large bowl, it will save…
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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 times. I purchased Roselli stilts from Big Ceramic Store. According to Big Ceramic Store, beyond cone 6, metal rods may begin to deform, and may deform at lower temperatures under…
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Making spoons from a mold (Pictorial)
It’s Another New Year
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Pulling Spoons
A while back I shared how I made spoons from a mold. I still have the plaster molds, but after awhile, I found them to be clumsy and frustrating. I’m not patient enough to wait for the mold to release the wet clay. So over the past few days being cooped up inside do to nasty weather, I’ve started back at spoon making without the molds. Instead of pressing clay into a mold, I roll a wedge-shaped coil, press the thicker end around the bowl of an existing spoon and pull the handle. My process is changing and evolving, but these are my basic steps for pulling ceramic spoons. …
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6 Tips for Growing Tomatoes
Over the past few years, I’ve picked up some valuable tips for growing tomatoes. This by no means implies that each summer I’m guaranteed a beautiful crop, and in fact am yearly frustrated by the usual problems – pests, disease, cracking, blossom end rot. These tips can help improve crops. 1. Pinch those suckers. Different gardeners will tell you different types of tomatoes should or shouldn’t have the suckers removed. If you are planting in a small space and deal with crowding, go ahead and pinch them to make sure to keep the growth in check and allow plenty of air movement around plants. My first crop of indeterminate tomatoes…
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Making a Bead Tree for the Kiln
My newest ceramic project has been making pendants using lace imprints. While I only glaze one side of star ornaments, pendants, I felt should be glazed all the way around. After all, whenever I wear jewelry, it always manages to flop around to the wrong side. Therefore, I needed bead tree, but after spending hours trying to find the most affordable option that also made sense for pendants, I came up empty. Amazon has two available — Small Bead Rack w 4p 6″wire and 12 Piece Bead Tree Rack. Even the sturdy replacement wires for the commercial bead trees were costly to purchase. This is my original bead tree design. Please don’t reproduce…
