Someone else sculpted these and never picked them up, and I did some crazy hand painting on them. Again, colors did not come out as I expected them to on the flowers, but the glazing looks a lot better than when I did the underglaze painting on it.The pineapple plate coloration came out particularly well/accurate.
Some flat tiles I made out of Meg's stamps.
So there is a state fair competition to make a fairy garden. Seriously, that exists. I happen to know someone who totally does that sort of thing, so we're working on one together. Here are the results so far:
Here's the base, which has to be 12x12. Meg provided me the yarn and I knit/crocheted a cover for it to make a shaggy forest floor. The base brown/green yarn I designed and Meg spun and then I crocheted around the edge.
Meg did this amazing mushroom hill/fairy house, and I did the underglaze on it and then she did the top layer of glaze. It came out really well.
This is the base piece--I used flower stamps all over it, then used a foam donut to make it more of a holder-type thing. I painted on red, purple, orange and yellow underglaze and then Meg used celadon glaze on top of that. It came out amazingly coppery and a perfect holder for the mushroom hill.
I can't really explain this one so much other than it was another slab draped over a foam donut. The weird blobs are things Meg made with drippings, which I hand painted underglaze on to attempt to make them flower-ish.
A baby labyrinth that I cut out of the tile stamp..
And here's where we glued the pieces on, and added little fairies out of yarn, and glued some nature-y bits and twigs and stuff onto t.
I may add some kind of fence so I can wrap vines and leave around it (and also to hopefully hold the pieces in just in case). But it's pretty wild and wooly so far.
Continued from here. And the final results after glazing are....
This came out rather thick. I probably should have hand painted it and then glazed it in clear like the other one, but oh well.
This is the piece formerly known as the octopus one--Meg wanted to glaze it anyway. You can't really tell what that is, but the purple's nice.
This one came out relatively well, all things considered.
As did this, though the colors came out drastically different from what I expected to see.
Here's the last of my crocheted samples.Yeah, that octopus has a ton of arms, what of it?
For Round Two of this level of experimentation, Meg and I dipped the pieces in slip without pre-soaking them first, and then put them in already made little cups.Meg also threw a bowl for my second version of the mandala to drape in there. I painted more slip on top of that.
So how did they come out?
So at this point they haven't crumbled in the kiln! Huzzah! However, I will admit that a few of them came out...crumblier when they were manhandled a bit later.
This one has pretty much lost its shit altogether after the photo was taken, really. And after breaking an edge off of another piece unexpectedly, I am being VERY careful about touching them. I glazed everything but the big nice bowl (I'm afraid to mess with it) to see how that comes out.
Oh, and this is a totally random thing I made after using some of Meg's experimental drippy swirly bits.
Continued from here.
So I thought this was going well. This week we made a few more pieces to try out:
I made a mandala and Meg made a bowl to drape it into, and she made a mandala and draped it over a flat piece she made. She also did a knitting sample and put it into a shell, and I dumped my scrumble into...well, it's kinda the top of a fairy house, I guess? But we'll probably never know because...
On Tuesday, I saw last week's pieces in the kiln. Most of them looked great or good, except for Meg's angel, which had crumbled entirely. We guessed it was due to starch being in it or something.
But a few days later I went to put the new pieces out to be baked in the kiln...and politely got told NOT to, because this happened when they tried to take the pieces out of the kiln:
Apparently yarn + clay slip is too thin and breaks. It was suggested that we either (a) quit doing this, or (b) start dunking them in so much clay you can't see the yarn details, which kinda seems like defeating the purpose.
Back to the drawing board...? Or Meg doing more tests....something? She said she saw that someone managed this online...wonder what they did.
So I'm taking a sculpture class that's VERY experimental. For example, this is from the first night of class-- we were to stamp a motif all over the clay and then drape it over something. Mine... broke a lot. Oh well.
Anyway, the instructor got the idea for me to knit/crochet some pieces out of a natural fiber--cotton in this case-- and then we'd try to turn them into something ceramic. Uh, somehow.
First one is basically a knitting sampler, the second and third are scrumbles (random bits of crochet), and the fourth is a crocheted mandala. Here's what they look like dry.
Then the teacher (Meg) had me learn how to make paper clay--kind of a mashup of newspaper and clay slip-- and after soaking my pieces in water for about an hour, soaked them in the clay. I draped the scrumbles on a flat block, the knitted sampler on a bowl (with newspaper propping up the middle), and the mandala eventually ended up in a bowl with a foam donut holding up the middle.
Meg had a crocheted angel that she dipped and propped up with newspaper in the middle, but I didn't get a shot of it before the dip.
A week-ish later after drying, they look like this:
I'm surprised the mandala (which I am trying to turn into a bowl) actually stayed that stiff. They've been put out to be bisqued....we'll see how that works, or if it does. Meanwhile, Meg is having me make more to do another attempt at a bowl--she'll throw one and we'll drape another mandala in or on it or something. I guess? We'll see this coming week.
I think they came out really cute.