A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Porcelain bowl, exterior carved and painted with underglazes, interior glazed with Niko Blue and swirls of Seaweed and Indigo Float.





Failed to record glazes for this bowl, annoyingly.





Iron Lustre base coat, drips and rim of Oatmeal. Oatmeal is a yellowish glaze on its own, which reacts with Iron Lustre to create that fantastic blue and pink.



Thrown and hand-altered mini vase, glazed with assorted celadons. They REALLY don't blend - I'd intended a smooth ombre effect.



Stripes of assorted metallic glazes from the LA studio, plus Ancient Jasper. I used thin lines of Oatmeal, a flux glaze (it runs and makes other glazes melt together) so they'd flow together.

After four months of practice in Crestline plus eight actual lessons in LA, I am thoroughly addicted and should probably not be allowed in pottery supply shops without a leash. I have acquired a large set of tools and multiple jars of glazes and underglazes, as the studio has a very small selection of glazes - I think only ten total.

I am still very bad at centering clay. This is the first step in making stuff on the wheel, and if you don't get it right your pieces will be lopsided. I can now usually get the top centered but not the bottom. If I do get the whole thing centered, it comes un-centered when I open it (create the well in the lump of the clay) or later in the process.

In that regard, I have once again managed to do the thing that always seems to happen with me, which is an early display of promise followed by a complete failure to live up to it. Joey (the Crestline studio owner) sadly remarked that I seemed to have it the first time I tried and I should watch more YouTube videos. Donna (the LA teacher, who is more tactful) seemed baffled that I STILL haven't gotten it after four months of practice and multiple lessons just on that. In both cases, all their other students who started at the same time as me or later than me have mastered centering.

However, I have now managed to at least sometimes center well enough that I can (again, sometimes) create things that, while not quite symmetrical, are at least close enough that I can use them as a basis for what I'm really interested in, which is carving, glazing, and other forms of decoration. So I figure that even if I'm much slower than average at centering, I have at least gotten somewhat better at it, which presumably means that at some future point I will achieve basic competence, even if I never get really good at the wheel. Luckily, basic competence is all I'm really after in terms of the wheel, because if I can make a bowl that's even okay, I can do this with it.

Here is a celadon bowl. The glow is light shining through it; porcelain is translucent when thin, and so is the glaze.







Hand-building, on the other, er, hand, is something I've been doing since I was about eight, though mostly with oven-baked modeling clay. The skills transfer pretty well to actual clay.

Here is a porcelain rose.