May Days

I will be at Art Star Craft Bazaar again this year! Look for the Snowday Ceramics booth.
Saturday, May 30th from 11-6pm & Sunday, May 31st from 11-6pm
Penn's Landing Great Plaza - on Columbus Boulevard between Walnut Street and Market Street in Philadelphia

The best part of last year was seeing so many friends, so I hope everyone can swing by again!

Doin' the Dart

Here's another thing from Shawn Spangler's Throw & Alter class: Darting, which is also a sewing technique in which you cut like a triangle out of your fabric and then sew the fabric back up. With pots, you remove a V-shape or it could also be an oval leaf-shape from the wall of your clay form and then push the walls back to close up the hole.


I tried it with simple, straight-up-and-down cylinders and hated it! These look so stupid.


















But then I tried it with some potbellied cups I made. One V-dart on the side turns the potbelly into a duckbutt. Love it.

Funny Face

A few weeks ago, I happened to be working at The Clay Studio on a day when Joanie was looking for someone to pose in an ad so I agreed to help her out. When I went to work at the restaurant today, my co-worker greeted me with the City Paper opened up to this page. Ha!

(the mustache is wet clay painted on my face)

You can find out more about classes here.

Pushing It, or, Fat Lips

I took a course with Shawn Spangler recently, called Throw and Alter. Here is a progression I went through in the early weeks of the class. Apologies in advance some of these photos are dim.

Following my teacher's demonstration, I threw a bowl with a hollow lip--a neat way to add some volume to your piece without adding a lot of extra weight. Then, I altered it by pressing a rib into the lip in four places. This had a way of making it look slightly puffy.



I made another bowl and did this again but tried to exaggerate the effect, this time pressing the the rib in further, so the four puffy parts even look like lobes, which you can see from the top. I also pushed out from inside the bowl a bit, thinking I was squaring out the piece but I don't know that achieved the desired effect. But anyway, you have to show the clay who's boss sometimes.



I then tried to get more extreme, and threw a bowl with an even larger hollow lip. When pressing down with the rib, I actually cut through the rim, which really emphasized the fat, puffy form. It is starting to look like an inflated raft or link sausages or something. On a larger scale, this could be a very impressive centerpiece bowl, or could have a handle across the top and be a quirky ceramic basket.

I really like this idea of making hollow components to my work, giving it a fun chunkiness but without heaviness.