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This is something I assume every potter does. If we don’t, we end up with a lot of excess that is just a waste. Foot trimmings, broken pieces and failed experiments all go into the bucket. When I have enough to do a batch of reclaim I make sure they’re all broken up somewhat small.

Then I fill the bucket with water over the trimmings and pieces. It usually makes a happy little fizzy sound.

And there it sits for a few days until everything is all mushed up well.

I know some potters will do a mixing process or sieve through at this stage but I just plop it all into an old bowl plaster mold.

I have it all figured out that this small 2 gallon bucket will fill one bowl mold exactly. It’s a small batch but it really doesn’t need to be massive. At this point I cover it loosely with a sheet of plastic and let it sit for 2-3 days. I check on it periodically and when the liquid is gone and it’s started to pull away from the walls, I know it’s ready for me.

If the middle is still gooey, sometimes I pull that part out and set it on a plaster batt for one more day and sometimes it’s not enough to worry about. Once you’ve done this a few times, you’ll be able to make your own determinations. At this point I wedge it up into workable chunks, toss them into a clay bag and I’ll use them when I’m ready.

When I was doing pottery full time my sheep obsession came full circle with putting sheep on the pottery. It never made it to the website as an option but I would bring it to all the shows I did.

Slowly the fiber took more of my time and I didn’t throw my pottery but we still had the big casting studio so I used cast ware to still provide sheep mugs

That mug was just done last November before I started to throw mugs again. Now we have mugs that look like an interesting cross between the first sheep I used to do and the ones I’ve been doing for the past couple of years.

They couldn’t ever be exact because of the changes in clay and glazes but I rather like the new one I’m doing…

I tell myself each time I start to formulate that there has to be someone out there that hits the right glaze on the first try.  And today that person might be me!  Coming up with glazes isn’t for the faint of heart. Its seriously one of the most frustrating and then hopefully rewarding parts of being a potter. You have to be ok with failing.

I have failed a lot. Though, all you need is one success to wipe away all those failures and make it really feel like you can do this “thing”.

I can do this thing.
I told myself this over and over again while making the majolica glaze I’m currently using.

Did I have enough boron in that formula?
Too much tin oxide? Do I even need that?
Was it the wrong Frit?
Maybe if I fired at a different cone?

I have a stack of old bits of failed glazes just hanging out waiting to be dumped. Really I’m done testing with them so they can go away and never come back thankyouverymuch. I have my glaze.

Its final test before a full size piece test was this:

But before it was that it was this:

and this:

and worst of all, this:

I now have my formula for majolica that is based on but not exactly the same as some of the glaze recipes I found online. They’re a great place to start. I also now fire to a cone higher than I expected to but am pleased at how the pottery and glaze work at that temp.  I learned a few things that I’m sure I’ll forget the next time I formulate but it’s all fun right? It is once you get past the frustration anyway.

Sometimes I use a pot as my test piece. I can of course completely wash off the glaze and start again if it’s awful or just not what I wanted. Still I have some time here and there when I’m not in the reach of a piece of pottery to paint on but I do have my watercolors and paper. I find myself sketching little motifs that will hopefully translate well onto pottery.

Sure the colors are going to be different, they just don’t always match up and I don’t necessarily need them too. I do have a tendency to paint a little different once I get a piece of pottery in my hand but the idea is sometimes all I’m looking for. There are the times that it’s a pretty good translation

There are also all the those times that a watercolor just won’t translate. Sometimes you really don’t know how a piece will fit. A flat square watercolor doesn’t always translate onto a shapely mug. Many of my old designs were just smaller motifs that worked with a shapely mug or bowl so now I find myself telling my hands they need to make more “square” feeling items for those designs that just won’t work as well on a sexy mugs with big hips. In those cases when a patterning won’t work, it’s back to the drawing board for either the painting or the pottery shape, or maybe both. I’ll talk more about successes and failures as I continue.

I have a favorite template. You can see it in a lot of the plates that I post.

Since it’s a favorite, I need to have it in more than one size. I started out making a smaller shape for a tiny bowl. I started with a cutout like you see above and folded it in half where the design met up and then in half again – you can see how simple this design shape really is

Then, I simply cut off about 3/4 of an inch keeping with the design. It could be drawn first but I just cut away.

Making it bigger takes a little more effort and there are 2 methods. The first is one that never really works well for me but I know others might have success with it. Sometimes it depends on the shapes you are copying. I lay out the pattern and trace around it then using a compass, draw a line out. This wasn’t big enough so I drew one more time. You can see the design got distorted.

To fix that, I drew lines straight out from the major design points and then re-sketched my design so I could have more crisp hills. Then I cut around the piece leaving a little bit around the edges. I just needed to be able to match it all up.

I folded just like I did with the first piece and in cutting I cleaned up any non-symmetrical issues.

For my final even bigger template, I folded a large piece of paper into quarters like I did with this one, Then traced the design on there, marked my points of interest, measured out the increasing distance on those points and drew my shape. It was easier because I only had to draw one quarter of the final plate template.

Voila! I have 4 different sizes of matching plates/bowls now.

Soon I’ll show you what I’ve been making from each of these sizes…. that is if you haven’t already sneaked a peek from my Instagram.