Reviving My Pottery

I've been playing with a new series or set of designs for my pottery. I'm bringing back the things I really enjoyed making fifteen or sixteen years ago when I was just starting to learn pottery.

The first thing I started making again were little gargoyle heads. I also made some bowls with heads and feet around the same time as the gargoyles. I made several of these when I was younger and gave some as birthday or Christmas presents to my friends. We still have one of my original ones sitting on our kitchen counter. I started making these again when I felt the gargoyle heads should become something and I remembered how much fun the bowls were when I was younger.

A bird-esque creature bowl.

The gargoyle heads also eventually got applied to the sides of some mugs last year for the Medieval Faire I was a vendor at. I originally started making the heads when my friend and mentor, Amy Higgason of Pigeon Road Pottery (check out her Facebook page here.) was trying to get me to work quickly without overthinking what I was doing. I had a problem with that then, and still do overthink things now on occasion. Because you work with such a small amount of clay, it can quickly dry out and become crumbly, hence the need to work and act without thinking too much.

A turret mug with gargoyles.

One other thing I loved doing was using Mason stains on my work to add some extra color and paint pictures or patterns. I've been wanting to bring that back to my work as well, but it has taken a little longer because it required a whole new set of chemicals that weren't in my glaze making supplies. I started working on this idea in March and then made some progress in May. Since I started actually making tests in March that means I had already been thinking about trying this since January 24, actually when Amy posted a picture of one of the mugs she got from me in this style way back when. I had been wishing I had a different style than the style I've been doing for the last 6 years and she happened to post a photo of that mug and I said, "OH! Maybe I should do some like that! That was fun." And I started gathering supplies.

A bottle in a "halfway" style with stains but old glazes.

Well I finally got a big batch of this new old style fired and I'm pretty excited about it! You can see all the pieces from this firing on my Facebook page. I did some work in my old glazes with Mason stain decoration and then I paired some of my old glazes with the new white base glaze (also from Amy, thanks Amy!) to make some new things like how I had been imagining them. I love how bright the stains get when they are over the top of the white glaze. I almost feel like I've been given a new set of paints or colored pencils, except I was always very particular about how I treated those, they had to stay tidy and clean, whereas I just jumped in with the stains and had fun.

The new white glaze paired with the Mason stains and my yellow glaze.

And I did have fun. Especially when I opened the kiln today and realized that everything I had glazed in the new style had turned out the way I had hoped! It's Christmas morning in my studio today!