Friday 4 February 2011

My little find =]

Well... I found a little gem in the bin at work (yes, I know, call me a tramp if you must).


Its the main part and handle of a broken cafetiere. I love the shape of it so I decided I would do a little side project of my own and make a mould so I could cast it. So I went into the slip casting workshop all day Friday and made the entire mould. Its in the drying cabinet at the moment and I forgot to take any pictures whilst making it (due to lack of time and busy messy hands), but I will get a picture or two of the mould up soon. I seriously can't wait to cast from it (bit sad eh? must be getting into this ceramics malarky). Will get more pictures up on this as soon as I can.


These little blob shapes are my test tiles with various glazes on. I've spent a fair bit of time in the glaze lab with one of those bloody huge dust/gas mask things on mixing various chemicals to get some glazes made. I've not put them in for firing though yet, I think I'm going to see if I can do my own kiln early next week to get used to that. 


The two pots above are a new venture... porcelain casting slip! I love them personally. Although they're really quite time consuming to cast (they take a lot longer to cast than earthenware and take forever to release from the mould) I love the paper-thin quality to them. I also love how porcelain looks when its fired... looks like that's the obvious next step then, however I'll have to see how they turn out because porcelain has a nasty habit of distorting and shrinking quite a bit in firing.



As you can see I've made a little home in the ceramics studio space. I've had a bit of a production line on the go over the past few weeks and now have quite a little collection of my cast forms and a few pots of glaze to mess around with... and of course the all important rollies in the corner ha!

More coming soon, I may even get around to putting some of my print work up here. Hope you've enjoyed my ramblings... any comments would be wonderful =]