Try Try Try.. till you succeed

So I woke up Christmas eve with this idea in my head... pillow shape bowls. I did make some wall clocks with my pillow shape extruder die and they sold well over the Christmas holidays. Now I wanted to make something else. The basic idea was make a long pillow form, cut out a hole and slump in a slab and attach the edges. Done!

I wish it was as simple as that. :) I spent all of Christmas Eve and Christmas day trying to figure out how to make these bowls. I went through 30+ pounds of clay and made 7 or 8 of these. The difficult part was making a clean piece with the bowl portion having a clean edge.

In the picture below you can see the progression of the last five from left to right. For the first piece, I cut the hole in the pillow shape and took a bigger slab of clay to slump it in. The edges of the pillow collapsed and after a lot of fussing finished it but I wasn't happy. The next one I tried a different shape cut out to make it easier to slump the clay in and that was not as clean as I wanted.
In the third I used the cut out itself, flipped it over and atached it. It attached fairly cleanly but had no volume. It would be a bowl that held nothing. Which made me think that the piece of clay being slumped needs to be a perfect match in dimension.
So that is what I did. I took precise measurement of the cut out. Increased it by 1/2 inch all around and it slumped and fit in a lot better.


Making anything new is a process, but it is a process I enjoy. Never fear to experiment and see what direction it can take you. In the picture below you can see how the edges got cleaner with every piece.

I did toss out the first three pieces too and decorated just the final two with my signature slip decoration. That just gave them the WOW factor!
Here are pictures of another one I completed. Would make a great serving bowl for nuts and candy.

Wish everyone a very Happy New Year! And with the New Year make a lot of New work!

New Form and New Item

As an artist, I always find it challenging and fun to create new forms. I had been thinking of some sort of wall art decoration with tiles for a long time. In my head I had thought of countless ways of making them. Square, round, paisley shapes etc... I wanted a three dimensions look and every process I went through was very tedious and not really getting to the look I wanted. Handbuilding with slabs required a lot of scoring/slipping and making sure the slabs didn't loose form and split. Thought of working with molds, but then I didn't want everything to look exactly the same.
Then just sitting on the couch one day (day dreaming my clay ideas), I made the connection between pillows and the beautiful farbics they are covered in. Aha! I will make them like pillows and decorate them as though they were covered in embroidered fabric.
Then of course started the process of how to make the pillow shapes. Thought of slabs of clay first, but then went back to one of my favorite eqiupment in the studio, my extruder. I made a die shaped in the form of a leaf and there I had my form. Of course there was a struggle with closing up the ends and cleaning them up, but I think I have the process down.
As a functional potter, I sometimes crave for everything to have a function. I know that even wall art has a function, i.e. to decorate a wall. So I decided to turn these into wall clocks. I absolutely love the way they turn out. I also like the fact that the hardware all gets hidden inside the pillow shape.




Interesting thing was when I posted the picture below on facebook, I asked people to guess what they were. I was amazed by the creative ideas everyone had like salt pepper shakers, vases, pencil holder, bread warmer, etc.. Someone finaly did guess them to be wall clocks. But this got me thinking that I could really make so many different items from this same basic shape and different sizes. So keep looking out for some new work coming to my shop as pillow shapes.



The original idea for wall decor is still something I am working on. For starters, I made several smaller size pillows as seen in the picture below. Can't wait till they are fired and installed on a wall.