Want Something Different to Do? Try Ceramics!

Most crafts are little work projects that non-artistic people can do that make them feel artistic! They are an expression of creativity, and even when the results arent all that spectacular, one feels as if one has accomplished something to make pretties!

When I was a child, Grandmas best friend, Mary Jack Goering, always served hot/iced mint tea and a slice of delicious cake on beautiful, rose painted china. Once, when we were leaving after an exceptionally fun visit, Grandma told me, Mary Jack painted that china herself.

My eyes grew round, and I had even more respect for this wonderful woman, who had survived five bouts of cancer, widowhood, and various other lifes ills with her laughter intact, and had very many talents, the least of which was her ability to produce tea and cake at a moments notice. Mary Jack, in addition to being a fabulous housekeeper, organizer, and general font of information, also had an unbelievable artistic talent!

Mary Jack was a bonafied Grand Lady. In fact, I would stack her up against anyone; confident in her ability to handle just about anything that came her way. Her husband had owned the local funeral home in Hawesville, KY, and she had comforted several generations of mourners with hot tea and baked goodies, gently wiped enumerable tears, and yet had, despite her health problems, retained her cheerful attitude and acceptance of lifes trials. She had a disconcerting habit of interjecting, Uhhhhh, huh as you spoke, but she laughed with my Grandma, and they were the closest of friends! Mary Jacks china was the inspiration of my trip down the ceramic lane, and, although I produced NOTHING as fine as her efforts, most of my stuff turned out as well as could be expected from a non-artistic person. Therefore, it is with great joy that I share with you just a smitherings of the Joy of Ceramics.

Im of the school of thought whereby one goes to a ceramic store to purchase something off the shelf to play with. Other people have much more talent than I, and start with a lump of clay, either turning it on a wheel to make pot-like objects, or hand sculpting with knives and various tools to make other goodies.

I fully realize just how much work goes into making all those pots and things, and certainly can appreciate their unbelievable prices! I bought a potters wheel, and very quickly learned that it requires a garage or some other area, (like a woodshed), where one can make a complete and total mess and easily clean it up. At the time, I was living in a house without a garage, and my kitchen was hard enough to deal with, without the addition of clay blobs slung on the walls. So, off I went to the local ceramic store!

When one gets to the ceramic store, one is confronted with aisles and aisles of greenware. It can boggle the mind, all the options available! Sometimes, it is best to have an idea of exactly what you want before you go, but be ready to compromise, because the stores rarely have the PERFECT PIECE.

Greenware is produced by pouring thick, gooey clay slip, into a plaster mold, sloshing it around as evenly as possible, and draining the excess back out of the hole in the mold. Any spillage around the hole is wiped off, so as not to interfere with the final product and make it easier to finish the greenware. The mold is left to dry, until, about a week later, (with good ventilation and relatively low humidity), the mold is opened and the dried clay greenware is pried from the mold. The two halves of the mold must fit tightly together, or one gets strangely shaped blobs poking out of the sides of the greenware. If you want really thick greenware, so you can carve on it, you repeat this process, to add another layer of slip to the inside of the mold.

At the ceramic store, they usually have a large quantity of greenware that has been produced from molds, sitting on shelves. If you're at a good store, you'll notice that there are few "blobs" and other messes on the sides of the greenware, and it will be easier to clean.

As you wander down the aisles, its a really good idea to have some thoughts about what you really want to make. Interested in a Halloween pumpkin? A Christmas tree? A figurine? They will likely have that, and more, to select from! I was so bedazzled by all the opportunities, I went back home, looked up more ceramic shops in the yellow pages, and visited all of them to find THE piece. Since it was early September, I selected a pumpkin, hoping I could finish it in time for Halloween. Later on, as I became a bit more confident and more practiced, I always seemed to gravitate toward animal figures, although I also made the complete Deluxe Nativity Scene, WITH the Three Kings, sheep, camels, and donkeys. If there had been a barn, cows, pigs, and chickens available, I would have made them, too! What fun!

The first step is to take the rough greenware, with spurs, blobs, and other defects, and smooth all that down so that the surface of your item is unblemished. There are several tools that can be used to do this, and they are inexpensive, but they really boil down to a tool with a flat, sharply pointed spade-shaped thing, for poking holes and carving, and small metal scoop, for knocking off bumps and smoothing down the areas, a coarse sponge, and a fine sponge.

When you hold the greenware to work on it, one has to be very careful not to exert too much pressure, or the greenware will shatter. At this point, its best to just pick up the large pieces, give them back to the shop to be turned back into slip, buy another piece, and start over.

The picture at the right shows a thickly poured, (2 layers of slip), pot that has been hand carved with a unique patter. Believe me, I'm not that talented! In this case a lighter wash was applied to a specific kind of dark clay slip. The "wash" technique discusssed below.

My first pumpkin took about 2 hours to smooth down, which really wasnt that bad. First, I scraped off all the burrs, and, using the coarse sponge, I smoothed all the rough places. Since my pumpkin had a lid that didnt fit perfectly, I had to scrape away excess clay around the edge to make sure the lid fit into the pumpkin. Then, once everything was relatively smooth and the lid fit, I used the fine sponge to wipe off the surface to make the whole thing as smooth as possible. This requires a light touch, and the ability to locate and blend in rough spots. Once done, I left the pumpkin back at the shop, so it could be fired into bisque.

Firing greenware into bisque requires a kiln, and a few years later, I was able to buy my very own used kiln. It still sits in our garage, but I havent used it in years My kiln is an electric kiln, and it requires the same kind of plug that one has for a stove. I think it is three phase power, but dont quote me on that, as electricity is not my forte. Anyway, I had an electrician come out and fix up a plug in the basement of my other house.

Firing greenware is a bit of a chore, and must be done in steps, in order to prevent shattering of the pieces. Load the kiln by setting the finished greenware on little ceramic props with little steel points. The steel points touch the greenware, and the whole thing props up the piece so that when it fires, it does not glue itself to anything else. Load the kiln with the large pieces on the bottom, and use various ceramic columns and layers, so that you can load the kiln fairly evenly, with larger pieces on the bottom, smaller pieces on the top and nothing touching anything else.

Once the kiln is loaded, the lid is closed, locked down, and youre ready to fire. Its best to start this in the early morning, because if you wait, youll be waking up to an alarm every two or three hours, and THATS no fun. My kiln had a variety of settings, and a variety of burners, (or electrical coils). Here was the general schedule:

• Start: Bottom burner, low
• Two hours later: Bottom burner, high
• Two hours later: Top burner low
• Two hours later: Top burner high
• Four hours later: Top burner low
• Two hours later: Top burner off
• Two hours later: Bottom burner low
• Two hours later: Bottom burner off
• Wait at least four hours before opening
• Wait at least six hours before removing bisque.

Yes, it is an all-day affair Not only that, but the clay gives off methane, which is supposed to be odorless, but the impurities in the clay make the methane smell a lot like a natural gas leak. Its best to prop open the garage door for ventilation, too. NEVER ever touch the kiln during the firing process, as it will inflict severe burns. Mine actually glowed red in the middle of the garage floormake sure the kiln will catch nothing else on fire, too!

When all this is done, one has a roughly finished product called bisque. As is typical of life in general, you may notice little areas that could have been smoothed better, or have little nicks, or blobs, etc. At this point, it is too late to fix that, but maybe you can paint around it.

There are more ways to finish the bisque than Carter has liver pills, and Im not up on all that, so Ill just talk about what I did to finish the bisque. For the pumpkin, I used an orange glaze on the outside and a clear glaze for the inside. Glaze is a viscous, quicksand-like substance, whose color does nothing to resemble its finished color.

The orange glaze that I used on the pumpkin looked like Pepto-Bismol, and was thick, like pudding, but had a grainy texture. Glaze is made of very fine, highly quartzitic sand, suspended in a liquid of some sort. Chemicals are added to make colors.

Different glazes, and there are thousands of them, have special effects, i.e. crackling, blobs of colors, runny colors, pearly colors, and on to infinity. Ive never seen charts of all the different glazes, but Im sure they have one, somewhere. I used a shiny orange glaze, a shiny green glaze for the stem, and a shiny clear glaze for the inside, painting the glazes thickly on the inside and outside. You want to pile on the glaze; otherwise it may run and give your piece a streaked/white look.

For a lot of my other pieces, I used a wash. A wash is a colored glaze, (frankly, I used grey a lot), that is used to fill in the hollows of the piece. Paint the wash on the bisque and with your sponge; wipe all the glaze off the humps on the piece. It makes the details of the piece stand out, and you can always do something else if it doesnt turn out like you wish. A wash can really add depth to your piecethink of a lamb with wooly fur; it makes it look more realistic than a pure white lamb.

Once youve applied a glaze, or a wash, or whatever, your piece must be fired again, and either youre done, or not. In the case of the pumpkin, once it was fired, I was done! For some of my wash pieces, I put on a clear glaze and fired it again, OR, I sprayed a sealer on the bisque, which gave it a smoother appearance, but not a shiny appearance. Some glazes need to be fired in steps, such as complicated painted pieces. Some people use craft paint on the bisque, and spray it with a sealer. The picture on the right shows a wash technique on a lamb, that was covered with a clear glaze.

While all this sounds very technical and/or tedious, it really is a lot of fun! Ceramics require patience, first and foremost, and the ability to imagine what that icky gook that youre painting on something will really look like when fired. It is really best to have a clear idea in your head, what you want it to look like when finished, otherwise, you may get a wild idea, and those are rarely good

I think these bowls are truly lovely! I'm getting all excited again to make even more glorious messes...

Whatever you do, when you pick a glaze, make sure the number on the bottle matches what you wanted from the color chart!

Ceramics are a LOT of fun!

Thanks for coming by!