Latest planter

I have not had many pieces out of the glaze kiln in my ceramics class this fall—I covered most of them in Ceramics update.  I’ve done a number of the little dishes shown there as glazing experiments, but still haven’t gotten them back.  One pot that was glazed some time ago, but only just showed up on the shelves this week was a small planter. I had planned it as a bowl, but in stamping my monogram on the bottom I punched all the way through the bottom, so I had to turn it into a planter.  It may have taken a while to get back to me, because I’d forgotten to put the “NS” mark for “night school” on the bottom, and I’d omitted my own monogram as well.

The pot was dipped in Noxema blue glaze, but the glaze had not dried when I had to pack up that day, and got badly smudged. Rather than try to fix it, I wiped off almost all the glaze, and let it dry for a week. The next week I dipped it in shiny milky white and candy red.  Because of the holes in the bottom, I did not have any way of keeping the interior and exterior glazes really separate.

Here is a top view of the planter. You can see a few voids where the bravo buff clay shows through.

An angled view of the interior.

An angled view of the opposite side of the interior, with the rather prominent voids.

One view of the bottom showing the candy red.

The opposite side of the bottom, showing more of the shiny milky white.

I put a small succulent in the pot, to give as a birthday present to a friend.

Another view of the succulent, from the other side of the pot.

I rather like the way the shiny milky white, candy red and noxema blue glazes interact here (other than the voids).

In addition to the little molded glaze-test pieces, I have one pot waiting for a glaze firing, and two that I have to trim, bisque-fire, and glaze.  I think that I’ll just have time to do that by the time the course ends.  I might be able to do some other minor hand-building, because that does not have to wait a week before trimming, but the last class will not involve much (if any) work with wet clay.

Ceramics update

As I mentioned in Got into ceramics class, I got into the beginning ceramics class for Watsonville/Aptos/Santa Cruz Adult Education (at Santa Cruz High) for this fall!

I mentioned some projects in that post, but only two have gone anywhere:

• I have a mold (resin printed at UCSC through BELS) for the little sauce dishes that I discussed in 3-D printed test pot.  I’ll want to test making sauce dishes with that mold and playing with the glazing. Well, I tried out the mold and it works, though the alignment by eye leaves something to be desired—If I do another top-and-bottom mold, I’ll make sure to have some mechanical alignment capability.
• I want to try making some more of the tiny trilobe planters, to see if I can make the feet a bit shorter and put the planters together in a single class period, rather than having to take the extrusions home.  I want to play with some of the other glazes on them also. Some of the planters were a bit wobbly, so I want to work on a way to make them more level (probably more care in cutting the extrusions).

I’ve made several of the sauce dishes now—I’ll be using them as glaze test pieces as they are fairly quick to make and have an interesting texture for the glaze. The dishes came out about 75mm in diameter and about 21mm high. The foot is very shallow, so I did not glaze inside the foot, but only painted there with an oxide or carbonate, before waxing the whole bottom.  For my first batch, I was planning to make 12, but one of them failed in being removed from the mold, so I ended up with 11. The clay may have been a bit too thin and a bit too wet, as the dishes tended to get a bit distorted coming out of the mold.

Here are some photos:

These were dipped in shiny milky white glaze.

The bottoms were not glazed but painted with carbonate or oxide: cobalt carbonate, copper carbonate, and iron oxide. The dark one is most likely the cobalt carbonate, and the really patchy one the copper carbonate.

These were painted with a commercial glaze: Western’s bright yellow gloss.

The other bottom was painted with black iron oxide, which I thought came out rather well, though the regular iron oxide is also good.

These were dipped in noxema blue glaze, which was rather lumpy that day. The single dip resulted in a thin enough layer that it mostly flowed away from the raised ribs, giving a nice color contrast.

The bottoms had the same oxides and carbonates as for the yellow dishes.

The second batch was more uniform in shape, and I made them all with the same glaze and oxide bottom, to see how consistent I could be.

The second batch was rolled on the slab roller, rather than with a rolling pin. As a result it was about 1mm thicker (7mm instead of 6mm) and somewhat drier (having been rolled on canvas repeatedly). These came out a little more uniform in shape, because they did not get distorted (much) in being removed from the mold.

The bottoms were all painted with black iron oxide, though rather sloppily. Unless I get better at painting on the oxides, I should probably just let the bare clay show here.

Last weekend, I bought some commercial glaze (Western’s Papaya Gloss) at Phoenix Ceramics that I tried on a set of dishes in this week’s class. I’m curious to see whether I get the color I’m hoping for. (If not, I might ask for glazing in the electric kiln, instead of the gas reduction kiln.)

Not all my ceramic work has been with the little dishes. I’ve also tried some handbuilding, some wheel throwing, and some extruding.

This was my first hand-built pot. The texture is from the canvas of the slab roller. The vase was dipped in shiny milky for the inside and top, and the bottom was dipped in candy red. I understand that I’m lucky to have gotten a red from the candy red, as it often comes out brownish.

Because there was no foot on this vase, I painted the bottom with black iron oxide.

The inside has a fairly uniform shiny milky white glaze. If the top had been more neatly trimmed and smoothed, this could have been a decent tumbler. It is about 115 mm high and 80mm diameter at the base.

This tiny wheel-thrown bowl is about 75mm wide at the top and 36mm wide at the foot. The walls are about 10mm thick. The base is far too thick (insufficient trimming) and the pot weighs 172g (disturbingly heavy).

The inside is shiny milky white, and the outside was rim-dipped in noxema blue. I do like the patterning where the noxema blue is on top of the shiny milky white.

This is a top view of the tiny pot I threw, showing the bulge in the floor that I should have removed.

This pot is about 120mm in diameter at the top and 63mm diameter at the foot. It is about 52 mm high, but only 25mm deep. It has way too thick a base and is disturbingly heavy at 390g. The walls vary in thickness, but get up to about 11mm thick.

I particularly like the stripes from drips of candy red from the rim over the shiny milky white interior.

The candy red on the outside came out well, with some interesting mottling from where the shiny milky white overflowed from the inside.

I made a pair of trilobe vessels from the extruder die that I made in the spring. The one on the left was supposed to be a planter and the one on the right a vase. Both have shiny milky white on the inside (with some spilling to the outside), bottom dipped in temoku gold, and a rim dip of vaporliner.

The vase has no foot, so I waxed the whole bottom, but the planter had a foot.

Interior of the trilobe vase, showing the shiny milky white interior and the vaporliner rim.

The interior of the planter shows where the temoku gold flowed into the pot through the drain holes when it was dipped—and where the holes have been plugged by the glaze! I have to decide whether to try drilling out the glaze to make this a planter, or leave the holes plugged to be a vase. I’m not happy with the shape for either, so maybe I’ll just leave it as a test piece and not do anything with it.

I have a couple of cylinders that I threw last week that I hope to trim this week—they were more successful than any of the other pots I’ve thrown, so I hope I can get them through the whole process without messing them up too badly.

Acting update for October 2023

Continuing my updates from Recent (mostly theater) activity, which was about a month ago, I’ll try to bring people up to date on what I’ve been doing in my new acting hobby.

• Every Monday and Wednesday, I had an hour-long rehearsal for the 2-minute scene after acting class. We presented to the class twice: on Wednesday October 25 and Wednesday Nov 1.  The scene went fairly well both times, but somewhat better on the second showing.
• I finished the Arden 3rd series edition of Hamlet before the 10 hours of table read with Santa Cruz Shakespeare happened. The parts I got to read were Polonius (I.2 and I.3, which includes the advice to Laertes and telling Ophelia to stop seeing Hamlet), Claudius (III.3, the thoughts-and-prayers monologue), and Gravedigger (V.1).  I did argue for some minor changes of wording (following the first folio, instead of the second quarto) and for restoring one cut line of Polonius’s that was a great cue for Ophelia.  All the changes I argued for were accepted by Charles Pasternak. The turnout for the table read was much bigger than they expected, with something like 19 participating readers and another 12 or so “auditors”.  That means that they raised at least $5000 from the fundraiser, and probably somewhat more. It was fun to read the parts I had, and I think I did a creditable job (aside from the rather tuneless singing of the Gravedigger).
• The Saturday Shakespeare lectures and reading of As You Like It has also finished. I read LeBeau (I.2), Jaques (II.5, II.7,  III.2, III.3, IV.1 and IV.2), and Touchstone (V.1, V.3).  I liked Jaques’ lines the best, as I had both the fool-in-the-forest and the all-the-world’s-a-stage monologues.
• We’ve had three rehearsals of The Artist in my living room so far, with the next one coming up in about 2 weeks.  The play is beginning to come together, and I think it will be fairly good.
• Tomorrow is the midpoint of the 8-session (Oct 16–Dec 4) radio-acting workshop with Bill Peters through Actors’ Theatre. We’ve had a number of exercises to record so far, and we’ll start working on our projects this week.  I did the first two weeks’ exercises paired with a woman from Capitola, and we recorded at her house, using a Blue Yeti microphone and Garage Band. For the third weeks’ exercise, I was paired with a man from Larkin Valley (too far for me to comfortably ride), so we recorded at my house using Audacity.  It turns out that Audacity can only record from one device at a time, so we tried both sharing a mic and recording our parts separately as separate tracks (listening to the other person’s prior recording over headphones for synchronization).
• For my project for the voice acting course, I plan to read my niece Sari’s children’s books: the Robotastic! series. I’ll probably do them as YouTube videos, since they are picture books, but I’ll have to get her permission before making the videos public.
• On Sunday Aug 29, I auditioned for a short student movie at UCSC (I found the audition info on Reddit). The group was a little disorganized.  They had scheduled the auditions at the classroom in McHenry Library, but they had not remembered to reserve the room in time, so the first hour of the auditions were there and the rest of the time was in a smaller room downstairs (in the Digital Scholarship Commons). They had promised sides for the auditions, which the director was supposed to bring, but the director was late. When the director showed up, not only had she not brought printed sides, but the only copy of the script (which was supposed to be on Google Drive) was on her laptop, and she had not brought her laptop. So the team creating the short tried to remember the script and write it on the whiteboard for us to use. Six people auditioned (group auditions) for the two parts in the 5-minute script—well, seven people if you count the guy who showed up 15 minutes before the auditions were over and the room had to be relinquished. The script consists mostly of sword fighting, though they had not even looked for a right choreographer yet, so we did the auditions with pool noodles.  The auditioning was fun, as long as you did not take it too seriously. They were planning to look over the site and do some rehearsals today with shooting to happen next Sunday. I passed on the name and contact information for the stage sword-fighting instructor I took a couple of classes from this summer.
• On Tuesday, having not heard anything, I assumed that they had give the parts to others—presumably because they wanted students, not an old guy for their video. But on Thursday I got an email offering me the part of “Shadowy Figure” and giving me the whole (2½-page) script. I accepted—despite the disorganization of the student group, I figured it would be fun to try.
• Today, I bicycled up to campus wearing my attempt at a peasant costume—a shirt I made for Society for Creative Anachronism about 50 years ago and a pouch of about the same vintage.  I was not able to wear the old trews I had made, as I’ve put on about 40 pounds since then, and they would not go over my hips. I carried my chain mail haubergeon in my panniers, as I thought it might be suitable for the other character, and my jo (short staff), as I thought it would make a more reasonable weapon for me than a sword.  When I got to the agreed-on meeting place, I was told that they had contacted the fight choreographer (yay!), but that they had decided to put this short on hold, because they were busy with a major project for school (due in a month) and didn’t really have time to squeeze in the short.  Given how disorganized they were, I think this was a wise decision.

Coming up

• In the Theater Arts 10A class at Cabrillo, we should be getting new, longer scenes assigned on Wednesday. I don’t know yet who I’ll be paired with.  These scenes will be in the showcase we’re doing on Monday Dec 11 (thankfully the week after the workshop with Bill Peters ends).
• The 8 tens @8 are coming up January 19–Feb 24, and The Artist is scheduled as the second play of the Part 2 series (unless it changes from the current schedule). I found the dates on the ticketing calendar (https://ci.ovationtix.com/35410), but I’ve not transferred them to my personal calendar yet.