Ta-da!

My first finished piece!

The glaze on the outside is blueish, and the inside glaze is sort of a rusty colour. They're both speckly, which is fun. I'm rather proud of it. It was a little harder than I thought it would be to get the glaze to stay where I put it, so it ran around a bit, but it turned out looking neat anyway. It definitely takes a while to get a piece from start to finish - shaping can a take a while, depending on what you are making and if you are adding any texture details, and then it needs to dry. Once dry, it goes in for bisque firing, and then you can put a glaze on it. It is then fired a second time (and at a much higher temperature), and this actually turns the glaze and some of the minerals in the clay to glass. After the second firing, the bottom of the piece (that didn't get glazed) needs to be smoothed out, since the clay gets really rough. You can't put glaze all the way to the bototm egde of the piece because it would run down off the piece and onto the kiln, and when it cools = HUGE MESS.

So I glazed another piece today, and hopefully it will be out of the kiln soon (firing takes a couple days). I realized that I need to get working on things for this class- our final is to present 6 finished pieces (good ones... haha), and since it takes a little while to get it all done, I really should get moving on it. I haven't glazed my bird's nest yet - it got a crack in it that I need to fix, and it's going to take a large chunk of time to do that. So maybe this Saturday will be a ceramics day... :)