I still haven’t done my first ceramic firing. Some things weren’t dry enough today, and without them I don’t feel I have a full enough load. I don’t really like the three pinch pots I made yesterday, now that they’re dry, but they’ll still be good to put beads in or something later on. I also made some larger cylindrical beads, which look quite nice. I had tried to make some bead molds but discovered I made them wrong–apparently I have to coat the beads with vegetable oil to keep them from sticking to the clay as it dries around them. Oh well.

Today I made some tiles to use for testing. I used a method I really wouldn’t recommend–I was just trying it out. I took a wooden picture frame and pressed clay into it until it was tile-shaped, using the flat bottom of a glass to smush it in and a piece of plastic to scrap it flat.

Actually, the method itself wasn’t the problem–that worked quite well. The problem was that the frame had a bevel on the inside, the outside edge of the clay had to be trimmed. I also trimmed that rectangle into three smaller rectangles, since the frame was rather big–apparently, according to the internet, I should have waited until the clay was leather-hard to do this. They seem to have turned out okay thusfar, but it remains to be seen how badly they may warp or crack.

I also spent about 8 hours yesterday filling orders of decanted perfume, a side-hobby of mine, and getting Etsy orders ready to mail. I think I have something like 35 envelopes to mail in the next two days. Yikes.

beads, clay, kiln, shipping, tiles, tips This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 3:23 am and is filed under Pano-pol-blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.