Ya gotta have friends ....

Weeks and weeks and weeks of careful drying.

It's a song! I can hear Bette Midler singing it in my head as soon as I think those words.  Once, walking my sons to school, we were talking about juggling 'friends', I was saying 'I have lots of friends', then muttered 'more than I can keep up with'.  A woman passing us by smiled and said 'Lucky you!'  It is true I have stacks of pals and they are all lovely!  One is advising me with regard to getting my website up and running.  Hil has a career's worth of marketing wisdom under her belt but especially - web related.  She spotted that I rarely discuss my own work here. It's true, but I have been busy making and storing stuff as it takes so long to dry out slowly (and struggling with a virus but no whining here).  I mean, would you like to be watching clay dry here?  It is slower than paint!  Hence I blog about others.  I am good at sharing info and documenting my own work and trials but now, I resolve to be a bit more organised with my blogging, maybe introduce some more structure to it and to try to

a) blog more often

b) account for my own activity and

c) maybe talk a little more about the methods and materials I have tried and favour for PRINT on CLAY.  

SOME OF MY UNDERGLAZE TESTS

Just now, I am knee deep in Diana Fayt's the Clayer Surfacing e-Course and honestly - if you want to know what I am learning there, then I will be a meany and say, sign up for it yourself next time it is offered, you will not be disappointed.  I will post images of the work that develops from the e-course though, but, as always in my entire educational career, I am behind with my work.

I have been teaching Sgraffito and Paper Resist techniques in a high school lately, and learning more of Sgraffito and Mishima (colour inlay) via Diana.  I have made some platters ready to do the Mashima - but they were too soft to work on yesterday, so I got some test tiles sorted using the new underglaze colours I bought.  I learnt to be a bit of a neat freak about test tiles from Janet deBoos, her terra sig tests were exemplary.  Test, test and test some more is the potter's motto.  Here, three depths of brushstrokes of underglazes to be tested with and without glaze, and on two clays and temperature ranges.