Tree Luminary and Process

Miracles never cease, I made something I said I was going to make instead of going off on another tangent. Here's a tree luminary complete with a star topper. Since I have star cutouts I didn't need to leave the top open for firing in the kiln.

I construct these pieces in a unique way. First I start at the bottom which eventually becomes the middle of the tree. As I get progressively taller and wider the clay being very moist has a tendency to be too soft to stand without slumping. Michele would be proud of me I used my hair dryer on the piece this time. It helped. Thanks Michele.

Here's what the inside of the piece looks like as I am constructing it. You can see all the layers overlapping one another.

Here I've flipped the piece over and started cutting out the stars to make the luminary. I double up the bottom to be sure it's sturdy enough to hold all the weight of the piece.This piece is about 17 inches tall so there is a lot of wet flexible clay which needs to firm up before it's stable enough to hold more clay weight..

Here I'm mixing up some green stained slip. The green I had was darker than I wanted so I added more slip to thin out the color. Most times I don't measure these stain ingredients, I go by eye for the color. Since I'm making one of a kind pieces the color doesn't have to match. If I needed to make pieces to match I could measure by volume and be assured of similar results.

Here's the luminary tree after I've hand brushed the green slip around the piece. With the cutout stars I couldn't pour the slip over the top and I didn't want green on the inside of the stars to I had to be careful applying the green slip.

For the bands of snow I thought the white stoneware slip wouldn't be white enough. I remembered I had some white extender stain so I mixed up a small batch. I was going to apply the white stained slip with wide mouthed applicator but the slip was too thick. I thinned it out and it was too thin.  So I hand brushed it around the piece. I wanted the white slip to be thick like drifts of snow. I may go back tomorrow and apply more slip but maybe not. I'm afraid if I apply too many layers it may not bond to the previous layer and flake off. I may leave well enough alone. Still in the back of my mind I'm wondering how to make a much thicker slip? Some slip with some volume that's stays put on this vertical surface? What do you think?

Now the piece is drying and I'll make a plate for underneath so a candle can be placed inside. I can't wait to see how this one looks with the lights turned off. I wish I could work faster on these, I think a grouping of these luminary trees would be wonderful in graduated sizes. Of course if I wasn't making it in layers it would be quicker, but then it wouldn't be as detailed as this one. This post is part of Artists in Blogland show and tell Saturday. Thanks for reading and for all your comments.

Contrasting Slip

I ran out of white clay so I decided to try what I had in mind with speckled tan clay. I wanted to make a tower using a contrasting color of slip to join the strips together, so for this tower the clay is tan and the slip is Navajo red.

After I constructed the piece I took a tooth brush and brushed the still wet slip which had oozed out of the seams around and around the piece horizontally. After the slip dries I'll rig up a mini piece of sand paper attached to a flat object to carefully sand back some of the red clay slip, sanding in the same direction as the strips (horizontal). We'll see if the seams hold and the slip adheres.

For some reason I'm drawn to circles right now and the top portion of this tower evolved on it's own. This piece makes me think of peering into the eyes of the soul. It's about 15 inches tall by 3 inches wide.

I snapped a shot of the female gopher tortoise going into her burrow. Every day this week we've had at least an inch of rain. Most of my vegetables have bitten the dust so I weeded my block bins today. Interspersed with the veges I have herbs planted, like rosemary, lavender, and thyme among others. The herbs are all doing fine. This post is part of the Mud Colony what's happening in the studio; click on over to see what others are up to. Thanks for reading and for all your encouragement.