Jenyfer Matthews

I started taking pottery classes with another tennis mom a little more than a year ago (with time off for summer and other assorted holidays) in exchange for a couple of quilts. I glazed the items that I’d produced thus far and she fired them while I was away in the US.

You know what they say about the best laid plans. I am not very experienced in making pottery, but I do know that try as you might, things don’t always come out as you might expect them to. There might be an air bubble in the clay that causes a pot to crack in the kiln or the glazes might mix in unexpected ways or the kiln might heat unevenly. There are also times when something really wonderful happens that you might like to reproduce and you’ll never know just how repeat it.

I picked up my things this week and it was a mixed bag. Some things were as I thought they would be…and some thing were not.

(click image to enlarge)

This was one of the first items I did (shows, doesn’t it??) A pinch pot (made by pinching the clay) was supposed to be glossy green on top, black underneath. Hmmm… Good thing I wasn’t terribly concerned with how this one came out!

It’s prettier underneath – where the glaze stuck, that is!

I made this little pot on the wheel and when it got a bit wonky at the top after we transferred it to the table to dry, I whacked the sides to square it up. The glaze is a dull pewter (which shows fingerprints terribly!) and the inside was glazed black. It looks better inside than out!

I did this jug on the wheel too. Again, a bit wonky on top so rather than cut it off, I formed it into a lip and added a handle. Voila. More dull pewter with black inside. Again, prettier inside than out!

I made this mask based on a picture I took of a ceramic mask my friend has. I don’t mind the color of this one, but a crack developed across the front (near what would be her hairline) and the glaze blistered on her nose. However, I kind of like this one because it looks like something I might have excavated myself.

This is a slab bowl – pretty quick and easy to construct. Just roll out a piece of clay, cut it to shape, drape it over another object and let it dry.

I had what I thought was a great idea – I crushed up a green wine bottle and sprinkled it on a couple of pieces, hoping to get a high gloss glass coating. As you see, once again the green glaze failed, the black underneath vanished, and I have a bowl that looks as if it has a blob of green wax stuck to it.

It looks much better from the side!

A big lesson I took away from this experience is to always do a test tile when working with unfamiliar glazes / materials. However, since this wasn’t my kiln it wasn’t really up to me.

This lizard is hand built and I futzed around with it for weeks to get it right. So can you imagine my disappointment that the glass didn’t melt properly? I may try to “fix” this one with some ceramic paints that I can bake on in my own oven.

This is by far my favorite pot of the bunch and is the only one that pretty much came out as I planned it to. This one is also hand built, a coil pot. I had intended to mount a small antler or a piece of drift wood in the hole in the lid. The antler I have is the right size, but doesn’t the mount pieces don’t quite fit flush and the drift wood I have is a wee bit too small. I’ll be back in the land of antlers and driftwood soon enough so either I guess I’ll wait and see what I find.

So there it is, my first and last pottery exhibition. I won’t let it put me off pottery forever, but I’ll probably stick to quilting and writing for a while…

So another interest of mine is in making pottery. I first took pottery lessons about 12 years ago and fell in love with the process. Unfortunately, it’s not such an easy hobby to take-along and so I haven’t been able work with clay since we moved abroad – until last spring when I discovered that one of the other tennis moms not only had her own equipment but also offered lessons.

So here I am, months later, getting ready to glaze my first crop of pots, and I had the great idea to add a bit of texture and shine by using bits of broken glass – specifically, the green glass of a Cockburn’s port bottle. It is a good idea and I do believe that the end result will look fabulous. The problem? Actually breaking the glass.

Because it’s not enough to just break the bottle – most of it has to be reduced to powder. I did a google search to figure out how best to accomplish this and found one site that suggested that heating glass to red hot and then plunging it in cold water would do the trick – the glass would shatter cleanly and then it was just a matter of pounding it to dust with a mortar and pestle. Easy peasy.

Forgive me, but I have my reservations. I am fully aware of how easily some glass will break when it is exposed to rapid changes in temperature, having once had a glass pitcher explode all over my kitchen while I was in the process of making iced tea. I am, however, somewhat reluctant to repeat such an experiment without safety glasses and perhaps a lead apron. Also, I think I would prefer to use non-cooking pots and instruments for the grinding process to minimize any food contamination and subsequent deaths in the pursuit of my artistic vision.

I haven’t totally formulated my plan but I’m thinking pretty low tech, perhaps involving multiple layers of plastic bags and a hammer. We’ll see what we get (besides multiple lacerations).