Just Potty

Today. I finally got back into the studio after a too long absence. The lovely weather conspired against me. It has been a beautiful fall here for the last two weeks or more, the temperatures were 12-16 degrees and usually sunny with very little breeze. Beautiful gardening weather in fact, and that was what I was concentrating on. The garlic is planted, the asparagus weeded and mulched. I even managed to re putty the windows in the greenhouse. All the leaves were mulched with the mower and piled onto the compost heap to rot, and the butternuts are in piles waiting for more room in the green bin. If I put those in the compost pile they germinate and I have dozens of trees to weed out in the spring.
Today the weather began to be more Novemberish and we made a fire for the first time in days. The new insulated back door and porch really help to keep the heat in and the draughts out, so lately there wasn't even a need for a fire in the evenings. As I type, I'm roasting at 25 degrees!
I woke up this morning knowing I really needed to get going on a pottery project that has been on the back burner for about 5 weeks. I had one day, two weeks ago when the weather was cold and damp that I started to make a plant pot for a friend. He requested it ages ago, to give to his wife for Christmas. At the time I thought, 'no problem', but after 8 months of no pottery, I'm a little rusty.
Because it it quite large, and I haven't thrown anything since March, I thought I would make a coil pot. (Plus I love making coil pots, they are fun and easy to clean up.) My first attempt two weeks ago, started out well, but at about the half way mark I realized it had become so wide that it wouldn't fit in my little kiln. Oops. This is a picture of it before it was smooshed. The plant sitting in it is for scale, it is a standard 8" wide plant pot.
Also, I felt the walls were a little thin for the size of pot I was making. I thought I was using a 1/2 inch hole to extrude the coils, so I found a 3/4 inch drill bit and made a new template. The second attempt with the larger coil made the walls too thick. That was when I realised the first hole was only a 3/8th inch, so I found a 1/2 inch drill bit and made yet another template. Truly, I think 5/8th would be best, but by this time I'm a little annoyed at myself and just want to get on with making the d@r* pot! I managed to get 3/4 of the work done on the next attempt, and then stopped for the day.
That was two weeks ago. Today I finished constructing the pot and decorated it by imprinting some leaves that I picked up while walking the dog. Some of the leaves were dried up after laying around on a shelf for so long. I soaked them in water and put them in the microwave to make them more pliable so they would stick better as I pressed them into the surface. The idea, is that the leaves will burn up in the kiln, but their vein imprint will remain in the clay. The imprint will hopefully catch some of the glaze and give the pot some texture.
I also made some extruded test tiles of the same clay body to use for glaze tests to see which colours look good on this clay. If all goes well, my friend will have his Christmas pressie in time. Fingers crossed.
Just for the fun of it, I also tried throwing today. It is not really like riding a bike, you do forget. I found I was making all the old mistakes I thought I had corrected, and I had to relearn all the techniques that I once knew before my attempts at cylinders started to take shape again.
If I keep at it, I may have something made for my own Christmas presents. Here's hoping the weather stays cold and damp!