Yesterday was a very busy day helping out Connie in her studio, but also a very rewarding one! After some weeks of firing all our clay creations in her kiln, my soap-dishes were complete, the earrings just needed backs putting on, and the foxes were ready for an orange glaze ready to be fired again.
If you’ve been following my pottery updates, you’ll know I’ve been helping Connie with these soap-dishes for a few weeks now. The first step was moulding the clay Connie rolled out for me into the dish shape, using a block to indent the dip in the middle and upturn the corners. The next step was to pipe little dots of slip on some of them, to create a pretty bumpy pattern (look at the photos to see what I mean!), and for the final step, last week I glazed them different colours. Connie then fired them in her kiln and this week, they were on the shelves ready for sale! I was so pleased with the way they came out, although there were a few mistakes where the glaze had run onto the underneath and the painting was a little uneven. On the whole though, if Connie is pleased with them, I am too!
I had two main jobs yesterday: putting backs on the earrings, writing the prices on cards and putting them on said cards; and glazing the foxes orange and their eyes with a clear glaze to make them shiny once fired. I was very happy with the way the earrings turned out – the orange ones are so pretty! As you can see, the colours have become a lot more pigmented during the firing process.
Firstly I paired them up into similar-patterned ones like this:
Then I used the world’s stickiest glue to attach the posts on the back of the earrings, like this:
And lastly, I wrote out the price on the tags and secured the earrings on with the back clip things.
For the foxes, they each needed three coats of orange glaze on the backs, fronts and edges, and two coats of clear glaze on their eyes. We experimented a little and decided to use two different shades of orange on the foxes – one is called ‘pumpkin’ so it’s more mellow, and the other is ‘lava’, which as you can imagine is more bright and dramatic. Again, they will come out much more pigmented after they’ve been fired.
a pre-glazed foxy 
a post-glazed foxy!
While I’ve been working on Christmas decorations and soap-dishes, Connie has been working on – among many other things – jewellery, and I asked her if she could make me a pair of really lovely earrings I had seen on the shelf while she was at it. She very kindly did so and I now have a new favourite pair of earrings – these sweet little brown hedgehogs!!
And believe me, until you’ve worked at a pottery studio, you will never understand the pride of having things you’ve made go up on shelves, ready to be sold for real life money to real life customers 😅