Serving dishes

            Here are some serving dishes that came out of the kiln on Wednesday! I am very pleased with all of these. The first two will be available in my Etsy shop in a few days. The last one is already spoken for.
            First up is a shallow serving dish in red and white with dragons and swirls:

            I was a little worried that the red glaze would leave droplets on the white glaze, since in the last firing it kinda spattered all over the place. Not this time, though - perhaps the changes I made to the firing schedule magically solved the problem? In any case, I'm pleased that the white areas remained white. I noticed that where I accidentally brushed a bit of the red over the white on the rim, it made a lovely pale blush color. I may use this on other pots in the future intentionally for subtle effects.

            And this bowl has three dragons on it. I took close ups of all three. I like them very much! I think I may work with this red and white theme some more in the future. It seems like a good color combination for dragons and phoenixes. Maybe other magical critters, too... any ideas?

            This next piece is red stoneware with clear glaze just on the food surface.

            The clear glaze looks cloudy here because it has teensy bubbles in it. The bubbles interfere with the light passing through to the clay surface under the glaze. Over red stoneware, this makes the glaze look white. Over porcelain (like the previous serving dish), it adds some depth to the surface, but since the porcelain is white and the glaze is clear/white, it doesn't appear to change the color.

 

            This red stoneware is the Hawaiian Red I mentioned in this post. It's very much a rusty orange, and I do like the color. The things I don't like about this clay are that it feels like sandpaper to throw, and it comes from far away - this box of clay took a month on special order to arrive at my semi-local pottery supply. Although it is half the price of the porcelain I use!
            I think when I am close to the end of this box of red clay I will try a different, more local clay. I'd rather use clay that is nearer me anyway so that it doesn't have to use up gas all the way across the country to get here.
            And here is the last serving bowl for this post. As mentioned above, this bowl has been claimed already. The two above, however, will be available on Etsy. So if you like them, keep an eye out on my Etsy shop!

            This bowls is glazed only on the inside. The texture on the outside was created when I trimmed the bowl; the grog in the clay gets dragged across the surface by the trimming tool as I work. I like the effect in this case, but I'd rather have clay with less grog - it's abrasive to my hands, and wears down my tools quickly.

             I'm very happy with the glazing on this bowl! The dark brown glaze is actually the Mottled Spice from this post. What happened? It's much thinner here, and where this glaze is thin, it's this dark brown that reminds me of coffee beans or dark chocolate. Also when it's thin it doesn't run off the pot and get cemented to my kiln shelves!
            I've now tested the two extremes of this glaze - super thin and super thick - and there's a good bit of wiggle room in between. As I continue to use it I'll get a better idea of how it will look at different thickness of application. I think this glaze is very nice. I like it when it's this coffee bean color, and I like the appearance of texture it creates when it's thicker. It allows me to have one glaze that can be used many different ways. This is good, because I don't really want to keep too many glazes in my studio, but I do want to have a lot of variety of surface on my pots and sculptures. 
            Here is a close up of the inside. You can tell the glaze is thin because you can see the texture of the pot through it.