I ended up staying and waiting the storm out, it was pretty damn scary. We were out of electricity for about 2 weeks where I live, two downed trees, a lot of branches, and absolutely no structure damage. Thankfully!
Well, my ceramic professor got hit hard, with about 5 feet of flood water in his house. I helped him move some stuff out to the street, cleaning the floors up, etc. He had plenty of his ceramic pieces sitting around the house on different places, well when he came home they had all floated around and were sitting down in weird places, all over the livingroom, etc. How weird?? It was nice though that he really didn't have any damaged pieces, but all his furniture, his paintings, literature, all that was destroyed though.
Since then, school picked back up and I have been busy in class. I did a run of 12 steins, with extruded handles. There was a glaze firing that came out and I was majorly disappointed with it. The forms were bad, the glazes were bad, the handles were horrible. So I did a run of cylinders that I made into steins. I found out a little trick to helping with attaching handles- I was taught when pulling a handle to attach it perpendicular to the wall form, like such | |== but I found out, if you attach the handle at about a 60 degree angle, the arch of the handle naturally appears, like such | |/.
I got picked on a little for extruding handles from one of my professors, so I've been working on pulling thinner handles. It's working so far, I'm finally getting it down. I don't have any pictures yet, but I feel alot more comfortable pulling handles now. To me, the biggest problem was attaching them to the top of the form.
A big thing happened in my life, I got my first wheel. It is a Creative Industries Clay Boss. It is a 1/2 hp wheel with a centering capacity of 100lbs. It took 5 days for it to ship to me, and I am really happy with it so far. The wheel head is a hard plastic/resin which i'm not use to but I plan on using bats mostly anyway. I had a pretty bad day on Thursday, when the wheel arrived, but once I set it up and got going, my worries left.
I went out this morning and trimmed the bottoms, without a giffin grips. Remember Simon Leach, the artist I mentioned a few posts back? Before I goto bed, I try and watch a video or two of his, but it always ends up turning into five or six videos. But anyway, Simon goes over a way of trimming using just the wheel head and a bit of water. The idea is to create a suction between the pot and the wheel. It doesn't work on pieces with altered rims of course, unless they are smooth and even. But, I successfully trimmed the items I threw the other night, and I am rather proud of one of the bowls. I had two cups I made also, which I made thumb marks for a more comfortable handling.
Hopefully I'll get to update more. I hope to put some more videos up soon, I'll try and find some more besides Simon. ;)
