Glazing and Snow

Finally I find some time to write about this week's pottery class. I spent it glazing my first bowl but I completely messed it up. My intention was to glaze the rings in white and blue alternately and so I did, but I did it very, very badly. I've never done this before so I wasn't prepared how tricky this stuff behaves. As long as the glaze is on the brush it is wet like paint but as soon as it touches the surface of the fired vessel all the moisture immediately sinks in and leaves a dusty, chalky coating and a dry brush. It was very hard or even impossible for me to apply the glaze on the seams where the rings touch each other. Whenever I tried it I ended up putting more and more glaze to the parts the brush touches before it reaches the grooves. It looked all clumpy and crumbly and stupid and it was driving me crazy! I was told the glaze will surely run to those parts when it melts in the kiln, but of course it didn't!


The glaze firing was finished on Thursday, so I went to the pottery and picked up my bowl. I decided before to like it whatever ugly it may look like and indeed it looked exactly as awful as I expected. I won't spare me the embarrasment and will show you a picture soon. I rather should have trusted my intuition and better washed off the glaze before firing and dipped it completely into just one colour of glaze to leave no parts unglazed. I just hope my other bowl will look better.


Despite the disappointment with my bowl Thursday morning was one of the loveliest this winter, because there was sun and there was snow. Yes, real snow! For a few hours only, but I walked on beautiful cool crunching snow after a completely snowless winter! What a lark!


I also walked to the river and took pictures of some of the nutrias living there. Legend says these are descendants of the ones someone abandoned, who kept them as pets many years ago. The grown ones are so tame you could touch them.