Ceramics: The Jar

                                     This is one of the pieces I made in my ceramics class.

 It is a little jar that i made on the wheel. It is my favorite piece because its a huge improvement on pieces that i have made in ceramics from the past two summers. I am a very small person with very small hands. My eight year old cousin has bigger hands than I do. Throwing pots on the wheel is very difficult because I need to have control of every part of the pot at all times or else the walls may get too thin, the base may get to thin or the whole thing can just collapse. I have had that happen before its not exactly fun. Sometimes its not that easy to have control of everything. Many pieces i make on the wheel come out  very small. I have another piece that I will post soon that collapsed on me but looked kinda cool so I kept it and fired it. Carving the lip and the foot of the jar scared me so much because it looked so good and I was so scared to have it just mess up because of the carving. My instructor really calmed me down and helped me carve out a pretty good lip. She then explained to me that the lip of the jar is the bottom part or the base and the foot of the jar is the opening at the top. I found that pretty cool. The first pot I made this session was terrible the lip was all over the place. I was very proud of myself to see this one come out so nice! Since I was so scared of the jar collapsing the walls on it are a little bit thick. Which after firing upset me because we had three options of glazing. One was raku the next was regular acrylic glaze and the last option was pit firing. I have many pieces with raku, acrylic and pit firing. I really wanted this jar to be rakued with the crackel glaze. This is the crackle glaze with raku firing that i found off google. I find it really cool and i thought it would look so nice on my jar. The problem was that the walls were too thick and if I had put it in the raku firing kiln it would have exploded. Also it wasn't Raku clay so that would have also made it explode if I had chosen to put it in the Raku kiln. I finally decided to paint it with brown acrylic and have it fired in the regular kiln. It didn't turn out terrible and I was satisfied with it. It looks like a little jar you would find in an antique store. I love it!


example of Raku crackle glaze. This is probably how my jar would have looked like if I had made the walls thinner.