Mud

You know that feeling where you just have a crazy little buzz and everything feels a bit too hectic. That's when I start gnawing nails, or culling or rearranging rooms . Sometimes it an avoidance strategy to avoid an unpleasant task (e.g. laundry) or thinking about something of a looming nature (e.g. surgery) . It keeps me awake some nights and wakes me from sleep on others. Yesterday it crept into my happy place at work...

so I played with mud.

There is a great deal to be said for the joy of mud which is probably why children are so drawn to it. I've had mine swimming it from when they were little but I doubt they'd deign to undertake such a thing nowadays- except if there's a ball involved to disguise the primal joy of mud wallowing. 

So I got some mud- clean, pretty, white porcelain  mud  that had gone hard in the bottom of a bucket.

It needed a swish around with some water and a big potato masher type of thing.

There was a ridiculous amount of shredded paper packed around some ink that came the other day. I knew it would come in handy.  A generous nest of it was immersed and squished around in the mud. (Yes, of course, it was clay slip but for therapeutic reasons I prefer to call it mud today.)

The whole gooey mess was quickly slopped into a big bowl shaped mould and gently coaxed into a convex shape.

Then, after a deep and satisfying sigh, I left it to dry. It was worth doing just to see the faces of the boys walking past. A lot of them do NOT like getting dirty.

I'll fire it when it dries and see if it becomes something or whether it was just a cathartic bit of fun.

The paper should all burn out leaving the exoskeleton of the clay. A bit of alchemy, a dash of mystery. Good times!

I Slipped!

 Last week I got a bit slippy with it. Needing a receptacle for the huge amounts of eggs we seem to have now the baking has stopped at home, I had a little brainwave. If I doused an egg carton with white runny clay (slip) would it fire into a ceramic egg carton?

The obvious thing to do was to get a carton from the boarders dining room and paint some clay on. I should have stuck with that but it got tedious waiting for it to dry between coats so...

 it seemed easier to just pour slip all over the carton- one side only in case you want to do this. I smoothed it out a bit with a soft brush to try and get it a bit even.



 Placing it on a piece of cardboard made it easier to move to the kiln without cracking it.

 Then the experimental knitting sculptures caught my eye. One was chopped up and dipped in slip.
Yes, it is messy.
Yes, it is deliciously so.
Note more skeleton drawings going on there too.
Well there is a drought on, as some of the rural boarders reminded us.

 The whole blobby mass was spread ever so daintily on another slab of cardboard and fired in the kiln to a bisque temperature of about 1000 degrees in case you decide to have a go. Don't you love just getting a bit mucky and trying something with no idea of the outcome?

 I'll let you know how it all turns out. There could be delicate sculptural loveliness or just a big mess of burnt fibres, card and broken ceramics. Stay tuned slip groupies!

P.S. Did I mention that I am really enjoying this job? Yes? One or fifty times?