Today we held our breath as we came in to the studio and asked Kathy how the firing of our two pieces had gone. She shook her head and frowned. “I’m afraid we didn’t have a very successful firing.” Uh oh. Visions of shards of pottery flashed through my head. “Let me show you. I can’t remember which pieces were yours.” Monica and I saw our bowls on the table—mostly intact. Whew! Mine had two pieces broken out of it on opposite sides and Monica’s did too. Kathy’s bowl, on the other hand, was in bits and pieces and unsalvageable. Too bad! We sorted through the shards looking for our missing pieces and found most of them.

One of the “holes” I decided to leave because it looked pretty artistic and kind of like a seashell which is where I was kind of going with the bowl: an earthy beach-y look. The other side I glued three pieces back in which still left three spaces where other pieces had broken off, but it looked three-dimensional and not too bad so I went with it. Here you can see the “artistic” hole.

And here is a different view of the bowl.

And who could forget my apple?

Today I managed to get two coats of glaze on the bowl, both inside and out but I still have to apply a third coat which I didn’t have time to do. Too bad, otherwise it could have been fired this week. Now I will have to wait one more week to see results!

I glazed the apple and used three different shades of red applied rather randomly. I have no idea how it’s going to come out but I’ll find out next week! I’m not too confident it will look good!

Here is the bowl after glazing. Keep in mind that this will not be the final color. The outside glaze is not food friendly and has lots of sandy bits in it that will explode and melt on firing. Since I don’t have a clue what I am going to do with it afterwards, I kept it food friendly just in case and used a different glaze inside. In the first photo you can see the side where I glued three pieces back in. You can see two of the three holes I left near the bottom. See them?

We ran out of time so I didn’t get to work on my other project at all, so next week I’ll finish it up so it can be fired along with the hand-built bowl once the other coats of glaze go on. I can’t wait to see what I get!