Some pottery.

I've been working on forms that are vaguely bud-vase shaped, but have a chunk cut out from them. There are a lot of technical challenges in the shape, you want the pot to be leather hard to trim efficiently, but leather soft to open the pot up, so either you have to rewet the pot after trimming or maybe trim it wetter than you want (hello chattering) or just throw the part you will be cutting open thin enough that you don't need to trim that part. Fiddly.

Plus, you end up with a glazing problem. Even if you pour or paint glaze, it is hard to glaze the interior and exterior differently, and you want the exterior and interior to have different treatments; the darker interior really pops with the lighter exterior. As you can see above, the dark interior also may run out the cut itself, which looks a little cool if I'm being honest, but it causes other problems - this one sort of stuck to the kiln shelf the running was so bad. That's Temoku for you- it runs like nobody's business.

In the background, you can see some other stuff I'd thrown and glazed recently. I’m trying to learn to work porcelain; it feels like this will make me a better potter. Porcelain is a lot more responsive to my hands- I can move it around just pushing a little bit, which means I need to be more precise in my throwing motions. It also dries out on the wheel pretty quickly, meaning you can throw it somewhat thin if you are careful, as the lower parts can be dried to support the upper. On the other hand, it can be super sticky if you don’t have the right level of wetness, so if you encounter a sticky patch you’ll pull the whole thing out of true. Plus, you know, if you’re not precise and thoughtful you’ll just moosh the whole thing up. B-mix is definitely a lot easier to throw small vases on, and speckled buff is a lot more forgiving for larger pieces (probably due to the grog content), but porcelain just is fun.

This guy was speckled buff, and then I put quite a bit of slip on it, trying out my slip trailer. A line of thick slip in a semicircle, which I then brushed down on the concave side. It added a lot of texture to the piece, which kind of looks like an artichoke.