Pillow Vases V: Sea Urchin

Techniques for applying the decoration can vary. When possible, I score and slip the vase's surface - this works quite well with the "Frosted" design because the decoration is always located around the opening and at the vase's "waist". (I use a large round cookie cutter to plot the line of decoration on the tiny vases with multiple openings.)

Since I have learned that scoring marks not covered by decorative elements can still be visible after glaze firing, I score and slip the underside of the decorative elements of the "Scrolls" and "Rosettes" designs instead. Due to the size and arrangement of the elements for the "Sea Urchin" designs, making sure the vase is plastic enough to take the decoration and then gently pressing it on after it has hardened somewhat seems to help prevent separation. There is no applied decoration for the "Lace" or "Plain" vases so the issue is moot for those designs. I then set the pieces to dry slowly before the final preparation for bisque firing.

Once I find a technique that works for me, I tend to push them as far as I can to see what else I can do. In terms of the slip-filled pastry bag, that was expressed in investigating as many different workable decorating tips as I could.

Not all of them work very well, but I did find that the plain round tips (of various sizes) and the ribbon tips are pretty useful. I use a medium to large round tip for these Sea Urchin vases, so called because the decoration resembles the surface of a sea urchin. I start off with a circle of "dots" of slip placed evenly around the opening, then another, larger, circle of dots, alternating between each of the dots in the first row, continuing to alternate down to the vase's "waist". (Vessels have "anatomy" which relates back to human physiology - with "necks", "shoulders", "waists" and "feet".)

Pillow Vases IV: Frosted

One of my favorite decorating tools in the studio is a pastry bag filled with slip with any one of the various decorating tips I've purchased over the years. I found my first "set" of decorating tools at K-Mart, when Martha Stewart still had a relationship with them - the kit I purchased (in a very nice lidded metal box) had her name on it. Since then, I've scoured cake decorating aisles at Michaels and JoAnne's for new and exciting effects. I find myself most often using star, round (of various sizes) and ribbon tips for my projects. The "Frosted" Pillow Vase designs are made using a "star" tip.

After assembling the Pillow Vase vessel form, it's often too dry to decorate right away. If that's the case, I can either re-hydrate it by draping with a damp rag and placing in a plastic bag or brush the surface with slip intermittently before adding the decoration. Once the piece is moist enough to successfully accept the decoration - moist but not so plastic that the clay will buckle at all with any pressure), I can apply whatever decoration I choose - spirals made from extruded clay, rosettes cut out from a thin slab of clay or slip decoration using a pastry bag and various tips.

For this "frosted" decoration, I use a pastry bag with a star tip. I score and then slip around the vase's opening and along its waist - the location of the join between the two parts of the vase. In the case of those tiny vases with a "pansy frog" (see two vases to the right side of the picture to the right), I mark a circle that encompasses all the openings and score and slip around it. (By slipping the scored area, the applied decoration does tend to conform to the piece more successfully.) I apply a circle of rosettes around the opening first, then around the waist, thus minimizing the risk of "messing up" the work I've already done. I'll either use my finger or a tool of some kind (doesn't really matter which), I clean the opening of any encroaching clay before setting it to dry. It's important with these pieces to make sure to sand the decorated area before bisque firing as the slip can dry into very sharp edges.

Pillow Vases III: Lace

My Lace Bowls are some of the most popular pieces in my oeuvre. Their evolution started with a piece of lace I picked up at Michael's and used as one of the textures in my Original Sunflower series. The texture was fairly highly relieved and had a rich, tapestried quality.

I liked the results so much, it became one of the textures I selected for my Fancy Sunflower series, for which I employed some of the more highly-relieved surfaces I had used for my Original Sunflowers - important because I was going to glaze the centers and the designs needed to handle two to three glaze coats.

At about the same time, I was exploring textures with some bowl forms; many of the glazes in my palette are reactive glazes that break to different colors over deeply-relieved textures - I had noticed this characteristic on the test tiles I had made and on the glazed sunflowers I was producing. I started playing around with the idea of lace-textured bowls, buttons and wall art - a product line that has become quite successful and continues to evolve; I'm now experimenting with larger platter-type centerpieces using vintage and contemporary lace.

Once I started working on the Pillow Vase concept, it seemed obvious to use the lace texture again, as it had been so successful in other genres. The challenge here was that, rather than using the lace for the inside of the bowls, I was using it for the outside. Whereas I had easily turned out bowl after bowl using the same piece of lace - rolling out the slab, rolling in the lace, forming the lace slab into the bowl and peeling the lace away, then starting on another piece, I had to invert the process so the lace side of the slab went into the bowl first.

After much trial and error, I've developed a reliable process for these pieces, forming the slab bowl into the mold and roughly trimming, then setting to dry until the lace-covered clay releases. I peel the lace away, place the (still-plastic) clay back in the mold and, gently yet firmly, form it into the mold, especially at the lip, trim and score. I don't cut any holes until after I've removed the pieces from the mold. I select the half for which the lace design's center most closely conforms to the center of the bowl form and use that as the orientation for the finished vase's opening.

The pieces are slipped and joined; the join looks like a natural part of the design, forming a resolved part of the lace motif.

Goth/Steampunk Pillow Vases

In developing a possible product line for the upcoming DetCon1, I thought it might be worthwhile to take some of my existing designs and revisit them with more of a Goth/Steampunk sensibility. For those of you who are unfamiliar with either of these aesthetics, "Goth" relates to a post-punk era subculture which draws upon influences from 19th-century Gothic literature (think Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, for example) and horror films, often characterized in popular culture through fashions reflecting Victorian styles, most often with dark clothing, make-up and hair styles. "Steampunk" is a sub-genre of science fiction typified by steam-powered machinery, particularly in a context inspired by early industrialized Western culture - especially the 19th century. Like the Goth aesthetic, Steampunk is inspired by the works of Mary Shelley, as well as those of Jules Vern and H.G. Wells.

Back in September, when my friend Sharon (who frequents these events and puts a great deal of effort into creating unique costumes for them) first suggested that this might be a new market for my work, I took some of the Pillow Vases I had already bisque-fired and tried the four metallic glazes in my repertoire. Metallic Black is a glaze recipe I was given by my first pottery teacher, Gene Pluhar. The other three glazes - Saturation Metallic, Saturation Gold and Palladium - are all from Amaco's Potter's Choice Series. With the exception of the Palladium glaze, all are food safe. For this reason, I never use the Palladium on any piece that might conceivably be used for food or beverage for any species - not just humans. I felt the Pillow Vases were a safe bet, though; I can't imagine someone deciding to use them for food service - in fact, I'm not sure they could!

I glazed up at least one of each style - Rosette, Lace, Frosted, Scrolls and Sea Urchin - in sizes ranging from Tiny to Medium. (I wasn't willing to take a risk with a Large Pillow Vase, as those are sufficiently demanding of materials and my effort that I didn't feel it necessary.) I got together with my best friend, Catherine, to celebrate her birthday with a nice meal out and brought the pieces with me for Show & Tell afterwards; I needed some feedback and Catherine has always been willing and able to provide me with useful insights regarding my work. Generally, she was favorable in her critique; she really liked how the Saturation Metallic and Saturation Gold glazes looked on the pieces, especially the Saturation Gold on the Sea Urchin Pillow Vase.

(The example I had for that was a Small Vase. She liked it so much, she showed me how she would display such a piece in her living room, making the observation that it would have to be much larger to work in that space; I later made her, especially, a Large Sea Urchin Pillow Vase in Saturation Gold and left it for her one time when I stopped by to surprise her.)

Catherine was less taken with the Metallic Black and Palladium glazes, although she did not reject them entirely, merely observing that they did not seem to work as well for the particular designs I was showing her as the Saturation Metallic and Saturation Gold examples. She also suggested that I might investigate doing some plain Pillow Vases - with no decoration at all; she felt those might show of the glazes to best advantage.

I decided to do a series of 24 Tiny Pillow Vases: four of each of the five existing designs plus four plain ones; I also varied the openings - the single small opening, or Ikebana vase; the larger single opening that could take a small pin frog; and the "built in" frog with an array of 17 openings for flower-arranging novices. (Being the obsessive-compulsive person that I am, I made sure that there would be an equal distribution of the three openings across the 24 vases and amongst the 6 designs and four glazes.)

I was very happy with the results, especially with the Saturation Metallic and Saturation Gold glazes. The pieces
glazed with Saturation Metallic looked particularly metallic, especially the plain Pillow Vase (see below, the vase farthest left). The experiment seems to confirm our initial determinations, that the Saturation Metallic and Saturation Gold glazes are both safe bets, with the other two glazes less successful but still acceptable. I'm looking for some additional glazes to try - I've been working with Coyote's Gun Metal Green and have some of their Bronze Temmoku to try. So, it will soon be time to glaze up some more pieces and see how they turn out.

As for the photo shoot, Don and I felt that we needed a different background for these pieces, rather than the wood slice we've used so successfully in the past. We concurred that something more "industrial" would be more appropriate. I found a piece of expanded metal in my store room, one side of which still had some black paint from a previous use. It turned out to be the perfect background for the Goth/Steampunk Pillow Vases and Lace Bowls, as well as for the masks I had done almost 20 years ago.