A pause

During June I wrote as many blog posts as I had done during the rest of the year... she'll never keep it up, I hear you say!  Well, you're right, I am having a bit of a break while I do family and end-of-term-for-the-boys type stuff.  I should be back at the end of the week.

In the meantime, in lieu of hold music, I will leave you with some pics that are buried deep in my Flickr account - you may have seen them before, I hope you like them!

These are flowers I made from old paperback books as part of my foundation course last year.  Like many of the best ideas, they came into being when I was fiddling with the scraps left over from working on an entirely different idea, and turned out to be so much better than anything I had planned!

I do have 'issues' with cutting up books, but the sunflowers were charity shop thrillers with crucial pages missing (how annoying - worse than a jigsaw with a piece missing!) and the others were some of the childrens books given away free with boxes of cereal a few years ago.  With 2 growing boys in our house we soon ended up with many more copies of each available book than any family could possibly need and our local charity shops had a glut of them too!

I have come to the end...

... of my one year foundation diploma in art and design. Even though I am completely exhausted after the frantic trying-to-get-everything-done of the last few days I am sad to have finished it - it was a great experience. Most of the time!

For my final project I have been experimenting with making 'paper' from vegetables. This is surprisingly easy when you are making flat sheets of paper, but much more difficult if you try to mould them into other shapes - so what did I decide to do?

I will write about the process, but I hope you will forgive me if I put that off for another time and just show you some pictures of my little corner of our exhibition - finished with 15 minutes to spare!

courgette - carrot - red cabbage

If anyone will be in Birkenhead at the end of June and would like to visit the exhibition, let me know and I will send you details.

Working Hard

I seem to have slipped a bit with the blog - I have been working hard at my college final project.  It is coming along very slowly but I can give you a sneak preview of some of the samples...

'Paper' made from red cabbage, boiled and  pressed

Strips of leek, boiled and pressed

Strips of courgette with grated carrot, boiled and pressed

All of these vegetables have dried into very nice 'paper' and it is quite easy to do this flat - it is less easy to coax them into the lovely shapes of my plaster moulds but I am working on it!

Smoke Firing Ceramics - part 2

I just thought I'd show you how the best pieces from this batch turned out.  I have finished them with some wax polish and the surfaces are now very pleasingly like sea polished pebbles.

I think we are definitely going to be burning things again this weekend!

Smoke Firing Ceramics

I have a collection of pieces of biscuit fired ceramic from college which have been waiting for me to do ‘something’ with them. They are nothing fancy, just a few experimental bits and pieces made when I was getting used to what I could do with the clay – the pace of the foundation course has been such that there was really no time to become expert in any new skills.

Anyway, after discussions with my college tutor I decided to have a go at smoke firing them – which is basically burying them in something that burns and setting fire to it!

There are potters who do the most amazing things with smoke firing

Smoke fired vessel by Sally Bradley.

Smoke fired vessel by Sian van Driel.

The monochrome colouring is so subtle and, I think, quite beautiful.

Personally, I was going to be happy if I managed to get any colour at all on my pieces, and at least some of them came out still in one piece!

For my ‘kiln’ I used one of those incinerators which look like an old-fashioned dustbin. I put a layer of newspaper in the bottom with a layer of sawdust on top. Then I put a few of my ceramic pieces in, packed around with more sawdust. One of the pieces I wrapped in newspaper with a handful of grass – just to see what happened. And I set fire to it!

I was surprised how much flame and smoke there was – next time I will do it at the bottom of the garden! And I may dampen the sawdust and try to include some slower burning material to try and slow the burn down. So, when it had finished burning I was left with a pile of ash and, amazingly, still whole pieces of ceramic!  Really I should have left it alone overnight but I was so impatient to see the results – fortunately nothing cracked when I took them out.  (The ash is hopefully going to keep the slugs away from our runner beans - apparently they don't like ash?)

So this is what I got – please excuse the dodgy photographs on the concrete – the pieces were still too hot to move! You can see markings where the grass stopped the colouration on the piece on the left – and one of the smaller pieces took the colour only on half of it, which I like very much.

 
They are actually much more coloured than I expected but all in all I am pretty pleased with them for my first attempt.  I will be coating them with a wax polish (when they have cooled down) to protect the surface and give them a subtle sheen - it will be interesting to see how much, if any, of the colour comes off then.  And I shall try again, wrapping some pieces so they are only partly coloured and burning different stuff - I have heard banana skins are interesting...  Watch this space!

Making Plaster Moulds

This week at college I have been making plaster moulds. For my final project I am hoping to make some lightweight translucent hanging forms (more of those later) and a necessary step in the process has been to make some rather heavyweight moulds.

I started by making the forms I wanted out of clay, using a wooden board as a base. The forms were quite large so to cut down on the amount of clay needed I used some off cuts of wood in the centre and moulded the clay over them. Actually, I would have liked to go larger but I almost couldn’t lift a couple of them as it was so I thought I had better stop! I covered the clay loosely and left it overnight to dry out a bit, until the surface was firm but still workable. It is really important at this stage to get the surface of the clay as smooth as possible as the plaster will pick up every little dent, bump and imperfection.

The next step is to build a retaining wall around the clay form about an inch to an inch-and-a-half out from the form. This stops the plaster from going everywhere but also gives you something to judge the thickness of the plaster by when you are pouring. As you can see, the retaining wall does not need to be as tall as the form.

I am not going to go into the quantities for mixing plaster as I am really not an expert – I am sure you can find more reliable info elsewhere! I used fine casting plaster for my moulds. It takes quite a bit of mixing to get to the right consistency - Greek yoghurt (not the set stuff!) is probably a good description. It is important that the plaster is not too thin or it will overwhelm the retaining walls. But you do have to act quickly at this stage as it thickens up really quickly – with my first mould the plaster was a little too thick and I ended up with a couple of air bubbles on the lip of the mould where the plaster hadn’t flowed. This bit is down to experience – I got better at it!

So, your plaster is like Greek yoghurt. Pour the plaster over the clay form, making sure it is all covered. If you do not have enough plaster you can add another layer to thicken the mould up, but the first layer must cover the whole form. You can pat it down and spread it out as necessary; it thickens and sets quite quickly. Remove the retaining wall and use a scraper to take off any rough edges or unnecessary thickness – and leave to dry. The plaster does get surprisingly warm while it is setting!

Once the plaster has cooled down and dried out a bit you can remove the clay. Turn the mould over – mine were so heavy I had to get someone to help with one of them!

Lever out the wood and if the clay is quite thick, gouge some of it out from the centre, keeping well away from the plaster. Then peel the clay back from the plaster – I found pushing it with my thumbs worked well. Once I had pulled away a few bits of clay from the edges the rest came out in one piece – although with each one it seemed like it was never going to move – until it did! I might in future wear gloves for this part – I tried hard to be gentle but I did catch the plaster with my fingernails in a couple of places.

So I am now the proud owner of 4 rather large plaster moulds with lots of possibilities…