For the past eight months or so I've been making these faceted bowls, cutting the coned clay and then opening up the cone into a bowl. The facets are torqued as I my hand pushes open the clay cone from the inside, the rims go wonky sometimes because of the uneven facets, sometimes the rims break and have to be patched. Ordinarily I wouldn't patch a standard bowl, but these faceted pieces are so misshapen that a patch just looks like one more accidental deformation.
And the bowls take the Shino glazes - and some others - very well. I often overlap two or three of my Shinos on them. And lately I've been adding pours of rutile, copper red, Temmoku, Nuka, even (gasp!) cobalt blue. Makes for lively bowls.
I've sold some of these over the past year, but the test will come in the next few months, as the customer base expands with the arrival of summer visitors to Cape Cod. We'll see.
Here are a few of the bowls from last week's firing. Top to bottom: Malcolm's orange trap Shino with ash celadon overlap; Kim's Genuine Rutile; rutile with Erin's Red; Orange Shino with cobalt, copper red and rutile pours; Orange Shino with cobalt, copper red and ash pours; crackled Orange Shino with rutile pour.

New pots from the kiln

I fired a load of pots Tuesday, opened the kiln Wednesday morning. Lots of simple bowls for the Cape Cod Potters' Soup Bowls for Hunger event in April, a small batch of handled chowder bowls, a dozen or thereabouts teabowls, some vases and odds and ends. Sarah Caruso put ten cups in the firing, using my glazes and her clay body. First time she's fired to cone 10 in years, she says. I think she was intrigued by some of the results. And there was a single tiny vase by Kim Medeiros, just so I could say she was part of the firing. Her pots have brought good luck the past couple of months.
I had unexpected results from the rutile glaze that I tried for the first time. It's Kim's recipe; she gets a milky blue/white on her pots, a color I thought I would try out. But for some reason the glaze fired to a deep purple for me, only showing that blue/white when it was poured over or otherwise overlapped another glaze. Too much reduction? A different grade of rutile? I don't know.
I did like it splashed over my usual Shinos. It supplied a bit of color where the Shinos tend toward black-and-white or a caramel brown or tan.
Anyway, more studying to be done, I guess. And I think I'm going to fire again next week, to clear out some of my bisque before we get to some remodeling of the studio area.
The photos, top to bottom: Tall jar of mine, small vase of Kim Medeiros; then six small faceted Shino teabowls, some with rutile or ash celadon pours.