Sacerdotesse

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outer rim done.. inner rim to go

I had some fun today starting to cover the wood clay forms I made earlier.

I rolled out a 3 card thick circle, and then pressed a stamp in to it to give it some texture.  This is the top side of the new pendant I’m making.  I did the same again for the underside of the pendant.  I then used the wooden form as a template and cut out 2 discs to fit the top and bottom side of the form.  Using some slip as glue, I waited for the 2 disks to become leather hard, and glued them on to the form.  I then trimmed back the disks a little to fit the form flush.  (I had to trim back a little of the form to fit the disks too!)

Well the wood clay pieces that are made are finally dry.. and it does look as if I will be able to sand the back as they are quite brittle.  The only issue I now have is that they warped in the drying process!  I’m going to put something heavy on them while I’m away over the weekend.. hopefully that will flatten them out a bit.

Showing the textured band and drilled dome

Well last night I spent waiting by the toaster thinggy for each successive layer of slip to dry as I built out the table on my latest piece.   In terms of form, it’s actually worked quite well, however I’m a bit concerned that there are tiny tiny air bubbles caught throughout the table which may disrupt it when I try to fire it.  It needs some sanding back and the decoration added, and that part is done.  This one has been so much easier to make than the first one, I guess because I have already made one I know what I’m doing a bit more.  It’s been in the differences between the two objects that I have spend the time.  This new one does not have borders around the decorative band, and this is where I had difficulty attaching the table.  I tried to attache them to the inner rim of the dome, but I couldn’t get that to work.   If i want to do one without a border again, I think I’ll add the table first and the border band afterwards.

I cooked some wood clay today.  I made some donuts out of it and put one of them on the toaster to dry it out.. however it didn’t dry out like silver clay does.. it started to cook!  Yikes!  I had to throw it out and start again.

has left the granulation station!

I finally had some luck getting my *%&*% little balls some kind of round and stuck on my piece in a non-random pattern that I’m quite pleased with.  My first attempt was a little skew-whiff and they were off centre.  Unfortunately they were also a bit closer to egg shaped than to spherical so they looked a little bit more like tiny mouse poops than the elegant granulation that I had hoped for!