Post #581543 by swizzle on Thu, Mar 24, 2011 12:16 AM

OK, here's this weeks update. First of thank you Tikiwahine and zerostreet.

I learnt something interesting last night which my teacher wasn't exactly clear about from the beginning. As i've mentioned and posted photos of in my previous posts (and Mauitikis thread), the way my teacher showed me how to do the first pour was to use a couple of cones of clay to prop up the master and then pour around it and remove them later and fill them in. Now apparently thats the way the "professionals" do it, however what she didn't mention was that that first pour of plaster will be thrown out and repoured after the second. So it is effectively cutting out having to pack clay around the master and then removing that clay and doing the second pour to achieve the same result.
Removing the cones and filling them with plaster is the "cheats" way of not having to throw out all the plaster used in the first pour. I have all the materials needed to make another mold this weekend and i'm not 100% sure how i'll go about it exactly but I do know i'll by using tips i've learnt both here on TC and from my teacher.

Now to the plaster, Wendy, my teacher said thicker than buttermilk herself and the way we were doing was the same way as GROG mentioned (thanks for your advice GROG), however we just stuck our hands straight in and broke up all the lumps with our fingers.

My mould is finished now so i'm ready to pour my first mug.I'll be going in on the Tuesday night class to pour one so that it will be ready to remove on Wednesday night which is the day I usually go. Very anxious and excited to see how it will turn out.

Then it'll be time for glazing, and that will be interesting. Wendy, you mentioned in a previous post that Babalu told you to glaze test, glaze test, glaze test. I can now see why.

Here is my first test glaze strip.

I went into my local ceramic supply place and was told they didn't have purple (my favourite colour) and would have to mix my own using blue and red, obviously. Now if you cant quite see from the picture, going from left to right I mixed 10 parts red to 2 parts blue. Then 10-4, 10-6, 10-8 then equal parts red/blue (in the middle) and then reversed that blue/red. As you can see, I certainly dont see any colour there that you could really call purple, at least not a shade i'm after. So it's back to the drawing board. The master and mold, to me at least, is quite simple, but glazing is a whole other ball-game. I think i'm going to have quite a few test glaze mugs floating around at the start.:D