Post #768168 by danlovestikis on Sat, Sep 3, 2016 2:34 PM

hang10tiki I do so love the Dole Plantation and all the Dole Whip.

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Sacramento Crawl mugs step by steps. So now I had 10 Artist Proofs with varying degrees of run over. I decided to touch them up and fire them again to see if they could be saved.

This mug had the very worst run-over of the green glaze called Malachite by Duncan. It's an element glaze.

This took an hour but slowly the glaze was ground off.

I don't want to have to do this for every crawl mug!

I re-glazed the lettering and fired it.

It's good enough now to be sold.

This mug had the run-over in just one place.

I added more of the green to the yellow and re-fired it.

Before and

after.

Before and

after.

By making the pineapple immature or more green I believed that I could risk using this runny glaze and still end up with a cool mug.

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Here's what you can do if you are willing to stand for 10 hours and work until you drop!

I have bought super heavy vases to use as my draining containers.

Since the inside of the pineapple will not show up I decided to use a clear black glaze.

I filled them until I got to the bottom of the leaves. I let them sit for 30 seconds and then poured out most into the jars and then let some drain by putting them upside down.

I am doing this inside left portion in the green color so

I used a heavy duty brush to scrub this back off.

I got smarter and while the next batch was draining I glazed the bottoms. I leave a small un-glazed box for the mugs number to be placed.

I kept going until I had finished glazing the insides, bottoms and cleaned up the leaves on all 60 mugs.

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When the mugs came out of the kiln I was able to choose the best glazes for the different areas and letters of the pineapple.

So I went to work on Artist Proof number 11. This mug would be the final Artist Proof and the one that would tell me if I'd chosen wisely.

I narrowed down the glazes used to these three.

I decided to start at the top and to do one layer. Maybe it wouldn't run as much. All these leaves I cut in took forever to glaze.

I covered the entire pineapple in the green Malachite glaze.

I let it dry overnight. Then I took a wet paper towel and wiped and

wiped and

wiped all these areas that I would glaze with a different color.

Next I did the pineapple flesh with yellow IN Duncan glaze. IN glazes show detail well. I hoped it would blend with the Malachite to make a pretty blue-green.

This would also make any runs not matter.

YES I am back to spending about 3 hours to glaze one mug. In these photos I am using a sea green/brown for the

bamboo, tiki,

wording and

every section of the backside.

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AFTER FIRING THIS IS HOW THE FINAL CAME OUT. This is how the crawl mugs will look. I hope you like it.

It is a good size pineapple and weighs between 3 and 4 pounds. I will include 2 long straws in different colors with each mug so they can be used at the crawl.

Front exposed.

Back exposed.

1 hour 50 minutes to post this many photos. In case you didn't know I love numbers and making tiki ceramics! Cheers, Wendy

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[ Edited by: danlovestikis 2016-09-03 14:51 ]