Pottery

I'm probably one of the slowest working potters in America. It takes me literally months to finish a pot. I've come to the conclusion that the reason for this lies solely in my lack of confidence in glazing and my overwhelming history of botching glaze jobs. For whatever reason my pots always come out with issues and when I spend SO much time on the carvings it makes me supremely frustrated to find it was all a waste, the pot can't be sold (or won't be, as I refuse to put any work into the gallery that doesn't meet my strict standards of quality). However up to this point I've been working with limited glazing options and I blame that for a large part of my troubles.
I am in the process of improving my classroom resources to include a spray booth. At the end of last year I spoke with my awesome principal about the possibility of having him foot the bill on a spray booth for my classroom. Without even hearing the price tag he agreed and didn't bat an eye lash when I told him what it would set his budget back. So at the start of this year I had my nice new booth only to find it is just inches too large for the space I have for it. In speaking with my maintenance man (who is worlds of unhelpful) he said that what I wanted to have done to accommodate this behemoth was not possible (read: I don't want to do it so it can't be done, period). So it's been a frustrating semester and a half dealing with this very large plastic paper weight on my limited counter space. I've decided to bypass maintenance and have my handy Mr. Fix-It (husband) come in and see what he can do. Last week I finally got my compressor and it seems that I have all the parts (nearly) to get this show on the road. Granted, it may not be a beautiful install but I think we can get it up and running on our own. So it is my hope that in the weeks to come I can start to glaze the abundance of pots that are sitting around, if not in the booth then at least outside with my fancy new compressor. It's exciting times. So here are a few of the things I've started and yet to finish. A few of which are totally different than my typical wares. (note: I am NOT a photographer so I must apologize for the crap-tastic photos. I do what I can.)

These three are very small, a little bigger than a golf ball, perhaps. I was going to do my trees on them but found the size to be a little smaller than my skills could accommodate. So I substituted my wheat pattern instead.

Another experiment with a different kind of carved pattern.

This is just my most recent experimentation. I'll post pictures again after I have glazed and hopefully not ruined them.