I have plans! A friend told me she read an article about making glazes from found ingredients. Ingredients like pumice and cuttlefish. I immediately wanted to try it and next time I was at the beach I was able to collect a bunch of it. My mum said she’s collected several bags of pumice too.
I swear I found a recipe on glazy that used just pumice and whiting but I can’t find it now. I’ll have to experiment a lot to get something useful.
Which brings me to the mortar and pestle. I needed something to crush up my ingredients, and why go buy one when I can make one!
I needed to make the bowl strong and thick, so I started with about 2kg of reclaimed clay. It is a stoneware mix of pb103 and BRT. When I was throwing it, I concentrated on making sure the inside had a smooth curve and the sides were about 1cm thick.
While turning, I decorated it with fine lines to about 3cm from the top.
The pestle is hand-built. I started with a pinch pot which I closed up into a ball, so it would be hollow inside. The handle was just rolled out and attached. It is solid. Once it had had time to dry a bit I punched a hole into it. I must have pushed a bit of clay in, because now it has a tiny rattle.
I was inspired by seeing this cup my friend did, and I used the same 2 glazes on this. And it was fired to 1280C.
I used a wax resist on the foot. I dipped the outside of the bowl into Moss first, though it was kind of thin. That Moss glaze settles really fast. I dipped it from the bottom into the Buttermilk over the Moss, then dipped it from the top into Buttermilk. That was really tricky - having to hold a bowl with not really anything to hold on to. Plus I didn’t want to get it all in the bowl, just on the edge. The inside of the bowl and the bulb part of the pestle are both unglazed.
I dipped the handle of the pestle in Buttermilk. That was tricky too, because there isn’t much Buttermilk left so I had to kind of swirl it around. The edge of the glaze on the pestle is not a straight line.
The green on most of the bowl is a very subtle green. You can see on one side though that the white is patchy and the green shows through more. The mortar was in the corner of the kiln and I suspect that the barer areas were the ones close to the wall and so fired a bit hotter. I can’t be sure though because, even though I was there and got to take it out of the kiln myself, I didn’t notice the bare area until I’d already lost track of which way it had been facing.
I was showing it off at our club night after it had come out of bisque and a woman there asked if I’d make one for her too. I think she’s going to want one even more after she sees the glazed version. I’ve already made a mortar, just need to make the pestle to go with it.
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