Humble Beginnings Ceramics

I make ceramics! Learning by doing and making mistakes. Join me on my journey!

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Welcome to Humble Beginnings Ceramics!

I started Humble Beginnings Ceramics in 2022 as a platform to share my experimental works, trying to incorporate curious and surprising details into functional ware.

I am exploring a wide range of shapes and functions at the moment, learning something from making each item. I am testing out techniques such as slab building, coiling and wheel throwing, trying different clay bodies and refining basic glazing techniques as they are quite new to me.

Join me on my journey, ask me questions, give me feedback, share your work, I am happy to have you here!

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Spoon Rest 🥄

because if humour isn’t for getting me through life, then what is it for 🌝

I hand-built this spoon rest from yellow medium-grogged stoneware. This was lacking in my kitchen and I wanted to make a spoon rest with a bit of personality. Little did I know it would be too much personality. Look at him!!

He’s supposed to have cucumber slices over his eyes but the underglaze melted a bit at high temperatures. Some other underglaze defects on the dish too. My fix to this was to invest in higher-temperature underglazes, as I work a lot with fine details in my ceramics. Do you love him? 🤩

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Sgraffito stingray ceramic wall hanging

I encountered this sweet blue-spotted ribbontail stingray last year off the coast of Krabi. One of the most exhilarating things about diving is being able to meet wild animals in their environment, where the sea is their home and you are a visitor.

Using the sgraffito method, I made a wall-hanging piece. I used a white underglaze from Botz on a wheel-thrown dish in grey speckled fine-grogged stoneware clay. I find this gives it a rustic weathered feel that naturally associates with the sea. Design was carved with a ball-end needle tool. Holes for hanging the piece. Fired to 1200C. I added elements of the sublime kelp forests and shells encountered in Cornwall to surround him.

I draw a lot of inspiration for my art from my surroundings, trying to capture my feelings in that moment I experienced in my pieces. For my interests to overlap and inspire one another is marvellous! It’s been exciting getting to know my medium through these challenges I set for myself, being able to explore different methods in a medium that is varied as it is ancient.

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B.U.T.T.E.R.

Ackk, will I ever be ready for these?! 🙈

I made some cow butter dishes! Can you picture these at breakfast in the morning? They are adorable, if I do say so myself.

You wouldn’t believe me but it took months and months of struggling to get to this stage. There are a bunch of techniques used here that are error-prone. The butter dish was slip-cast in two parts. As a bright-eyed optimistic beginner I started off trying to make my own slip for casting out of recycled grogless slurry, without appropriate tools of course. In an earlier IG story I detailed how I had to recycle most of what I casted due to lumpiness and uneven casting. 🙈 I then bought ready-made slip, but as everything in ceramics this had to be further adjusted, this time for the right specific gravity for the closed-form casting mould for the base of the butter dish. Lots of cracking and uneven casting followed, I must have cast more than 15 failed base plates before arriving at something I could fire. The rest went into recycling.

Next challenge was colouring the cows, which I sculpted by hand; I had some insane troubleshooting with the underglaze/overglaze. The underglaze was fine at the bisque fire but started to bubble at higher temperatures, giving rise to some bubbling and pinholing defects. Some colours were just not suited for high temperatures. Some colours had uneven appearances. Some colours cracked when too thickly applied. Some colours reacted with the clear overglaze. Then there are your run-of-the-mill glaze defects, pinholing etc, resulting in more adjustments to the firing schedules in ramp times, temperature and hold times. Basically, a lot of research and trial and error to arrive here. This is what I get for self-teaching, the learning is never-ending!

Glazing:

Mooing cow butter dish: Amaco 3x Blue Rutile over 3x Honey Flux

Smiling cow butter dish: Amaco 3x Iron Lustre over 3x Honey Flux

Fired to 1200C with drop&hold -50C for 20 minutes

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Sassy ceramic panda 🐼

I was going to wait until he was finished in the glaze firing, but this guy is so stinking cute I decided to share. This is him after the bisque, in white fine-grogged clay and coloured with underglaze. You can see the brush marks where the colour is thin, so I used this time to touch up on the details, and send him through the glaze firing with a coat of clear. Fingers crossed! 🤞🏻

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Spoons are hard, guys. 🥄

Here are some birdy spoons I made a while back. I had this idea that I wanted to make some simple spoons with a decal design (sanbaostudio) in the bowl of the spoon (yes, that is what it is called, I Googled it). I made six spoons in total, three large ones of grey clay and three small ones of leather clay. Both fine-grogged, thought would be fine for hand-building. Decided to carve out the bowl of the spoon with loop tools after forming the general shape. Big mistake!

The contoured form of the bowl in contrast with the slim neck meant that any pressure at weak points immediately led to breakage. One spoon required fixing of a broken neck six times! I now know of other artists who make the bowl by pinching and then pulling a handle, which honestly looks 1000x better than these. The glaze firing brought more problems: the grey clay warped so badly I can’t bear to look at those large spoons anymore. One of the small spoons met its demise after the bisque firing when I dropped it 🥲 and these are the remaining two. They still hold a “handmade charm”, if you know what I mean. It will probably be a while until I try making spoons again. That said, I still like the sweet birdies here.

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Say hello to my Grilled Fish paint palette! 🎨

I thought it would be fun to make a ceramic paint palette using the slab technique, but I also wanted to give it my own spin. Since I have been working on incorporating animals into my designs, I made a fish with the scales being the paint wells. I also wanted to section a part for holding brushes, since I often have the problem with finding a place for them while painting. This piece is a prototype, for me to feel out how to make a palette, gauge thicknesses, drying techniques and glazes.

I chose the Botz Speckle Cream 9886 stoneware glaze since I had used it on other pieces and liked the iron speckle effect. Fired to 1250C. It gives the fish a grilled look and also repels any colour stains. I’ve been using it to mix underglazes for my other pieces and it looks new and unused after I wash it each time. All in all, a successful prototype, and I’m looking forward to making more animal palettes in the future!

I painted a series of seascapes during my summer in Cornwall, and used them for this photo shoot. They are really quite small, and I enjoyed the reduced pressure in painting due to that and my general lack of experience with painting 🌝 If you struggle with 2-D media like me, I highly recommend starting small! I have a graveyard of unfinished canvases stashed in the storage now..

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Dear Fren,

people who put you down, they don’t have much going on. It’s easier to be all talk than action, easier to assume than to try and fail. They don’t have the courage to. You, on the other hand, might fail constantly, but by trying you are already doing something for yourself, and you will yourself benefit from it. Don’t be disheartened by the failures, for you learn something from each one. Keep going for what you believe in, because it makes you happy!

xx, Lin

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Iron Lustre 🌙

A must-have in my range of Amaco glazes. This is 3x Iron Lustre alone, fired to 1200C, no hold, on a wheel-thrown leather grogged-stoneware bottle with pulled handle. I usually like the look of IL under other glazes but this alone deserves recognition. It screams vintage and stepped straight out of Victorian London. Too much Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. My favourite thing is the rust iron breaking through!!

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A state of calm. 🌙

Bear cub teacup, work in progress. Unfired stoneware with underglaze. Looking forward to the finished result!

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How cute is this tiny pot?

That is all.

Wheel-thrown, bisqued, hand-turned, grogged clay.

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Slowly and steadily getting through documenting the pieces that came out of the pre-Christmas firing batches. I had the opportunity then to do a few glaze fires because I had to do some troubleshooting: under-firing, crawling, pinholes, re-glazing, etc. All part of the learning process, lots of research, but I often felt very frustrated and wished it would go smoothly the first time!

This piece was under-fired the first time (1050C) and came out a muddy grey-brown, which is precisely when I learnt to read glaze instructions very carefully before deciding which pieces to fire together. Was super depressed, decided to put it through a higher temperature glaze fire (1200C) with a slower climb since the pieces were already glaze-fired. The colours weren’t to my liking when I first saw them on the piece, but I left it several months and looked at it again. The colours kind of remind me of IKEA 😅 and The Starry Night, and how the ochre flows over the texture is rather striking, suspended in time.

Glazing: #amacobrent Ancient Jasper 2x over Blue Rutile 2x (3x over textured part), fired to 1200C, no hold.

[allsoundsasscreed]

Visit Original Link

This is the instrumental version of the shanty/folk song “William Taylor.” Works great for karaoke sessions. (:

Listen to the original with lyrics here.

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The song that inspired the obsession! 🏴‍☠️

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Tumblers ❤️

I’ve been experimenting with textures and angled cuts, and tumblers are relatively simple forms to experiment with. I used a loop tool for the fluting and titanium-fused trimming Xiem tools for the angled cuts. So far the titanium-fused tools are holding up extremely well, especially as I like to throw with grogged clay, no matter how fine. My pitiful throwing sponge died a long time ago… 🪦

Testing glaze combinations has been both extremely frustrating and rewarding, sometimes with multiple refires or reglazing. These three tumblers came out lovely on the first try, and I thought the colours looked so cute together I had to take them stacked. My time at the Leach Pottery has instilled in me a love for iron breaking over texture that I can’t give up now.

Tumbler 1: Amaco Arctic Blue 2x over Iron Lustre 2x

Tumbler 2: Botz Beige Granite 2x body, Sand Granite 2x triangles, tape-resist method

Tumbler 3: Amaco Seaweed 2x over Honey Flux 2x

Fired to 1200C, no hold.

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Out of the kiln, just in time for Christmas!

We do Secret Santa with my partner’s family over Christmas, and this year I am Secret Santa to his dad. A very tall German man with a sparkling sense of humour and a generally lovely person to be around. He is usually laughing and loves to eat pretzels. I had it in my mind to use the very German pretzel cookie cutter I found at a store for this project.

This mug was hand-built using the slab technique out of yellow medium-grogged stoneware (20%, 0-0.5mm), and the pretzels were also cut out of slabs and attached to the mug using lots of scoring and slip. Would you believe, this is the second mug I built, the first one of grog-less stoneware didn’t even survive the initial drying stage because the pretzels were too thick and so much warping and cracking occurred, I cut my losses and made a new one. If I were to make this again, I’d probably make the pretzels even thinner as they were still a bit thick for their purpose. This new piece also went through three firings (one bisque, two glaze firings) because the first glaze combination was so dull and patchy that I had to reglaze. Fortunately the second glaze firing produced this sweet piece, just in time for Christmas! 🎄

Happy holidays!

Pretzel: Botz Unidekor Whiskey Brown 2x and White

Mug: Amaco Potter’s Choice 2x Seaweed over 2x Honey Flux

Fired to 1200C no hold.

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What I’ve been up to- work in progress!

Testing the waters with a bit of sgraffito after the last attempt cramped my hand. This time it cramped my eyes, but I had a much smaller surface area to cover. I slept very well, thank you. Looking forward to firing this soon!

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I made a sarcastic coffee mug 😏

I initially made this as a birthday gift for my partner but the first try failed so hard. I used a leather-coloured clay body and tried to do an inlay with blue stoneware glaze, and with a clear glaze over.

The result was pitiful because the colours ended up looking so dull (also thanks to insufficient blue glaze amount) that it looked like someone haphazardly scratched a pattern onto a mug. The clear glaze also came out bubbly and milky in some areas due to too-thick application, when I still had faith in manufacturers’ instructions for powdered glaze preparation instead of adjusting its specific gravity…

I was gloomy and left the mug on a shelf for several months before I dared to pick it up again. I had recently purchased some liquid coloured pigments that can be used universally as underglaze or overglaze, and decided to paint over the original design. I had nothing to lose if it didn’t turn out well. Prayed to the kiln gods during the 1250C refiring, and this is how it turned out!

The milkiness in the clear glaze cleared completely and the bubbles decreased drastically, although not disappearing completely due to the thickness of the glaze. The pigments “slipped” a little on the clear glaze (downwards, gravity), and had small holes (I think, where the clear glaze bubbles burst and smoothed over). The pigment colour came out much more interesting than I expected; its sheen at different angles makes it look like different shades of blue.

Another mug of white stoneware clay is coming out of the biscuit firing today and I’m confident the blue will come out cleaner on the white body. Now to adjust the SG of my clear glaze and we’ll find out if all that works!!!

Let me know what you think in the comments, would you like to see more designs like this? More sarcasm, perhaps? 😏😏