Playing with Clay

FH and I got home late last Monday and I was knackered. I also had no plans for my streams Tuesday and Wednesday. I'd been thinking up a new sculpted teapot design in the car, so I decided on just playing with clay and seeing where things took me.

Whilst rummaging for colors, I found some pre-mixed "dough" colors leftover from workshops I'd taught and decided they needed to be used up as well.

 The first thing I played with was a cane for candies and cake decorations. I attempted a strawberry design. It's... ok. I'm not super happy with it. The design itself was not well planned out and the result is "meh" in quality. I can do better, so that one is going where it should've gone first. The sketch pad. Also I don't know if the clay had started to dry out or if it was just really cold in my studio, but I was having problems with my canes cracking and breaking apart as I was working them to make them smaller.

After I got fed up with the cane foolishness, I switched to my prototypes for new teapots. The center tomato is plain. The other two are based on one of the emote designs E-Jipt uses in his Twitch channel. It's a "Not Tomato." Long story. The gloss varnish and the sunlight weren't playing nicely and this is the best picture I have of them. The tomato teapot itself still needs tweaking. Also I'd like to make them a bit smaller.

The leftover bits of cane got the teapot treatment as well. Also some of it got turned into lollipops.

Wednesday was "baking day." I started out making a simple split-top loaf and a braided loaf. Then I decided to try marbled rye. I'm pretty pleased with that experiment. The rye can use some tweaking, but this is a good first result.

Various dinner rolls followed as did cookies in different states of preparation.

While I was working, a viewer asked how I'd made the tomato teapots the day before, I so made another to demonstrate. And E-Jipt suggested a Pokemon-themed teapot while I was working so I tried that as well.

The tomato teapot has more detail than the first versions. I added more vine details and am happier with it. The Pokeball teapots... not so much. They're too big and clunky for one. I turned one into a cookie jar as it looks better size-wise. Also the red smeared everywhere on the white bottoms. So they get to join the strawberry cane back at the drawing board. I may end up making the two haves of the Pokeballs separately and "gluing" them together with liquid polymer after par-baking them. Just to keep the red from staining the white. I'm not sure yet. But it's a neat project idea to play with.

Thursday night was the mini group meeting and we all made the Plein Air set from True 2 Scale's tutorial. That was a lot of fun. I'd made mine already so I could help everyone else figure their out.

The next several meetings will be all hat shop oriented. Hatboxes are next month, but I'm not teaching that one. However I need to make some tools for making silk roses and start practicing a hat design people liked. Unless I'm complete rubbish at it, that will be June's project. We go out for dinner in July, but I'm going to suggest having an all-day play day in July sometime. Don't know how that will go. 

That's all for today. I need to go sketch up some cane designs and start research mini hat shop items. See you next Sunday!