Toad Houses

This weekend I decided to make a few terra cotta toad houses. I'm not going to use any glazes but I will use an iron oxide wash to highlight the lettering and incised lines.
These are already spoken for. Not only should I have made more this weekend, I should have made them before summer started.
They will look great in the garden.

Fire In The Valley

Check out my interview on WKBT News 8 La Crosse, WI. "Fire In The Valley."

Femlins Update

I finally painted the red lips on the Femlin tumblers. It took a hell of a lot longer than I originally thought it would. With a pencil I drew the lips on all the tumblers. then I grabbed some red glaze and thought I could use a wooden toothpick to apply the glaze to the very small lips I had drawn. Right away I realized this wasn't going to work. It worked great for Lichtenstein plate I made.
I ended up using the finest brush I had and painted wax resist around the exterior lines of lips. Then, using the same brush I applied the red glaze. This worked well and went real fast but since I used the wax resist it required me to fire the tumblers one more time to get rid of the wax so I apply a clear glaze to the exteriors. This was the third firing. Now I just need to apply the clear glaze and fire one last time to cone 04.

Getting Closer to the Kiln

Getting closer to firing these tumblers.  The last step is adding red lips to the femlins. Hope to finish that today.
The exterior of the tumblers was brush stroked with black underglaze. The interior is a white majolica base glaze. To get a perfect line between the rim and the interior I used a latex wax resist to coat the rims and then applied the majolica base glaze.
I was a little pissed to discover I was a bit sloppy using the wax resist on one of the tumblers and it dripped from the rim half way down the exterior so now I am going to have to fire it to get rid of the wax before I can apply a clear glaze. Getting closer.