Part of the Process

I've come to love trimming and glazing much more than I used to. My heart used to belong solely to throwing, but I've realized over the last year or so that throwing takes the shortest amount of time. In that case, my favorite part is the least involved? I needed to shift my thinking, and I did. I started to find something meditative in trimming. It's become a continuation of the honing process that throwing is. 

The act of throwing takes an unformed lump of clay, and turns it into something roughly resembling a functional object. But then, using the wheel to whittle the semi-formed object into a complete idea. In trimming the foot ring finds a parallel with the rim; walls become uniformly thin and smoothed; in my case, all kinds of details are added, creating a unique object. Take these bowls:

They're at a leather-hard stage. They've been sitting on that newspaper-covered board for a week (I dry things too slowly. I'm working on that.) and are ready to trim. After turning each over and removing all the excess clay from the foot (I need some action shots), each also gets decoration on the rim:

Now they're unique, well formed, and ready for bisquing. Throwing those bowls (all 11 of them) took less than 10 minutes. Trimming them took over twice that time.

Now glazing them.. Well, the final product will take another ten days to get. 

Speaking of glazing. Here are those bottles, out of the bisque fire:

All pink and porous. Amazing that when that gets out of the reduction firing it will look totally different: warm, brown, even a bit grainy on the bare clay.

Post glazing, pre-firing:

I'm so excited for how these turn out. Glazing has become another meditative process, and has encouraged me to really visualize how I want a piece to look. I used to just put some glazes on and hope for the best, but now I think about the form itself, and what would compliment it. A constant learning process.