December creations

Such a long time since I posted. But I have a lot of creations to share. I collected them last week after spending five days in hospital with pneumonia. Prior to that I had seven days of illness including back pain, fever and hallucinations. Fun. Anyway I am on the mend now and hoping the tests do not reveal the cause to be birds or ceramic dust.
First up, I love the variations that copper rust glaze can produce depending how long you hold the piece in the glaze. Personally I prefer the deeper colour but I like playing with the different shades. Excuse the poorly made larger vessel. Not one of my greater moments on the wheel.

Behold my first ever mug! I was so excited that this turned out. I have used turquoise underglaze, my favourite colour. Also here you can see a project that I have had on my mind for some time, I scratched the lower part of the vase to create a rough texture (I did this during the turning process) and left that part unglazed. I'm really happy with the effect although it's probably difficult to see the texture properly in the photo.

I was ready to go back to basics when I made these three little pots. I needed a rest from the challenge of mugs and vases and wanted to improve my general skills. I had fun colouring them, using turquoise underglaze on the first one and dripping jade underglaze with an eyedropper, apricot underglaze on the second one with turquoise patterns and matt denim glaze on the third one.

Next up, a couple of hand sculpted characters, one based loosely on the anime character Totoro.

And of course yet another bird...

Then there is my attempt at a nativity scene which has been fired without any glaze as I wanted a raw look.