The Slab Technique

For this piece, we were assigned to create four different mugs, but they all needed to be related in some form in order to make them a set. You also needed to use the slab technique in order to create these mugs. I chose to create four of the same mugs, and to make them more unique but also still related, I chose to do all pastel colors that I hand mixed, but each mug is a different color, and I also chose to let the mugs differ in size a little to give some aspects of uniqueness.

In order to create these mugs, I needed to start out by rolling a large piece of slab clay and sectioning it off into four different sections. Then, I rolled out each individual slab to the proper thickness and used a tennis ball container as the sizing, and folded the clay around the tennis container. Once I attached the loose pieces, I set it aside and worked on the next mug. Once I had all four mug bases formed, it was time to work on the bottoms and the handles. for the bottoms, I rolled out another slab and cut out the bottoms sizing them properly for each mug shape. Then I rolled out all different sizes of clay balls and flattened the bottoms. Once all the pieces were attached to the mugs, they were bisque-fired and ready to be glazed. For the glazes, I hand-mixed for all the mugs and glazed them until I liked the color. I used SM-51, HF-167, C-20, and SM-44, and mixed them with SM-11 and SM-10. After they were glaze fired, I was able to photograph them and call them a set of final pieces.

There were a few revisions I needed to do in order to call my piece finished. The first revision I needed to make was the handles. When I was first trying to make the handles I wanted, I couldn't think of a design that matched my idea. Then, after some research on unique handle ideas, I was able to choose the bubble look and am very happy with how it turned out. The final revision I needed to make was to the colors of the mugs. The first mug that came out of the kiln I did not like as much and realized I needed to mix lighter glazes to get the pastel colors I was looking for. In the end, I am very happy with the results and will be giving these as gifts to my family.