Smoke Fired Form

Purpose: Experience an ancient method of creating surface decoration for bisqued clay.

Reflection: 

With that starting block, we pushed a hole in the middle with our thumbs. Once we had a large enough hole we closed it and began to round off the corners. As we started to round to the ends and close the hole, I formed mine into the shape of a pear. As I finished shaping my form, we poked holes into them to ensure they would not explode in the kiln. We let them sit for a few days to dry out then used plastic to smooth the surface. After we were done smoothing they were put in the kiln to fire. Once done firing we took some foliage from outside to wrap around our forms and secured them on. After all this prep they were ready to smoke fire.  

This process takes a lot of patience and can sometimes not turn out how you wanted so I can't see myself wanting to do this again though it was fun this first time. What worked well was the forming of the closed form that part was a lot of fun because you have a lot of freedom to choose how your form looks. Something that didn't work so well was the pasting of plants onto my form. I think I put too much glue on the form and when it came out of the firing there were some white spots where the glue most likely was.