Teapots!

Check the Design Style Guide blog today for a great feature on teapots, including one of mine!

Teapots are great to make! I throw a form on the wheel and then set it aside to dry a bit. In the meantime, I throw a lid and a spout and I pull a handle. Once the clay is leather hard I attach the handle and the spout, making sure to poke drain holes for the tea to pour out of the teapot (I actually forgot to do that once and didn't realize it until I was glazing it and couldn't understand why the glaze wasn't pouring out the spout!). The next step is to let the teapots dry slowly.

After they are bone, the pieces are bisque fired. This gets rid of some impurities in the clay and hardens it enough for the next part in the process: the glazing. I have buckets of glaze that I mix myself. The first step in glazing is to mix the glaze and, if needed, sieve it again to make sure that I have a good suspension. If I'm going to use only one color glaze, I carefully hold the teapot with a pair of tongs and dip it in the glaze bucket. If I'm going to use two glazes, then I carefully glaze the inside with one color and once the glaze is dry enough to handle the pot again, I dip the pot in the next color. Finally, I carefully clean the bottom of the pot to make sure that there is no glaze remaining there (if there is, the pot will stick to the bottom of the kiln shelf).

Once glazed the teapots are loaded again for the final glaze firing!

Here are my latest teapots!