Tiles on trays and swifts in September

Well, sort of.

Sep 10, 2024

Hi and welcome to this week’s newsletter!

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Can you believe it’s September already?

School started last week, here in Poland. Our daughter is going to fourth grade, a big deal here, because it’s the year the kids “graduate” to having several subjects taught by different teachers in different classrooms. This felt scary to my daughter who worried that she would not find the right classroom on time. She now has to walk the corridors with the older kids (schools in Poland are divided into primary school, 7 to 15 years old, and lyceum or technical school, 15 to 18 years old) which was also a source of worry. “They move too fast and are very loud!” she would complain. “Faster than you and even louder?!” I would marvel to myself, and then say out loud “Yes, I know that can feel scary”. On the other hand, she was excited about the fact that she will have a locker all to herself and looking forward to that.

As it turns out, it’s going well (knock on wood). She already knows the school, even if she is most familiar with one section of it, so that helped. And it is a small school, with only two classes per grade, one of the advantages of not living in the city.

Since I last wrote to you, the weather has gone bonkers. It’s been so hot, I actually left the tomato plants alone and have been harvesting a few that are turning orange faster than the mildew, now slowed down by the temperatures over 30 ºC, can catch up with them. The tomatoes redden nicely if left on a sunny spot inside. The high temperatures, untypical as they are, have, of course, made me reconsider the whole I-won’t-ever-grow-tomatoes-here-again thing, and I even saved some seeds from a particularly tasty one… Anyway, we’ll see in February.

Because it’s been so hot, I have been mostly at home, unable to do anything outside. This turned out to be a good thing and I am happy I was able to spend quite a lot of time in the studio.

Old favourites, colours and sgraffito

I have been trying to finish some pieces to finally do a bisque firing. I am looking forward to firing the wild clay test tiles and to share the results with you. I was delighted to get such a great response to my last post Wild clay as this is what I really long to write about — clay. Often I get side-tracked and, of course, I also enjoy sharing other aspects of my life, but honestly I mostly want to tell you about clay. And paste papers, once I get round to that.

As much as I am anxious to use the new slips, I need to wait for the results of the first firing before using them on any pieces. It may turn out that they are unusable or uninteresting. Only fire will tell.

In the meantime, I have been having fun with colours and sgraffito. I also went back to an old favourite — pressing dried elderflower umbels to make a mug. This one will go to the US, my first order from overseas! Needless to say I am over the moon and completely terrified at the same time.

I usually have several pieces in different stages of completion — each drying between steps, while I work on the next one. I have been playing with a geometric design, reminiscent of mosaic or tiles, overlaid by stencilled swifts or leaves. I start with a rough outline of random squares and rectangles; I press in the lines a bit and start filling them in with the colours. I started with the tray and chose four shades of blue. It was supposed to be three but I didn’t want the same colour in adjacent squares, so, in the end, I added a fourth one. Don’t ask me how many square/rectangles I drew — I have no idea and I added subdivisions as I went (a healthy dose of randomness to counter the very geometric nature of the decoration), when they became necessary in order to avoid the above rule of no-touchy-same-colour.

I am usually rather chaotic in my decorations so this one was a bit of a challenge for me and… I must say I throughly enjoyed the process. When all the spaces were filled, I sgraffitoed the lines which made the colours pop even more. Stencilling in the swift was not part of the original plan but, once I was done with the lines, I imagined the tray was a wall and immediately the walls of the underground stations in Lisbon came to my mind. I thought in particular of the panels designed by Maria Keil (next time I am in Lisbon I need to remember to take pictures of her tile murals and panels — subject for a future postcard, I think). She often mixed geometric forms with drawings and, although I am not as bold as she was, I really wanted to try something similar.

I enjoyed this so much, I went ahead and made a tiny plate and mug, more colourful this time.

The blues used on the tray are all underglazes; the colours on the mug and tiny plate are slips I made mixing white powdered clay and stains (except for the swifts, those are underglaze), so, although these two have more colours, they may actually turn out more muted than the blues on the tray. We’ll see.

I am pretty sure I will be revisiting this pattern, not exactly the same but similar; same idea, geometric background overlaid by a stencilled shape… So many ideas, so little time...

I could have repeated the pattern on the other mugs straight away, but I needed a break from the geometricness (hmmm… well, I just wrote it, so it’s a word…) of it so I decided to go back to flowery patterns. On two other mugs I used another Portuguese inspired design (it’s funny, if I wasn’t writing this I would never have realised how much my recent work is in fact inspired by Portuguese themes, be it the tiles or the swifts).

I traced the drawing on to the clay, lightly, just enough to get the outline (I am not good with freehand painting), and used slips again to colour the flowers and the leaves, which I then enhanced with some sgraffitoed lines. On one of the mugs, I left the background undecorated as I am hoping to use an oxide wash before applying the glaze. But that’s for later.

On the fourth mug I went all out… underglazes again, swifts galore and sgraffito.

But I think the second mug I used the flower pattern on is my favourite. I really like the dark background, which will hopefully turn a light black (yes, that’s a thing) once glazed.

All will, of course, change a lot after the first firing and again, once they are glazed, so I may change my mind.

Do you have a favourite? I will share the pictures of the fired mugs and we can see if our favourites change or not.

And now for something completely different

Also drying on the shelves waiting to be loaded into the kiln are four other mugs made in quite a different style.

Sometime ago, I took Sarah Pike’s Domestika course and made a lot of clay stamps. I really love her work. In a way, her pieces are the opposite of mine, super clean and neat, her stamps are amazing and she applies them perfectly. It was interesting to see her process and of course it’s always good to learn something new. I also enjoy seeing how other potters work and most of the time I will pick up a tip or two that seem simple and yet greatly improve my process. In Sarah’s course, for example, this was how to better roll a slab by carefully lifting it up in between rolls to unstick it from the board. Seems obvious, right? Well, I wasn’t doing that and I can tell you it makes a huge difference.

Anyway, back to stamps… So, I learned how to make better stamps but I didn’t want to make Sarah Pike mugs, so I left the stamps alone for some time, unsure if I would ever use them.

Well, last week I did. And I think that, to someone who knows her work, my mugs will still make them think Sarah Pike. In fact, when I shared them on a chat here on Substack, someone mentioned her course — looking at you,

Fi Cooper

(which in turn was really cool because I got to “know” someone else who also writes about clay but not only clay in her beautifully named publication

A Wandering Way

That being said, I am really pleased how these turned out anyway. My stamps are messy, up-close it looks like they have been applied by a uncoordinated 3 year old (that actually makes them totally non-Sarah Pike, in fact), and I don’t have a good glaze that will show off the texture… But, I have other ideas about how to finish them so stay tuned.

Before I go

It was a busy couple of weeks and now I am very close to being able to start the kiln. I still need to make a few more of the elderflower umbel mugs; so many things can go wrong in the making and firing process that I need to have several to choose from to fulfil the order. And I might as well make a couple of matching plates, while I’m at it.

I leave you with a short video — you’ll want to turn up the volume for if you want to hear the beautiful sound of clay starting to wake up and get ready to be formed again.

As always, thank you so much for reading and I will see you next time.

Sara xx

ps: As I finish writing this letter, the weather has turned. It rained all day yesterday and today the air is fresh and clean. The heat wave has ended and I breath a sigh of relief.