early July things

 

I started making mugs! I get closer to my goal of making a giant sports direct dupe mug. My next steps are just continuing to throw mugs, practicing throwing with bigger pieces of clay and learning to make a variety of handle styles, so I can reach the Giant Mug goal. I also eventually want to practice doing more underglazing (basically painting underneath a translucent/transparent glaze, like this black design shown on the mug image above) and on-glaze decorating techniques (painting on top of a glaze, not done it before).

Here's a less successful but still interesting pot. It's not so successful because the wax resist somehow got on the upper area of the pot (the light line near the rim). Also there's some glaze mess on the inside of the pot, because I messed up the glaze application initially and then roughly cleaned it before re applying a different glaze; there was still some residue of the first glaze and instead of combining, somehow the two glazes didn't get along so there's a big unglazed spot on the inside... 

However! I actually find the new glaze itself very interesting colour and texture wise, I'm not usually into blues but this one has a lot of variation within it, so I'll probably try do some more pots with this glaze. I'll see how the next result comes out, I wonder if some of the variation is coming from my haphazard prior glaze dipping and subsequent messy cleaning.

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I have a few more pots that came out of the kiln, none are particularly noteworthy to be honest. I am getting better at throwing bigger, taller things, though. I have put 4 new mugs up for their first kiln firing, so I'm looking forward to see how they get on (fingers crossed the handles stay on).

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In craft news

• I'm continuing to use and destash my yarn!
• I sold/traded a couple jumper weights of handspun yarn that I'd made because I didn't have solid plans on what to make with them, and I have enough works in progress/queued specific projects to get on with.
• I'm working on my dad's cardigan and making good progress. It looks like I'll still have a whole other jumper quantity of yarn even after finishing it though! So I might make myself a cardigan or sell/trade the remainder.
• I did buy a jumper quantity of pale coloured Sandnes Garn peer gynt yarn for a Kosekofte which has been a knitting goal for quite some time. For the colourwork contrast colours I will be using a bunch of handspun and leftover yarn, so it still sort of feels like a win in terms of stash.
• I suppose if there's leftover then I can use the rest for some mittens or other small accessories, or sell the peer gynt yarn.

In game dev/art news

• Continuing to try learn to code and doing a bit of shader and in-engine (Unity) learning at work too. Hit a wall with one of my tutorials so I need to ask someone about that soon.
• Continuing slowly but surely with the dress up pixel artwork.
• Done some watercolour painting recently as well as some general sketchbook drawing which has been fun 😌