This is another set of tiles I made for my number plaque mosaic project. These were harder to make. I rolled out slabs of 1/4 inch cone 06 clay, and then used a razor blade to cut around the leaf shapes.  Poppy leaves are deeply lobed, which makes them a difficult shape to reproduce, not like an aspen leaf.

I have a plan to make a number plaque, and I wanted it to be more than just functional, I want it to be beautiful.  I decided upon poppies as an appropriate botanical motif.  I sketched it out, and my design will fit about five poppy flowers on it. These are the tiles I made. The finished work won’t be done for at least a couple of months.

To make the tiles, I cut a slice of cone 06 clay and then pounded it flat with a special mallet.  I found some cloth that has a similar crepe-like texture to the poppy petals and rolled it into the clay.  I traced the lines and cut around by using some photographs I took from my garden last year.  For the center, I used a clay gun to extrude small, thin strings, which I cut short.

This glaze has lead in it, but it’s an intense, opaque red.  It’s not as solid as I had hoped, but I don’t know if that’s due to firing or if I didn’t get the glaze on thick enough around the edges.  I can live with it.

Here’s the second terracotta orchid pot that I glazed.  For this one, I decided to use a rabbit, because I wanted to use the brown slip.  The texture on the rim of the pot is also due to the slip.

Although the green (It looks green on white clay) glaze I used for the rim and saucer was also supposed to have crystallization, I can’t see any here. I don’t know if that’s because of a bad batch of glaze, or because the crystals are all clumped in the bottom and wouldn’t come up (though it didn’t seem like that when I stirred) or because the slow cool wasn’t slow enough. I’m not disappointed. I’ve decided I don’t like the crystallization. It obscures the texture of the clay body.

My orchids needed repotting, so I went to Lowe’s and bought a pair of terracotta pots and saucers.  The orchids are going to go in my studio, which has orange walls, so I wanted something that would tone down the orange of the clay body.  After a couple of days of deliberation, I settled on two designs. This is the first one.

To make the texture on the brim and for the outline of the raven, I used the commercially produced slip from Duncan called “French Impressions.” This is their black color.  It would have come out better on the brim if the blue glaze I chose didn’t have so much crystallization.  My test tile hardly has any crystallization.  It could be that I used a longer cool-down during this firing than when I fired the test tile.  I suppose the dots provide some interest.

For the third paperweight, this one, I decided to use the optic mold.  This is a star-shaped mold that tapers to a narrow point. I believe it’s made of aluminum.  After rolling my first gather of glass in the frit and melting the frit into it, I put the jack glass-side down and push, incising lines into the glass.  If I had done this before I gathered the frit (the broken glass that makes the color) it would have made vertical stripes.

After pulling the gather out of the optic mold, I grabbed the end of the glass with some diamon shears and twisted.  Then I gathered a second batch of clear glass, and rounded it smooth with some wooden blocks before jacking it off into the annealer.  Of the three, this is the most complex creation process, and it’s the one I like the least.