I originally made the base of this as a drum for my husband.  I made two, actually, but this one had too-shallow of a shape, so he said he wasn’t going to use it. I decided, that since I’ve been planning to make a fountain for a while, that I would use this to make a practice fountain.  For those who didn’t see the earlier post, it’s about 14″ high, and shaped like a birdbath except that it has a hole running from top to bottom.

My first step was to make a sphere. I made two, actually, in the same manner that my smiley balls are made: two pinch pots adhered at the lip and then smoothed. These got too dry to smooth out, so I sort of lathed them on the giffin grip, which means that they have a concentric circle pattern from several different ordinals.  I used shiny white glaze on one and kind of  a stoneware glaze (spodumene) on the other.  Our water is very salty, and anything that has water running over it gets a rime after a while.  Each of the spheres had inch diameter holes in the poles.  I ended up choosing the larger white sphere, because of the pleasing proportion with it to the base.

I chose a site for the fountain, then dug a hole to accomodate a plastic storage bin, sans lid.  The pump sits at the bottom.  On top of the storage bin lid I placed a metal grate, then some hardware cloth, and finally metal screen, each with holes cut to allow the plastic tubing to extend upwards.  I put the birdbath part on top, and threaded the sphere’s holes through the tubing.  I accidentally cut the tubing to exactly the right length.  Don’t count on happy accidents.

Once I’d cut a pipe to put the cord in, and buried it, my fountain was ready to fill.  One problem I didn’t anticipate was that the water seeped out underneath the sphere.  I thought I’d put a ring of foam as a gasket, but I couldn’t find any, so instead I used sheets of thin plastic.  This slowed down the seepage enough that the water filled the basin as I’d intended.

Since it seemed to be working fine, I started to cover the screen with river rocks.  These rocks were too heavy, and bowed it down alarmingly, so I just put them in a ring and used a handful of pea gravel to obscure the screen.

Next time I do a fountain, it will be a wall fountain, and it will be much more elaborate.

This is a piece I did in high school.  It’s raku fired, which accounts for the carbon trappings.  The piece is merely a cylinder of clay, altered to make it interesting, with a loop like a handle on top.  I really love this piece, and tried to duplicate it in 2003 without much success.  I decided to photograph this because I was experimenting with lighting techniques and needed a subject.

This is the largest of all six of this series, and can hold maybe sixteen ounces.  It has a couple dots of blue glaze that got on there by mistake, but it’s still one of my favorite drinking vessels now.

For the second set of weed cups, I first tried to scratch in the design and then fill it with white slip, using a metal rib tool to scrape it off. That didn’t work at all. My fellow ceramicists suggested that perhaps I had done it with the clay too wet (It was leather hard when I put the slip in, and leather hard still when I scraped it off).  So I sanded off my messed up design and tried again, this time putting the white slip over the entire surface.  While it was still leather-hard, I scratched the design into it.  Since I’d already done it several times by this point, I barely needed the photo as a reference.

This has a slightly narrower shape, and is smaller than the other weed cup.