This looks a lot like a smiley ball without a face, doesn’t it?  I wanted to do something as close to a sphere as I could manage, just because it’s pretty easy and it’s sometimes nice to have a heavy ball to roll around in your hands. I coated it with red iron oxide (as I did for the freaky rabbit sculpture) too.

I think this is one of the smiley balls that I traded away for someone else’s pot.  This is the last of the smiley balls I had photographed, except the small ones.

Here’s another one of my smiley balls. I think I still have this one. I placed it near a fountain, hoping that it would eventually get damp enough to grow moss. So far it hasn’t, but then again, we do live in the desert. I bet it would make an awesome chia pet.

These are the last of the tiny colored smiley balls. These will probably be the only ones I make that are glazed like this, though I’ll still use the double-fork tool for something else.

These are portable smiley balls I made to bring as gifts for people I’m visiting later this spring.  They are about the size of nuts. The one on the left got that weird texture from being overfired.  In the future, I will make these plain, or maybe with colored clay bodies. Glazing them is too difficult.

Here are two more smiley balls, ready to give away, once I file off the  pits left by the stilts. Astute observers will note that the colors of glaze are the same as on the “thorny pot” from December.

Part of doing art of any kind involves learning from failure.  I find the low-fire glazes rather tiresome to apply, especially when you can’t set them down until the glaze dries.  I made the nifty double-fork tongs to help glaze them (see last post) and I naturally assumed that it would be easy to just dip them into the jar of glaze instead of brushing glaze on. After all, three coats of cream-thick glaze is rather thick, and we dip our pots at the Tempe Arts center in glaze to good effect.

This is what happened. I suspected it would be too thick when a drop of glaze solidified on the forehead of one of them like a sprouting unicorn horn.  I knocked it off as best I could, and fired it anyway.  Both of these pieces had to be broken off of the stilts to get them loose.

Everyone seems to really love my smiley balls. I’ve ended up giving away over half of the ones I’ve made.  I wanted to have some to give to friends I’m going to visit in the spring, but carrying full-sized ones in my luggage wouldn’t do, so I planned to make small ones.

These weren’t as easy to sculpt as I thought.  Like the doll heads for my faeries, it’s hard to not damage the part you’ve already done while putting pressure on it to create the next part.  I made a couple dozen of them anyway.

Second hardest part–glazing them.  Here’s a picture of a tool I made to hold them while waiting for the glaze to dry.

It’s two forks duct-taped to a champagne cork, with a rubber band for tension.  It works fairly well. I just wish I had four or five of them.

Haven’t seen one of these for a while!