Looking for a suitable bowl to stand my ginger beer plant in yesterday afternoon, I remembered these bowls that I threw on the wheel at Batley School of Art in 1969 and I brought them down from the attic.
These were the rejects; somewhere I’ve got one bowl which was slightly more successful but my ultimate ambition had been to make a teapot. Mr MacAdam, our ceramics tutor, talked me through the process, which involved throwing a spout separately and attaching that with slip (watered-down clay) to the teapot. He was keen that the handle should appear to grow naturally from the pot.
Unfortunately I never got that far. Several, if not all of these bowls, were originally intended to be teapots but they wobbled on the wheel and, in order to salvage something from my efforts, I cut them down and repurposed them.
I had some limited success with mugs. You can drink from them, but my idea of randomly blotching them with manganese powder didn’t work: they just look as if someone with blue powder paint on their hands has picked them up.
But I do like the glaze on these bowls, I just wish that I’d used the same glaze on the mugs. Mr MacAdam keep a grey, A4 hardback, which he referred to as his ‘Dirty Book’, to keep a record of recipes for glazes that he tried. He claimed that he could always tell which students had done life drawing by the shapes of the pots they threw on the wheel.
I treasured a demonstration mug which Mac made to demonstrate the process. There were subtle features, like a sharper edge on the inside of the rim to prevent tea dribbling down the outside of the mug. I used the mug right through college but sadly it got broken decades ago.