It’s always a little odd to return to the studio after a long time away, especially traveling. The first day back always involves a little (or a lot of) dawdling… organizing thoughts and ideas, getting reacquainted with the feel of the work space and materials, being motivated to create. Usually it takes me a couple of days to really get back into the swing of things.

But there’s nothing like a fast-approaching deadline to get you moving right away… and I had one of those to kick-start my week after a get-away-from-it-all holiday. A full wedding ceremony tea set (with back-ups) to be completed in an already fully scheduled ten days, you say? Challenge accepted! Plenty of people would be able to pull it off easily, but teapots are not my cup of tea (yes, I just did that). Still, I do like a good challenge, particularly when it involves creativity.

Here are some of the pieces just before they were decorated with slip (liquid clay).

Anyway, the moment of truth comes tomorrow when the glaze kiln is opened. To be honest, I’m a bit nervous.

I’ve been contemplating shapes recently, trying to get out of a “shape rut” at the wheel.

I’m hoping that these silhouettes of tea time will help inspire me… at the very least, I do appreciate the elegant lines cast by the various items in profile.

Love it when something bad happens (a mug breaks) and something funny comes out of it (this clay face).

Can you see his crooked nose, prominent chin, thick eyebrows and worried look?

As frustrating as it is when something goes wrong in the studio, we should always be able to laugh at our mistakes!

(This wasn’t my broken mug, but everyone — including its creator — had a good chuckle at the clay face that appeared in the act of destruction.)

I finished a batch of mugs recently. All of them are wheel-thrown and hand-painted with various “characters” using the traditional Chinese qinghua (blue flower) paint. This raccoon one is my favorite of the bunch.

Qinghua painting has been really fun to do… I find myself enjoying it much more than I expected to. To me, the contrast of the cobalt against porcelain or even bare stoneware clay (as shown above) is beautiful. My only frustration with the paint is that it smudges quite easily during any part of the process (even after bisque firing), so the pieces have to be handled very delicately. In any case, if done correctly, the outcome can be quite lovely.

If you’ve been following along, you’ll be aware that I have been playing around with these “Qinghua character” designs ever since I took a qinghua workshop during my trip to Jingdezhen. The decorating and glazing process for this series of mugs is still a bit complicated and involves much waiting (I have lamented a bit on this topic), so I’m working on trying to streamline it in order to minimize further frustration for myself.

In the meantime, I’m gonna enjoy having this cutie on my desk : )

I’ve been lacking focus in the studio. Since returning from my brief trip to Beijing last week, I’ve been dilly-dallying (cue: hanging head in shame). It’s bad. Really bad. For example, I spent five hours “glazing” yesterday; about three quarters of that time involved numerous tea breaks and chit chat and general dawdling. (As usual, the process of glazing does nothing to inspire me. To be clear, I love thinking about and concocting various cool glaze combinations, but the actual doing often has the undesired effect of killing the inspiration.)

The lack of focus is driving me nuts, but somehow I just can’t figure out what I want to do next. I seem to be caught in this space where there is simultaneously too much to explore and too little to do. That is, there are a lot of ideas swimming in my head yet I’m not ready to commit to any of them. My excuse is that I’m still searching for the idea that is worth sinking time and energy into developing.

Honestly, I know I just have to make a decision and get started on something… anything.

Remember my frustration with glazing last week? I had been playing around with new, fancy ideas which made my glazing process much more complicated than it needed to be. Well, I’m here to declare that it was all worth it! To be honest, there was a bit of anxiousness that I had managed to ruin all of my painstaking qinghua painting work with the experimentation. However, the pieces came out of the glaze firing looking much better than I expected. I am actually very happy with the results.

These cups were the most complex and time-consuming of the batch due to the “windows” of paisley all around the outside (plus a tiny little one on the inside). While I love the effect, I will have to rethink this design…

All in all, I’m loving the qinghua pigment with dark blue or white glaze and I’ll definitely be playing with the combinations a lot more.

The weather forecast shows rain over the next few days.

Fittingly, here are some bisque-fired “forecast spoons” to add a bright (and fun) spot to an otherwise grey Monday…

Rain outside means I’ll be staying inside the workshop to get some glazing done. Yay…?