Studio Day: Hand Built Ceramics

Today I spent a good 6 hours in the studio finishing up some sculpted tiles and hand building six plates.  First the tiles.  They needed to be finished -- I had started them over the last couple of weeks:

These will later be sanded, fired, partially glazed and mounted into frames.

On this particularly large tile, I rubbed fine sand into the surface.  I am curious how it will fire up.

I then set about to make a set of Antipasti plates. In total I want four rectangles as serving plates and 8 small squares as plates to eat from.

Hand building is something I do when I want irregular shapes or very large bowls which are too fatiguing to make on the wheel.  Here's how it works:

First, I cut the clay bases from the large block....

...much like slicing a piece of bread from a loaf with a wire.

Then I rolled long strands of clay, much like we all learned in kindergarten...

...and attached the rolls to the edge of the base which I cut from the block.

I managed to get the four rectangles formed as well as two squares.  I wrapped them up in plastic and will wait a couple of days.  When they have firmed up a bit, I will  go back and completely clean them up.  

On these particular plates, I want the irregular edge. I am not sure how I am going to glaze them yet.  It was a productive studio day.

Here is an example of a large bowl which I also hand built -- it is approximately 23 inches in diameter, is glazed on the inside and raw on the outside.