Baby Smiling In Back Seat

At last week’s Show and Tell, I showed you three pots I’d made. For each of them, I textured the pot (either the clay or the glaze) using gauze from injections I gave myself during IVF #1. Each of the pots is nice, but none of them turned out the way I’d intended.

Today you get to see the good one.

Like two of last week’s pots, for this week’s plate I used the gauze at the glazing stage. Specifically, I used the gauze in combination with wax resist, as I did with the darkest blue cup last week. I experimented with different thicknesses of gauze — double-layered, quadrupled, octupled — to let through different amounts of wax. It worked!

The layers were thicker in the middle and thinner at the edges, meaning that more wax seeped through at the edges, and that therefore less of the second glaze got absorbed at the edges.

Here is the whole plate. It is 6 inches in diameter.

And here is a close-up of the plate. There are large brown shapes where the wax prevented the second glaze from absorption, and there are little blue swirls where the glaze came through the holes in the gauze. The swirls don’t mimic the squares in the gauze exactly, but it’s definitely different from the way this glaze usually looks.

I have a bunch of gauze from IVF #1 left — as I mentioned last week, there were a lot of injections. And I will collect more gauze for IVF #2 soon, so I’ll try some more experiments over the next few months. Stay tuned for future Show and Tells.