Teapot & Marbling

I found my teapot!

I am pretty happy with the form of the pot itself. The handle is the right shape and size and not drooping (had to support it with a lump of clay while the handle dries to keep it in shape). The spout is a nice shape, and positioned pretty accurately on the pot. The only thing is that the lower tip of the spout is a tad too low. Which means that I can only fill my pot up to about 75% full, beyond which water will flow out of the spout.

The lid fits! But the shape is a bit too fancy for me. If I could, I would have trimmed more off to get a shorter lid. But I was worried that it will crack, so I left it as it is. Gail suggested that I could glaze it a darker colour compared to the pot itself, to attract attention away from the lid.

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We learned how to do marbling using slip. Slip is something like super-diluted clay with a floculant added (reminds me of my dosage form design module back in the NUS days).

Marbling is pretty straigtforward, but requires quite a bit of skill to get a perfect print. Otherwise, a lot of air bubbles may form.

Here is my experimental tray with some leaf patterns. I cut out the shapes on newspaper, and placed them on the surface of the marbled slip. The slip will (magically) stick to the newspaper in a uniform layer. Then I placed the newspaper on the tray, and wait for the slip to dry. The two leaves on the right still have the newspaper intact.

A day later, I removed the other two leaves. And Ta Dah!

You can probably see that there is some chipping off on the centre leaf. That is because I was too kan cheong and wanted to take a peak to see if the slip had stuck to the tray. Apparently, it has not, and the slip decided to stick to the newspaper permanently instead. So strictly no peeking when doing marbling.