Jewelry and carving

We had a jewelry making class this semester, which I missed coz I was out of town. But I tried to make some anyway. These are the pendents that I made.

I just rolled out a thin sheet of clay and used a cookie cutter to cut out the squares. Then when the clay is a little bit harder, I carved out the patterns and poked a hole using those stirrers from Starbucks.

Glazing them was the hard part. I can't dip them like I do when I glaze my pots, coz these are too small. So the glaze has to be painted on instead. It worked fine for pine green and jade green. But when I tried to use a combination of moody blue and auburn, the colours didn't show up...

I also made some earrings, which many people say look like turtle shells. It was fun to make, but not so fun to glaze. Auburn (the only brownish looking turtle shell) turned out really runny looking... not good...

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I was looking for a nice swirly pattern when I saw this:


So I decided to carve my pot with a "lucky cloud" pattern which is found on the Beijing Olympic torch.

And here is the carved pot!

Fun! I finished it in one afternoon, but my carving tool has worn out. Technically it can still be used, but it is now a potentially dangerous weapon. Time to buy a new carving tool...