Ok, so I actually had about 5 Christmases. I shared the traditional one with my parents and sisters, spent the following day with relatives in Tennessee, last week spent a night with my aunt and cousin visiting from Florida, did a Christmas with the housemates this week and finally finished up tonight by exchanging gifts with my boyfriend. So now I can finally post photos of all of the Christmas gifts I made because they have now all been given!
I gave my parents a 25-piece dish set. Here is their large serving bowl with two small salad bowls. I forgot to get pictures of the plates and will post those later. I started this set back in late August or early September and have several plates made with different glazes, trying out different greens before finding the one I settled on. I even started out by melting glass in the grapes but ultimately decided to just glaze them. I'm really happy with how the set turned out in the end but it was a huge project that I won't attempt again for a long while.
Here's my mom's tea mug when I first got it and then the first time she used it. I glazed it with the same purple I used in the grapes on the dish set. Its such a cool design, with the pocket on the side to hold the used tea bag. And of course I had to add a little something to make it my own so I put a snail on the top of the handle.
This is a milk and cookie mug I made for my dad that also matches the dish set. I made one for my sister Michaela too, its blue. They're similar to the tea mug but with a bigger side pocket, perfect for holding Oreos.
I made this cute little mug for my other sister, Megan. The handle is a snail and its glazed in her favorite colors. She drinks a lot of tea and coffee so I knew I could make her any kind of mug and just have fun with it. There's even a picture of her using it.
I sent my grandmother and great grandmother teapots which I showed pictures of in an earlier blog and I didn't want my grandfather to feel left out so I made him this mug. I glazed it with floating blue, the same glaze I used on my frog jar with legs, but it
came out with pretty purples and browns too. It was the prettiest glaze I've ever had come out on one of my pieces, I loved it!I had the housemates gifts planned out a long time ago but getting them done was another story. Matt had asked for a "Thor Mug" months ago and I finally got the design right and got it made. Its basically a mug made to look like the comic book character, Thor's, hammer. I basically just hand-built a square mug that I glazed and painted silver (it has at least five coats of paint), did a handle that I wrapped in suede and finished it by painting the Thor symbol on the side.
David's gifts were easy, I made him four matching apple baking bowls.
He's made us all baked apples before and had seem the bowls at a festival a while back. He really liked them and they were really easy to make.Brad's gift was by far the most trying. I've written about it multiple times, how the final product was at least the fifth attempt. I made his first teapot and the glaze went on too thick and it
cracked in the kiln, I attempted to throw at least three other teapots that failed, I ended up with two donut shaped vases because they never got a spout or handle and I made one beautiful teapot before this one and broke it on the way to the Odyssey. So this is was the final result and Brad's gift.And finally, I gave Tenzie his dragon bowl. See, Tenzie told me that he "doesn't do pottery" so he was a challenge because I had to make something he would really like. He doesn't drink coffee and he's still in college so nice dishes were out of the question. So I made him this dragon bowl instead. I went kind of crazy with it too. It took about five hours to throw and do the hand building work then I glazed it and then hand painted the details metallic green and red, his spikes and eyes and everything. I even lightly brushed the red over his whole body and then rubbed it off so it would stay in the scales. I painted paper and then laminated it for the wings, they were the final touch he needed to really make it work. I love him!
So those were all of the Christmas gifts I made this year. It was fun but really stressful and I'm hoping next year I'll have my own kiln so I can get pieces done faster. I'll be starting earlier too, with or without my own kiln.I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas! Thanks for being so patient with me, I promise to be writing more often again, now that my holidays have finally ended!
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