Sunday Final

I hit the road in search of inspiration.
Instead I found rain.
Here I am, hiding out like a I'm made of sugar or something:



I cut my ride short and headed back home to work on that teapot.
Teapots like the one I'm doing are not made to be functional. I make mine to pour, though even that's a stretch.
I use the teapot as a theme, then combine it with another theme to sort of push the idea of the teapot to it's limit.
Handle, spout and lid are the only prerequisites.
Looking at what I had already done, I decided to go industrial.
I ditched the handle I made and started over.
First I rolled out some thin strips of clay:



Spraying the body with water helps to keep it workable and not too dried out.
I then attached two strips to the outside of the teapot body, one on each side:



You can sort of see where I'm going by what I did to the spout.
More spraying then I blended the strips in:



The idea is to create the illusion of an overlap.
Once that was done, I made little clay balls and added some rivets:



I kept the same concept on the handles(the wrap around) except I decided to create bands on the top and bottom. For a second I gave some thought to making the handle out of wood, adding it after the firing, but decided against it.
More on that later.
So, two bands, top and bottom to hold the handle:




You can see where I left the handle long, that's so that it can hold itself up. The clay here is very stressed.
More on that later too.
Then I just added more rivet thingys.
Foo-foos:



I'm still not liking the lid but besides that, I think it turned out okay.
Well, a bit more than just okay.
The thing is, I give this piece about a fifty percent chance of surviving.
In fact, I was doing some patching up until I covered it to dry.
This particular clay has a shrinkage of around five percent. That means as it dries, the clay begins to shrink.
It does most of shrinking in the kiln as chemical water is burned off.
The bands and the way I attached the handles are still sort of wet while the rest of the pot was halfway to dry.
Not good.
If everything dries the same, it has a chance, if not, I expect major cracks to form.
Here's some close ups of the handle area:




I gotta say that's pretty crazy, even for me.
There were a couple of different ways I could have executed the attachment points, but in a fit of madness I did it the hard way.
Using that design it would have been easy to fit a piece of wood for a handle, I just don't know if it's going to make it.
Anyways, we'll see what happens in a couple of days.
If it holds together, I'll probably make a different lid. I was going to do one today, but after thinking about it, I figured I might as well wait.
Next weekend, I'll try something more traditional.