No one tells you how difficult it is to clean a hollow die. When it comes out you can barely even see the metal.

The extruder is fun. The teeth on this one make it so that I'm never exerting too much force. I saw videos of people who are like standing on the wall and still struggling. This isn't no effort, but it is somewhat light effort to get things through.

I made all of these into vases by cutting a bottom and adding it on. I'll get fancier as I experiment more.

This reminds me of the symbol from the TV show Charmed, but I think it will make a really cool bud vase.


This die is like a giant noodle. I think it's going to look awesome with a glaze that breaks.




This one came out with some personality




There's something about a hexagon. I think this shape might make a really nice size mug.

I bought myself an extruder for the holidays. Just got it mounted. Craig decided it needed to be mounted to a board then to the wall so that it was attached to two studs. It might be overkill or it might be saving the walls. I went with one from Steel Potter at The Ceramic Shop. It's not well known, but I was obsessed with their dies.

So I started down the path last week with the work around for all my images. I didn't realize that it was "working" because I'm logged into Google. So if you're logged into Google on your browser then rainbows and butterflies - all the images work for 2023 (that's as far as I got). However, if you don't have a google account or aren't logged in, then you're not seeing anything. Google still has the issue assigned and hasn't said they aren't going to fix it yet, but I am wondering at this point if they will. They haven't posted anything since 2 days after it happened even though more people post about having the issue each day. For them this isn't a big deal, but for small business it's huge.

sigh

I love the bowls that I make and how big they are, but they don't stack very well. I wanted to play with some stackable bowls. I made 4 blank and 4 crab. This is the last crab one I made that I feel like came out the best. I've gotten really good at mug shapes, but definitely struggle more with bowls. This one is interesting because the diameter of the top and bottom are much different. I still have to clean up the rim once it's leather hard.

I bought a set of these molds for myself over the holidays. There's no texture on them now because I want to play with glaze techniques later. These two vases are the small and the medium, haven't had a chance to make the large yet.

I feel like I'm getting better at smoothing the clay in the puzzling molds.