Supersturctures

Here is the first of a series of large bottles. They are destined for the soda kiln and 'should' fit into the bisque kiln. Here is how it is built:

I rolled my clay at about 3/8", cleaned off the face, and draped it over my wooden mold.

After using the heat gun to stiffen up the clay a bit I flipped it over. Here you can see the plywood mold. This one is scaled up from the tall bottle in my previous post but you can cut these at any dimension. You want to make three of these clay slabs and let them sit for a couple of hours before you try to put it all together.

Now comes the tricky part......assembly. You may want help holding them up so you can get a good bead of clay on the inside seem or you can get handy with whatever is around and prop the sucker up as I have done.

Once all three sides are together the piece is very stable and you can really work those seems. 

If the piece is going to crack this is where it is going to happen, so compress the crap out of it! I spend about ten to fifteen minutes compressing each of these seems. This also gives me time to give it a crisp and sharp edge, which really adds to the look of the piece.

Did I mention slip and score everything really well? 

Cut out a triangle piece for the bottom and apply. I use a pony roller to compress the foot and get a nice clean looking foot.

Before I flip the piece over it is good to go over each of these seems again and get them  as good as you can down near the foot.

The top is similar to the bottom but as you can see there is no definition between the walls and the top. Time to get out your soft rubber rib and compress again.

The neck is really important. The diameter, the length, and it's relationship to the bottle itself really give your pot it's final character. 

I added this final piece to the top but it could go either way.

Final height is 29 inches......bisque kiln is 27 inches. It'll fit! I used one bag of Laguna Bmix on this project. After it dries I will bring it to the spray booth and apply a colored flashing slip.