Pasta Galore!

What they asked for: 12-16 pasta plates, 8” in diameter. They liked warm reds, and warm yellow-greens and cool blue-greens.

I started fleshing out my ideas for this project in early January and quickly got to throwing. Typically when I throw I don’t care to weigh my clay, but this commission was a game changer! It was very important to me to get each piece as similar to the rest, so out came the scale and rulers! I carefully weighed out 2.5 lbs of clay per plate. While throwing, I brought out a ruler to make sure the rims of the plates were the same diameter.

I spent January and February throwing plate after plate waiting for them to dry, checking to see if they were dry, waiting some more, checking them again, and FINALLY trimming them. At any one time I had 7 plates waiting to dry. Whew. The initial process for these took a LONG time.

Three freshly thrown plates!

A test plate with the final glaze combination pre-firing.

In February and March the plates started coming out of the bisque kiln. I made some mini plates to test glaze combinations. I finally fell in love with a combination that resulted in the warm, vibrant orangey brown you see above, with a beautiful splash of layered blue! You can see here what the plates looked like before going through the glaze kiln.

As these pieces came out of the glaze fire I took special care to sand the bottom of each piece. I ended up with 20 plates and quickly whittled down the 4 that weren’t quite up to par. This was a local comission so I was able to pack these plates up in my car and deliver them right to their house!

You can now find me in the studio now with a ruler close at hand, ready to tell you exactly how much clay I’m throwing with!