Ahead of the curve

I spent a luxurious full day at UCLAN in a more or less deserted studio today.  Katie had the 'toasty' spraying room to herself (due to Kate's experiments with firing bread soaked in slip!), Roberta took over the throwing room and I had the whole of the hand-building workshop to myself!

I had a mixed day.  I planned to make as many components as possible for a large version of the hexagonal structure so spent much of the day extruding and corrugating clay, ending up with several boards of extrusions!  Just as well I had the room to myself because I had to use up most of the bench space!! It's going to need a real feat of 'moisture management' in getting this big work put together.  The component parts are small and dry out very quickly. Also the structure is open and the air flows freely around the edges quickening the drying time further. That - and finding space to store the component parts - are going to be the significant challenges before I even start trying to build it...

Board no.1 of extrusions!  I like this in itself!
I've put it on the back burner to make try else based on these parallel wavy lines

But - good news... my single plane larger hexagonal work had come out of the bisque okay - in that it held together.  There are some issues with joins and a couple of sections did drop out when I moved it across the bench.  I need to make sure I pay extra attention to the joins when making the larger version.  Quality of construction is going to be crucial as I scale the work up.  Handling is difficult even at bisque.  I'm going to have to make sure these structures are always moved on a board until fully stoneware fired. Even then, it will be interesting to see how strong they end up.

There were a half a dozen or so places with slight gaps where there should have been tight joins

More good news - a few other small test pieces came out of this bisque okay too.  I photographed them as a little collection and think they sit together well as a group:

I did say I had a 'mixed' day...  Not everything went well. I unwrapped a quite large piece of work that I'd been making 2 weeks ago and had stored on the shelf above my bench. Somehow, this had fallen over - no idea how.  It was in about 4 big pieces but had dried out in such a way that I couldn't match the sections back together again.  I wasted 2 precious hours rebuilding it... I managed to save all of the 'teeth' but had to remake the wave sections. I think it actually looks better than it did before it got damaged (I forgot to take a picture!).  Here it is before I rebuilt it...

:-(