Tulip bowls

In previous blogs I have described the making of bowls and plates through handbuilding, rather than throwing on the wheel. One of my main projects this year, in the ceramics workshop, is to create a dinnerware set. Details of the large and small plates of the dinnerware set can be found here, here, here, and here. Here are two of the bowls for the set after I put the feet on them, using two thin semi-circular slabs.

When the four bowls (it is a quartet tableware set) came out of the bisque fire, I drew the tulip designs directly on them with a pencil. I talk about the bowls and my plans for glazing here.

I started with glaze painting the flowers - two different colours of yellow.

I glaze painted the leaves and stems with "tropic green" a speckly green that I particularly like, but I painted a coat of "apple green" over the stems as I wanted them to vary from the leaves, but still have that nice speckle.

Since a glaze fire was announced, I worked at getting one bowl completely glazed. The background and inside of the bowl are glazed with the same "speckled turquoise" that are on the plates.

I was very happy with the firing results of the bowl! I found out that the tropic green is one of the runnier glazes and really liked that gravity pulled it down a bit to accentuate the terracotta lines. I also enjoy the random dripping into the stem from the leaves.

Here is another view of the first finished tulip bowl. The "speckled turquoise" is a consistently beautiful colour and the interior of the bowl is very smooth.

Another view of the finished bowl! Once I finish glazing the other three bowls, I will start work on 4 mugs to complete the dinnerware set.

ceramic handbuilt bowls

I made four bowls to go with my tulip dinnerware set, which can be seen in progress and finished here, here, here and here. A medium-size pudding bowl was used as a former (lined with cling film of course!).

You can see the feet on the bowls are made by two half-moon, measured slab pieces similar to the feet on the small plates in the set. They were affixed when the bowls were leather hard, in the usual manner of scoring and slipping.

I drew tulip designs on each bowl's exterior. I think the interiors will be the solid speckled turquoise glaze that I used for the background on the plates (so they will also connect with the backgrounds on the bowl exteriors). The speckled turquoise glaze has a bit of a rough texture, though, so I will also do a top coat of clear glaze to hopefully smooth it out.

A glaze firing was going to be put on, so I shelved these bowls, knowing that the glaze-painting of the designs would take a bit more time than I had. I quickly glazed a smaller, simpler bowl so it would go in that firing.

This turned out to be a good plan! Using only two glazes - fire engine red for the interior and rose gold for the exterior - my small terracotta bowl turned out quite lovely. I call it Libation Bowl. Though I am sure this is suitable for blood sacrifices, it will probably get most use as a peanut bowl.