Firing discovery

Some time ago my neighbour gave me one of those charcoal kettle BBQ's. I had the idea at the time of using it for paper making but then I got a gas burner BBQ and the kettle sat in the garage lean to collecting dust and spider webs. A few months ago i asked Ricky's Mum if she could make use of it and she said. Yes as they didn't have one. Fast forward to two weeks ago at pottery - I’d gone over to the studio after work on the Thursday evening but was not feeling the best. I'd even considered going straight home, but I'm glad I didn't. While having a coffee and a chat with Wendy and Rod, who are key members of the group, we somehow got on to the subject of pit firing and ways to it in your backyard. That's when I learned about using a kettle BBQ. Wendy suggested I have a look on YouTube so I watched a videos  and got very enthused in giving it a go myself. Needless to say, the next day I phoned Ricky's Mum and asked if I could be an Indian-giver and have the BBQ back. When I explained why, she more than happy to return it as Ricky enjoy doing pottery and it'll be something different for him to learn about.

I even had the bags of charcoal returned to me.

My idea was to create a pottery boot that could be used as a kitchen herb planter. I found a boot pattern online and enlarged it 400% to to actual size of a boot.

 I talked to Wendy at the pottery group, who has years of experience working with clay. She was very excited for me when I said I'd acquired a kettle BBQ from my neighbour and didn't realise what I could do in it when I gave away but had it returned. She recommended I used red raku clay as it is a hardy, coarse clay ideally suited for the hand building of large work, slab building and sculpting. 

  It has "beautiful strength, plasticity, workability and is forgiving for all methods of hand building. plu really low shrinkage - a stunning handbuilding clay" 

 I found the easiest way to roll it out was "slapping it down" and "flipping it over" to stretch it.

  Then I cut out the shapes using the paper templates as my guide. When I tried to assemble it, it wasn't what I really had in mind -it was more like a converse sneaker.

  So I went and got my boots and tried to take a pattern off of them which was tricky to do.

 It took at few attempts to get the shapes right...

...and not have it too thick or too thin.

In the end I abandoned to whole idea as it turns out making a boot is much easier in my head than in reality! I think I'd better just stick to soap dishes.

 PAPER-MAKING/SOAP LABELLING

I needed to make up a batch of paper so I could label more soap.

SOAP-MAKING:

I spent an afternoon making soap as I've almost run out of stock.