#hand-building

I made a few more little guys tonight.

Little goblin ears, little mushroom friend, a leaf guy with issues, and one dude with a proper nose.

Oceanic Serving Bowl by Alicia

I made a little teaset for Alicia’s daughter, and this is what she gave me in trade. Isn’t it fantastic? She makes a lot of these dishes and plates, and they are all great. Unfortunately she doesn’t have a blog or anything I can link you to, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

Background

Alicia started making this style of dish because her son doesn’t like his food to touch, so she made him some plates with dividers in them. Which is a pretty great solution, because it’s really hard to buy a divided plate that’s not plastic or metal. 

How they are made

To make them, she starts with a slab of the shape she wants for the bottom, and marks out the outside and interior walls with several layers of coils. Then she squeezes them to thin them and stretch them upwards, to get the delicate wavy edges. She uses BRT, which is what gives it its very organic feel.

She has taken process photos before and has said she’ll do a write up of her process for me. Once she does that, I’ll do a post all about that.

The glaze

It’s glazed with a combination of apple/jade green, a dark blue (that I don’t have the recipe for) and buttermilk. The technique she used to get this fantastic effect was a happy accident.

She said that she put the blue and green on first, but it was too thick and cracked badly as it dried. So she chipped most of it off, leaving just a thin layer. Then she painted over that and on the outside with buttermilk, but while that was still wet, she sprinkled the dry chips of blue/green glaze over it. 

Can we talk for a moment here about Lolo Kokochaka’s work? Unreal. It’s so vibrant and playful, and I’m so envious of how seamlessly she meshes color with shape. It’s something I struggle with a lot in my own work, and it is such an inspiration to see someone work so seemingly effortlessly between the two. She creates really nice, simple forms, enhanced by color scheme. Lolo appears to work predominantly by hand-building out of Copenhagen, Denmark.

I made the Bean God. It must be given legume offerings regularly or bad things will happen.

A trio of bird peoples.