WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK

BURNISHED WHISTLES

CERAMICS I

clay, sawdust fire& glue/water mixture & metallic rubbing compounds

Let's see what my clay peeps have been up to.

Making clay whistle.

Not an easy assignment,

 but they were up to it as you can see below.

Junior Gary Liu Jr. patiently trying to get his clay to whistle.

They had to burnish the pieces with smooth river rocks as well.

And after whistles came out of the sawdust fire they had a choice to either rub with 

the metallics or to use a glue/water mixture to bring out the natural markings from the firing.

All 3 senior boys here chose the metallic.

They are Tarun Desai, Andrew Chen & Jonathan Hsu

Metallic was put on by junior Manav Gandhi (far left) and senior Robert Dunn (far right), 

but junior Gary Liu (middle) used the glue sauce to seal the sawdust fired clay with.

Next we have the work of senior Jonathan Gong,

and juniors Jessica Andres and Annie Oh.

And lastly we have whistles by juniors Cathy Huang, Benjamin Barnett, and Nathan Lam.

I want you to look closely at Nathan's whistle,

note the 6 holes on either side of the whistle area?

He figured out how to play a full scale of notes by the hole placement 

for a whooping 25 extra credit points.

It was very difficult and required great patience with a lot of trial and error on his part.

But he did it!!!

This sawdust was one of the best firings of the year.

Note all the cool flashes of carbon as it marks the clay.

Credit for this goes to my lovely assistant Alyssa Olea (Whitney Ceramic Alumni 2012)

who comes in to load, fire and unload these beauties.

We use anything combustible for the firings.

Poor thing has to put her hands in horse and cow manure

so that we can reach the temps. we need to get to in the oil drum we recycled to fire in.

Keeps it interesting around here  

LOL