The
weather can make all the difference to making pots. Today has been damp and
drizzly and the air feels colder too, which makes drying times much longer. The
jugs I threw yesterday were too damp to turn and the handles I was making for
them too soft to attach. So while I waited for both jugs and handles to dry out
and stiffen, I decided to make some pottery stamps.
Pottery
stamps are so easy to make. The easiest method is to take a piece of clay and
roll it into a ball. Flatten one side of the ball to give yourself a ‘stamp’
area, and then use wooden sticks, metal tools or any type of utensil to carve
or impress designs into the clay. This is best done while the clay is on its
way to becoming leatherhard, but can be done to soft clay too if you make
confident marks.
Alternatively,
make a cylinder shape and impress your design right around the cylinder (but
not the ends). This type of stamp is called a roulette. They work by holding
them at the flat ends and rolling them like a wheel into soft clay to create a
continuous repeat pattern. Both types of stamp must be left to dry out
thoroughly before bisque firing in the kiln. This will make them hard enough to
use again and again, and as long as you look after them (and don’t drop them!)
they should last years.
This
is exactly the method I used to make my own pottery seal. For the first few
years of making pots I used to carve my initials into bases by hand. This is
time consuming however and can sometimes look scratchy, so I decided to design
my own seal. At first I got distracted by the idea of having a metal seal
especially made: but this seemed an unnecessary expense and not personal
enough. So instead I played around with some designs before settling on my
initials made using a simple handmade clay seal. As you can see in the photo
above, these have been bisque fired and feature my initials in reverse. They’re
both the same design but one of them is indented and the other is in relief,
which gives me the option of having an ‘outward’ or ‘inward’ stamp. I’ve been
using them for about five years now and all my work is stamped using them: even
the smallest buttons!
Anyway,
eventually the jugs and handles dried out enough for me to finish them…
