Dinner Plates

Well it's not all porcelain around here these days. At our Holiday Show people kept asking for dinner plates and here is the first half of them. I made 25 altogether, including ones for our home that Anne asked for. Never hurts to order when everyone else is ordering.

While I love to make porcelain, I also love to make pots that people can use every day. A mug that someone might cherish gives me great satisfaction, and I love to see lots of pots all lined up neatly, ready for the next step, whatever that is. There were also orders for bowls and I got all of them in except for 4 hiding on the table in the photo below. They are lined up in a square, but even 4 makes me happy. It's 25F here in North Florida this morning and the large electric in the photo, Papa Bear, is firing to go off around noon. We are going for heat today.

Here is what the plates will look like when they are fired, well, except that they will be plates instead of pie plates. I use two different matte glazes and then spray an ash like glaze in the interstices of the glazing process. Each piece is glazed with many layers which require handling the pots several times before stacking them into the large gas kiln, where they are reduction fired to cone 10, around 2350F.

I do have to say that these pie plates bake incredible pies. Anne makes an apple pie every Thanksgiving and a cherry pie every Christmas and the pies are always wonderful and crusts are always perfect. They are a bit larger than the traditional pie, but, what the heck, it just means more pie. Yum.