SLAB POT: Purse Pot
My Slab pot, is supposed to be a purse, although it looks sort of like a cropped T-shirt. Again, ( like all of my other pots) my idea for a purse pot came with me trying to be different & creative. Unlike pinch pots, there are limits on what you can do with a slab pot. The most classic example would be some kind of a building or a abstract cube.. and it's very hard to have wavy natural looking pots with slab pots. I, not being a big fan of hard edges and measured angles, really really didn't want to do a hard edged pot of some kind. So from the inspiration of what a hard leathery drying clay looked like, I decided to make clay leather…. and came up with the idea of making a bag/purse.
I personally thought it was going to be a challenge… but still somewhat easy. I had it all down in my head and I imagined myself doing all the wrinkles and the seam textures all realistically. It turns out however, that that really wasn't the case. First of all, It was super hard since the slabs were thin and therefore they dried faster. They also lacked support and I ended up getting so frustrated because my wall kept falling apart. Thankfully, I managed to use a newspaper to hold the clay in place before it drove me crazy.
For the glaze I wanted something that had a little contrast in flat areas but big contrast depending on the think/thin-ness of my glaze. I wanted to do a dip glaze because they were prettier, but wanted a brown green and a blue to be present in various areas of my pot. I ended up finding a perfect glaze for my pot, and I really like how it turned out.
The hardest part, and probably my biggest flaw of this pot was that the puzzle aspect of it was not too strong. I couldn't cut through the wavy parts that stuck out of the pot and the puzzle ended up being a somewhat straight cut. Oh well. It still works.