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I have a very good excuse for not having posted in the past week or ten days or however long, and it is this:

This is a strictly no-gushing area, however, so I will be concise and say only that I went to Paris & Paris has art museums & and I am interested in art, and let you put two and two together and also make you a present of the pictures I took in the Louvre, which, come to find out, has not only the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo and ten thousand Chinese tourists waving Nikon d5000s, but also pots! Who knew?

So, to return to the point, I like to make tall skinny pieces, not unlike those immediately below, although those are stone and I didn't make them, but the point is, I don't know how well tall skinny pieces are going to work in the pit-firing process, because they're not very sturdy and likely to crack even in the relatively consistent and safe electric kilns. 

Pieces are also likely to crack in unstable firings (like pit firings, where the temperature of the kiln os not constant) if they have a lot of embellishments, e.g. handles, like below.

So: for fear of cracking, I must avoid elaborate handles, add-ons, and tall skinny forms. I'll still make some such pieces because I have no way to predict exactly how they'll turn out, but I'm worried that if I make a collection of tall skinny pieces with handles they'll all break and my presentation will be me dramatically unveiling a lot of broken shards, at the thought of which my blood runs cold. How, then, can I make my pieces remotely visually interesting? Well, like this, of course:

The above are nice. They are actually made of stone, not clay, but that form will be pretty easy to make on a wheel. The main concern will be not making the lip too thick and the piece itself too heavy.

I really like the above. I've never seen the tiny-handles thing before. I can't tell if they were functional, like maybe they had some kind of handle of organic fiber strung through them which has long since rotted, or if they were purely aesthetic. But I like them and I doubt they would be in great danger of cracking or being bumped in the kiln, so I will try and incorporate them into some pieces based on the above photo.

As for the photo below, these are great, I love them; they're also a great deal larger than the pieces in the previous photos (although maybe you can't tell), and much more difficult to make. So maybe if I have enough pieces to satisfy me towards the end of the project I'll tackle these forms, minus the little pedestal feet on the bottom, because who needs that? And it would worry me in the firings (the feet, I mean).

The pieces with the tiny handles, by the way, are products of the Naqada II and III periods in Egypt, about 3500-3200 and 3200-3000 BC, respectively--also known as the last phases of Egyptian prehistory. And it turns out that in the Naqada periods nobody used potter's wheels, which doesn't sound fun to me, so I'll be keeping the aesthetic--the product--but not the method.

Until the next entry, au revoir, a bientot, etc., ha, ha.