I’ve been really busy making palettes this summer. A big thank you to Amber Lane who has kindly included my Honey Bee Palette in many of her photos and videos on Instagram.

I love making the white porcelain palettes but I’ve also missed playing with colorful ceramics. This past weekend’s weather was beautiful so I set aside the time to layout my latest tile table top. The idea for the design came from walking my dogs along the path at Golden Gardens beach.

This patio table is one of the first pieces of furniture James and I bought together. It’s over 20 years old and a little rusted and banged up so it’s more than ready for a makeover. The mesh top is a good substrate for adhering the tiles with thinset. In order to grout the tiles, I’ll tape the underside of the table, apply the grout and remove it when the grout has hardened a bit.

I started making tiled tables as a way to use clay that is too hard to press into molds but is soft enough to roll into slabs and then cut into tiles. They’re also a great way to use up clay bodies and glazes that have been sitting around the studio for a long time.

Sometimes it’s nice to take a break from the more physical routine of tile pressing and work at a slower pace on something. These sgraffito bowls take a fair amount of time to carve but it’s a relaxing, almost meditative, process that yields a very useful item.

This rabbit is the first new tile of the year. Designing tiles is the most fun stage of the the making process; I wish I had more time to do it. I usually try to add three or four new designs every year to my shop but, since there’s not much room in the studio for more molds, it may be time to retire some of the older designs. Even though I feel like my work is evolving in some ways, there’s a lot of sentimental attachment to those tiles. It’s going to be a challenge.

As a tile maker, I make a lot of plaster molds.

This is especially true lately as I’ve been pouring, as opposed to pressing, tiles and palettes. Unlike regular clay, there are chemicals in the casting slip that break down the plaster. This means I need to make new molds fairly often.

The idea for this palette came from an artist named Mona who asked me to make her a white dragonfly tile because she thought it would work well as a small palette. She was right – it made a really good mini palette because of the negative space surrounding the insect.

I’ve been wanting to design another palette so I sketched some ideas incorporating a pattern of dragonflies. Since it is a relatively large piece, I’ve been experimenting with different types of clay in an effort to minimize the warping often associated with larger tiles. I love the white color of porcelain clay for making palettes because I think it provides a great surface for mixing colors, but I decided to try a couple of stoneware clay bodies too. I was taught that stoneware, especially with sand and grog, is less inclined to warp than porcelain. Surprisingly, I did encounter some warping with one of the stoneware clays as it dried. Fortunately, the palette flattened out during the glaze firing.

I glazed the porcelain palettes with clear glaze and the stoneware palettes with white glaze. The white stoneware palettes provide a white surface for mixing colors but they have a more rustic appearance. The darker clay peaks through the white glaze and accentuates the carved details.

This weekend everyone here was either working or doing the Seattle to Portland Bike Ride so I was on my own. I took this quiet time to finally finish my tiled patio table or, as Romy affectionately calls it, “the hippie dippy table project”.

It all started a couple of months ago when James and I were on a Saturday morning drive. I looked out the car window and saw a topless steel patio table on the side of the road. I immediately thought, hmmm, that looks like it’s in pretty good shape; it would make a nice tile project. So I said, “Stop, let’s get it!” He said it wouldn’t fit in the back of the Prius and kept driving.  Later that day I recruited Ollie to come with me in the Volvo wagon to see if it was still there. It was and he helped me lift it into the car.

When I got home, I tipped the table over onto a thick piece of spare plywood that I had in the basement and traced the top. It took a little work to reacquaint myself with my old jigsaw but I figured it out eventually. The rest was pretty easy. I made a lot of tiles from slabs of clay using cookie cutters. I then glazed them with a variety of cone 5 glazes I have in the studio. The last steps were laying them out, setting them with thinset, and grouting. I did apply a sheet of waterproofing barrier on top of the plywood. I’ll probably be leaving the table out in the rain and I’m hoping the barrier will protect the plywood from water damage.

I finally finished this series of panels a couple of weeks ago. Each panel took quite a bit of time as I worked on them slowly, completing various stages while working on other pieces. One of my goals this year is to limit firings by only firing fully loaded kilns. It saves a lot of time and energy (both my physical energy and electricity) but requires a lot of patience. These panels will be part of a series that counts from 1 to 12. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with this series yet but they will be part of a tessellating animal calendar at the very least. More about this in a future post…