Ok, this is the tale of many hearts that came out of my last firing. But a tale of two hearts just sounded so much better. Kind of like the title of some gothic romance novel.
But not these hearts up there in the sweet circle. I am perfectly happy with these. They are made of a chocolately stone ware clay that I found in my studio the other day. The clay is lots of years old and left over from an ancient tile project. I pressed and cut these hearts from a scaled up version of the photo polymer plates that I showed you here.
But these hearts in porcelain? I am not so happy. Love the glaze. It's actually a very ugly glaze that I've given a little twist. But that twist is entirely off topic and I like to be on track. See those arrows up there? There are flaws in the porcelain. Teeny, tiny little surface cracks. Nothing structural. Doesn't show up until after final kiln firing. I don't like them.
But I can fix it (I think :-). Not these hearts. They are done. They are toast. It all has to do with how these hearts get made. And I kinda stuffed up. There's another step that needs to happen in making these. I say this with great confidence but it's really just another step in the process of working with a new method of making. It's entirely possible the whole thing could get scrapped. But if I can fix this up I will be mighty happy because I really like the impressions these photopolymer plates make.
And here is a totally unrelated error in the porcelain hearts. It's a little tiny blister in the glaze. These reds are so prone to it. It annoys me because I really, really like this colour. Which is weird because I am not a red/pink kind of girl. If you look very closely I think you will find some of those tiny little cracks in these hearts too.
And this one too, has those bitty cracks. This is like having the gauntlet thrown down. There's a problem here. How do I fix that? It's a challenge. How do I solve this problem. It's a bit of what keeps me coming back to the studio. If it were all easy and worked out perfectly each time, I'd get sooooo bored.
I'm curious. What do you do when you have a set back when you try something new?
