This past week has been all about porcelain seeds. I made 16 solid bulbs and fit them to each opening in the pod. I then cut each bulb in half, hollowed them out, and reattached them, patching the seams and smoothing the surfaces.
I also added little nubs into the bottom of each cavern and cut out the bottom of each seed and replaced it with soft clay, so that when I placed a seed into its crevasse, it created a latch-key mechanism to hold the seeds in place through firing. I placed a couple of sheets of toilet paper in between the sandy red clay and the smooth porcelain seeds, so that the two bodies don’t mix.
The last step of the process was to cut the bottom of the pod to balance the weight. For the past few weeks I have been working with a foam bumper under the bottom of the heavier side, so that the whole piece didn’t tip over. Today I cut it at a different angle, duct-taped a coarse sheet of sandpaper to a wheel, and sanded down the bottom of the seed pod.
Pure innovation.
This piece is now ready for firing and glazing! It took a lot of trial and error to figure out how to build it, but I’m really happy with how it turned out and I’m excited to start a new project.