Bird retrospective

In 2007, we took a trip to Vancouver Island. While we were waiting for the ferry in Port Angeles, Washington, we admired the huge cormorant statues by Duncan Yves McKiernan, and I wondered if I could make small versions of those elegant forms on the pottery wheel. When we got home, I gave it a try. I was five years into clay, and still pretty new to altering thrown forms. I ended up with a bunch of phallic abstract birds that looked like this:

(This was also before I learned how to photograph my work, and I thought a blue tablecloth would make a satisfactory backdrop for a formal shot. Oof.)

In the intervening years, I have made hundreds of chickens...

...and hundreds of penguins,...

...and learned a ton about clay and design and googly eyes.

Today I recalled those not-so-long-necked wheel-thrown-and-altered cormorants of yore, drew upon everything I've learned in the meantime about making wheel-thrown-and-altered chickens and penguins, and came up with a pair of dinosaurish herons.

These birds are standing on chopstick legs, but I'm thinking once they're fired, I'll make metal legs for them--or bribe my beloved engineer to make metal legs for them--and stick them in the garden.

Pi plate, test 2

Today I tested the second π plate, to make sure the survival of the first one wasn't a fluke.

First, I washed the π plate, because it had been sitting out in the dining room for two weeks holding sea monsters (see postscript) and collecting dust, because we're not as good at putting things away when pandemics preclude having company for dinner. Washing confirmed that this plate, like the other one, had not vitrified--i.e. the clay is still porous. The glazed top didn't seem to soak up any water, but the unglazed bottom did. I wiped the plate dry and let it sit on the counter for a few hours, but I assume it remained a little damp. 

I prepared a tart crust, put it in the plate, and stuck the plate in the freezer for an hour. 

While it was chilling, I prepared a really fine vanilla custard with six--count 'em, six--egg yolks.

I removed the chilled crust/plate from the freezer, put a piece of parchment paper on top of it, filled it with dry black beans (cuz who needs pie weights?), and put it back in the freezer while the oven preheated to 375^oF. Then I put the cold pie plate straight into the oven. 

Twenty minutes later, I took it out and lifted out the beans. That's how I learned that chilled dry black beans are excellent insulators. The bottom of the crust hadn't cooked thoroughly, so back into the oven it went, minus beans, for another 10 minutes. Ta da:

After letting the crust cool, I filled it with custard and topped it with fresh sliced strawberries.

The final step involved eating pie with E and S. The crust was delectably crisp.

Three non-breakages don't guarantee these plates won't crack, but I'm pretty comfortable describing them as "oven safe."

Postscript: There be monsters here.

GeekPots

In addition to making π plates, I also made a website for my pottery biz. I figured it was time for something more formal and more malleable than this blog and Facebook. Making the π plates was easier than making the website, if you don't count the 18 years I've been practicing making pots. It was supposed to be a serious site, but the chatty chickens had other ideas. Geekpots.com. Please check it out!

Pi plate

I have been meaning to make a π plate for years, and this spring I finally did. The plate includes about 800 digits--my favorite run of which is 999999--before spiraling off to infinity underneath the rim.

I'm generally wary of using pottery in the oven. S and I once had a beautiful hand-painted baking dish from Poland, and we followed all of the instructions for its use until it cracked in the oven. Typically, pottery should go into a cold oven and warm up as the oven does. That doesn't seem conducive to pie plates, since pie crusts usually go from the refrigerator or freezer straight into a hot oven, so the π plate remained unrealized. Then a student at Claymakers requested a class on pots for cooking, and the studio manager gave me a bag of thermal-shock resistant clay to test out in preparation for that. 

I made two test plates, and glazed them with the two glazes I have that usually show texture the best. One showed the digits well, and the other did not. This made it easy to decide which plate to sacrifice to thermal shock testing.

After the empty plate survived going straight into a hot oven, I made the best pie crust I've ever made, tucked it into the pie plate, stuck it in the fridge overnight, filled it with the best spinach, onion, and Gruyère quiche filling I've ever made (fresh whole spinach is key) and put it into a hot oven. It performed extremely well.  

We ran the plate through the dishwasher, and learned it clearly hadn't vitrified at the temperature I had fired it to (^6). Given that earthenware is likewise porous and often used for bakeware, I'm not particularly worried about that.

The next test will be to make a pie in the other π plate, to make sure the success of the first one wasn't a fluke. Then we'll have to eat the pie, to make sure it's OK--all in the name of research, of course.