Ceramic Bead Making Class

These are pictures of from the ceramic bead making class I taught last Saturday. These are shots from Day One. Students are working in low fire white ceramic clay so that they will get good, bright results when they glaze their beads and pendant. We made beads, pendants, toggle clasps, and links with high temp wire.

Here are the flatter pieces, links, toggles, pendants. The large flat piece in the front has markings from a beautiful sea urchin from Belize. Students were so inventive and extremely engaged in their work.

Here is the class set up in our Barn Studio. There is a wonderful view of the now green, green pasture out these window. I like the class size around 4 students and that is just what we had. Plenty of time for everyone to get the attention they need and plenty of room at our long table that hails from another ceramic studio begun many years ago at the Handweaving Museum in Clayton. We got this when they were remodelling several years ago.

We kept our ready to dry work in little plastic trays or these ridged plates. They will go out into the entrance way to my studio which has shelves. It is a bit drier there than in my studio which is below ground level a bit and very moist-- a good and bad quality.

The fragile flat pieces I topped with another piece of plaster board later to help prevent warping.

Students very concentrated on their work. All made beautiful pieces. It is such a pleasure to be around such creative folks. Thank you for coming.

Next weekend on Day Two we will be glazing the beads and doing some raku firing of some of them. I'll post those pics afterwards.