The gods have been appeased.....

....or maybe it's the fact that I left my carbon sitting next to the litter box for a few days.  Honestly all the talk about storing carbon air-tight, priming, sifting....I just let mine lay around and it just keeps on giving.  Candice left a comment on yesterday's post....she read my blog and left her carbon in the laundry room.... and got great colors. 

All these pieces below were in the same run...single layer.  Below is a piece that I molded from a Gary Wilson fossil.  I haven't polished this piece yet.  I think I might just try to seal it as is.

I have been trying to master bracelets with mixed results.  This time I rolled out and textured a strip of clay and placed it around a wooden bracelet mandrel.  Take a look at the mandrel below.  Close to the bottom you can see two faint parallel lines.  This is where I placed the clay to dry.  When it started to dry and pull away from the mandrel, I pushed it up and off so it could finish drying with the constraint of the mandrel.  Look how it shrunk...it tightened up...a lot. 

Check out the texture in the unfired clay. This is from one of the etched copper plates that I made. The text is from a picture that I took at the Louvre. It has a much sharper texture than the polymer tear away sheets.

The fired piece...again...in the same batch as that bright red piece above. The texture really held up well in the firing.

Another dilemma piece....I carved a hole in this piece after it was dry.  This is always risky because the pressure of cutting into the middle of a piece could crack it...but I liked the ragged edges on the inside of the hole.  Well...it wasn't the carving but the fact that I dropped it that made it crack.  So I tried to patch it together with a pseudo staple on the front and the back. 

But it split anyway and you can tell that my cutting wasn't all that precise because it started to split in a few other areas.  I am gong to try to rivet this together with metal straps and then lace it together with leather.  

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