Completed [The Glassworks] Bowls (Job Thread 2)

[Lenell Belleste]

Timestamp: 30th of Spring, 513 AV

Lenell made her way to the small back door of the Glasswork's pottery area. She was very happy it had an individual access to the outside, since it kept her from having to go every day through the blazing hot area for glass making, with that frightening, red molten glass being carried about. She had learned a new respect for artists and artisans that worked in glass. Not only did they need talent to make fine things, but, in her opinion, they also needed stronger nerves than she had.

The pottery area ran people in several shifts to make the best use of their limited space and tools. It also helped conserve kiln fuel. Kilns needed to be kept up to a certain temperature when firing wares, and for a workshop, it made better sense to have them in constant use as well, so the fuel would be making goods while it maintained the kiln heat, and potters wouldn't be standing around waiting for them to reach a certain temperature.

Lenell nodded at the young man who was on before her, now leaving, and walked to the work table. A small ledger contained both what orders needed filling, as well as what goods had been made. Today, bowls for the University dining hall seemed to be Lenell's chore.

She walked to the rack of aprons, grabbed a clean one to wrap around herself, then went to the clay cabinet. When she worked at the pottery studio at the University, she mixed her own clay from water and soils. That was proper there, where students needed both to learn from the ground up, as well as have more creativity in their choices. Here, it would have been a waste of the time for those whose skills allowed them to form at least the simple ware the dining hall required. A young person was employed for a couple of hours, late at night, simply to mix the clays needed for the next day's orders and wrap them in the moist fabric that kept them ready for working. Lenell grabbed one rough, large ball out, and tore off a hunk big enough for an individual soup serving bowl.

First, as always, she took the clay to the work table to run it through a good round of kneading and wedging. Then she took the clay body and threw it down upon a clean wheel. No jigger molds needed here, those only applied to flat ware, and it was easier to just use the wheel and hands to make things other than plates.

She sat down and spun the wheel up with the foot peddle. Then she began the process called centering the clay. It involved pressing the clay body downward and inward till it was rotationally symmetrical. Shaping the inside bottom of the bowl was called flooring. She worked that area with her hands till it had the proper small flat center that then curved upward, making sure to keep the thickness of the clay even all around. She then shaped the walls, a process called pulling, in which both the curvature and even thickness were also the most important concerns, pretty much the point of shaping them on the wheel at all, instead of just pounding your fist into the center of the clay body on a table and calling things done. When she was pleased with the bowl's shape, she grabbed a small wedge shaped blade for a quick initial trimming. She would perfect the trim when the bowl had dried to its leatherware state, but those final trimmings could not be reworked, whereas the first trimmings could be added back to the waiting wet clay.

She carefully carried her bowl to a drying rack, then pulled off another hunk of clay to make a second. She could get a small batch up quickly enough to put the whole group through the different drying, firing and glazing stages together. She had to work quickly though, so they would pass from their raw greenware state to their leatherware state at approximately the same time.

She spun the wheel up again, and went back to work