18" PLUS & 2LBS. OF CLAY

I was recently asked to throw a couple of larger serving bowls in stoneware, destined for temmoku and ash and temmoku and iron for their surfaces. I don't make a lot of bowls any bigger than a normal family will use as they are hard to ship and need the right fit to sell, but an order is an order. Once in the studio, I put on one of my favorite best of the 80s cds, wedged up the clay and started throwing with the hope that throwing two bowls would yield two bowls out of the kiln. As I was throwing and with the help of the music, my mind wandered back to Cleveland State where I was throwing a series of 24" serving pieces for a caterer and to one particular female student who just had a series of questions for everything I was doing. On this particular morning, studio tasks out of the way, I was throwing and then the inevitable questions  to which she arrived at "well how much clay was I using?". It may have been my mood, the music, the tasks at hand but without skipping a beat I told her they were just 5lbs of clay each*. Off she went, spending several hours throwing and just always came up shy, by half. I realize this may sound cruel but as it turned out, by the end of her series, she had thrown bowls larger than she had ever done so out of 5lbs of clay. I let her in on the actual weight and told her they were only 2lbs of clay at which point she figured out that I wasn't exactly truthful with her which brings me back to today with two 18" plus bowls out of a mere 2lbs of clay, between them.

(* My wife thought it important to mention that during my time at CSU, people all played jokes on each other, they were not malicious, it was just part of the atmosphere of a fun, jovial, competitive pottery studio.)