Pot Anatomy

A friend of Mr. ShellHawk's and mine is a herpetologist-meaning that he's a snake/amphibian expert. We were over at his place for dinner a little while back, and he asked me if I could throw some water dishes and maybe a few snake hides for him. (A snake hide is a hidey-hole for the  snake to crawl into.) He couldn't find his favorite water dishes anymore, and he'd been using broken pots for his hides, so I said I'd do it for him.

It's pretty cold in the Garage of Doom right now, so playing with clay has been challenging. Warm water used to soften up the clay gets cold quickly, and I'm trying to use clay I'm not too familiar with. Pots absolutely refuse to dry, so I've been setting them beside the fireplace for a few hours a night so I can get them to dry enough to cut them in half for the snake hide.

I made several different shapes to show him before I went ahead and fired them, and what you see above is one of them. This has actually been a good exercise for me. Since I'm slicing the pots vertically, I'm able to see the thickness and consistency of the walls and bottom of the pots I throw. This picture tells me that if I were to use this for a pot, the floor of the pot is a bit thin to support the weight of the pot. The lower part of the walls look pretty good to me, though, because the larger and taller the pot is, the more you must consider the thickness of the lower walls. I could have pulled the clay up a bit more if I were planning to use it as a pot, making the walls a bit thinner, but it's a passable pot. I just wasn't worrying about it too much, as it was going to be cut in half, anyway.

God, I need an electric wheel! The kick wheel is killing me!