My mother gave me another pottery commission recently, possibly the most challenging one yet. She has a small glass bottle of olive oil which she and my father use to dress salads, but of course it drips a bit. Its not very practical putting it on a saucer, as the centre of gravity is in the wrong place, and it would tip over easily (and very messily!). Instead, she’s been putting the bottle into a little ramekin, where it fits snugly. So the chance of tipping it over accidentally is small, and all the drips get satisfactorily dealt with. Except that the bone china ramekin she was using didn’t match any of her other serving dishes, plates etc etc. So would I please throw her a ramekin, sized to exactly fit the olive oil jug, and coloured to match some of her other bowls and plates.
Blue and green ramekins
My father sent me some photos, together with the dimensions of both the ramekin and the little bottle, and I spent my last two sessions at Eastnor Pottery first throwing then turning and decorating the pots. The trouble was, I’m still not very good at judging how much the clay is going to shrink between throwing and firing. It’s generally somewhere around 10%, but can vary from that quite considerably. And that makes it very difficult to throw something to an exact finished size. In the end I threw lots of “variations on a theme”, all the same basic shape but deliberately slightly different diameters and heights. Surprisingly, it’s actually more difficult to throw small pots accurately than it is ones twice the size – they’re fiddly and you have to use your finger-tips more.
I picked up the resulting fired pots from Eastnor last week, and I think they’ve come out pretty well. My mother reports that the smallest one is a very good fit for her olive-oil jug. Mission accomplished – phew!
