The Lamps Are Bases

Well, the photos from the iPhone don't do these justice, and neither do the cheap lamp kits I bought. I need better lamp kits and I'm going to have a bit of difficulty finding shades that make me happy. A few people have suggested that I need to make my own shades, and I think they may be right. The cheap lamp kits seemed fine, until these were done. Now the cheap brass looks cheap and shiny.

I will definitely make more, once I figure out better lamp kits.

The flowers are forget-me-nots and orange blossoms with a little liberty on colors. I wanted romantic, loving flowers for our bedroom, but orange blossoms are actually white. I "upped" the color a bit to make them prettier. The forget-me-nots are a little more purple than they would be in real life, but not as purple as the photo makes them seem. The blue sky spray really turned out exactly as I would have wanted it.

Questions? Comments?

The Lamps Are Glazed

I began these lamps some time ago. I knew we needed lamps for our bedroom (we have one dented IKEA thing right now), so I figured I should make some. I knew I wanted to make slab-built pieces with an uneven number of sides (there are five, which you can't see because of my bad iPhone photo). So, I went to Brickhouse and made a model from cardboard -- actually, a Priority Mail box. It was a little too short at first, so I just cut it longer and then wrote on the cardboard how long that was. It was all a little off-the-cuff, so I was nervous. I sprayed them with porcelain slip to make them white.

Well, my teacher for hand-built work encouraged me to hand paint them, so I went home and came up with some floral ideas. I went back the next day and carved out each design with a pencil (really, a pencil), which will look darker since you will see some clay color where the lines are. Then, I hand painted the colors on with underglaze. Then, because I got a crazy idea (after painting the flowers) that a little blue behind would make a good sky background, I waxed over the flowers and sprayed a light-blue underglaze lightly all over the lamps.

So, today, they came out of the bisque kiln. In order to attempt to get the affect I want, I hand painted clear glaze on the flowers and then waxed them again, so that I could spray another mixture of clear and faux celadon glaze over the whole thing in the hopes that it will have an even more amazing "sky" look. They are waiting to go into the glaze kiln now.

Note: the one in the front has no glaze on the flowers yet, the one in the back has hand-painted clear glaze blocking the colors.