Wonderful Commissions

I have been getting some fabulous commissions lately from people who see my work on the website and ask to have something special made for them, or in most instances as a gift for a friend.  I think I've said before how much I love making these.  It's the challenge of designing and bringing to fruition something with a specific brief, rather than just going my own way.

The picture above shows this piece having been fired once and now awaiting glazing. The components of each little 'picture section' are cut out of clay separately and applied to the piece using 'slip' (a mushy clay and water mixture).  The aim is to make it resemble a piece of Applique textile work.

The glazing is the tricky bit because I need to aim for a nice spread of colours, without them clashing or making the whole thing look too 'busy'.

shows it glazed but not yet fired a second time.  So at this stage I am never quite sure whether it will look right until I take it out of the kiln again and it looks like this ....

I suspect you can see what my 'instructions' were for this one!  This lady likes flowers, and new clothes, (me too!), so we had a section depicting those things ...

and she has been known to go to London to do the odd spot of shopping .....

but she is also a family person, with two grown-up sons and a daughter.  This section, below, was the most difficult to capture, but I chose to represent it like the kind of picture a child would do of their family.

and last, but not least, she is a book lover, so we gave her this little stack of books to read ....

I think I pulled it off OK, and she did drop me an email to say how much she liked it, which was very kind.

I am sure, one day soon, someone is going to ask me to create something really crazy which I will have to decline, but it's not happened yet!

xCathy