And the winner is...

The pot.

Yep, the bowl, the pot, the blasted thing won.

If you read my earlier post you know I was wrestling with a bowl, refiring, fixing, tweaking, refiring, etc., etc... 'cause stubborn me just refused to admit defeat.

I liked the design.

I liked the colors... at least some color incarnations... the color scheme has stayed roughly the same, but boy have the actual colors gone through a few transformations! Light one time, matte another, marbled, dark, you name it, I think I hit every variation possible in the turquoise / aqua family!

I finally pushed the silly thing past the limit of reasonableness and while it didn't blow up, the glaze rebelled completely.

It popped open into wide gashing, sharp holes exposing the raw clay! Yes, I went way overboard on this contest of wills.

It's so bad I can't even put it in my pottery garden. What's a pottery garden? Mine is a rock garden where I add my failures, pieces of my work that break and other found items from the yard.

I live on a 5-acre place that spits up all kinds of interesting things each time it rains. I'm just outside Atlanta, nowhere near the ocean, and the ground delivers beautiful seashells! I've found ancient shaving cans, cool pieces of metal and other interesting objects. I have a nice pile of glass going, and I'm saving all the broken tile to make a path in front of the studio.

I put the smaller "found" items in the garden along with my pottery, pop in a flower or plant of some sort and plant to let it go where it wants. I just started it at the beginning of this year so I expect to have fun over the next few years as I add things.

I dug up all the rocks from the yard, which is full of quartz, mica and granite pieces.

Next year I'll take a photo and share it with you, assuming it's worthy of sharing.

I suppose I could bury the pot in the ground so the outside edges, where the huge gashes are would be underground, but at this point I think the bowl is cursed. It wanted to die a long time ago.

The photo shows it in my trash can. Looking at the photo you really can't see how bad the glaze has popped and peeled off. The color is more of a dark turquoise than black, and it has lighter marbled bits which show as a light blue or white in the photo. The color of the clay is showing through around the fluted edges.

The outside is where I had fun with this one when I initially made it. There are horizontal and vertical strips on the outside. The horizontal end in a petal at the bottom curve. Ah well, I am going to do it again as I like the design, the flow, the curves... but I'm using a different clay. I think a lack of grog in the clay might have contributed to the inability to curve without cracking.

Whatever.

I'm going to do it again, despite losing this contest of wills.