I made a lamp!

I've got a bone to pick with this latest throwdown episode. Don't get me wrong, love a ceramic lamp. I think it's really cool that they had a ceramic lamp project for the throwdown. I've even been experimenting a little bit with making ceramic lamps myself and it's something that's like always been on my to make list. What I had a problem with is that they didn't take into consideration the entirety of the lamp. They had these beautiful handcrafted lamp bases with all these depth and stories and they were just beautiful. And then they stuck this horrible gray drum style lampshade on top of them. And I think this is my issue with interior design in general. A lot of people don't seem to consider the lampshade when it comes to lamps and stuff. Or maybe this is personally just my bias because I hate those drum shape lampshades. I think they're super ugly. But my main issue is like the lamp bases stood on their own and then they added this component to it that was standardized to all the potters. Not to be judgmental but it just looked really ugly in my opinion. My personal opinion. The potters are not at fault here. It's the producers and whatever. They told them they had to use this lampshade. So when I knew that I was going to recreate this project, I got myself a nice lampshade. I got this lamp from eBay. This is used. I got it for like five bucks like including shipping. So I'm really excited about it. I just think it's really cute. And guys don't sleep on eBay honestly. And here's the key. I knew I needed to get this lampshade before I even started designing and conceptualizing this lamp so that the lamp would work together as a whole. So now I've been having this lampshade for the last couple days trying to figure out the design for it. And I'm gonna go a little off script here because I just couldn't think of a design that I like that was kind of following their rules. So what they had to do is make a landscape of some kind and it was using underglazes again. Which I refuse to do. I refuse to use any more underglazes. Maybe in the next project but not in this project. I really just did not want to do it. So I decided to combine this project with a technique that y'all have been bugging me about doing a video on which is sgraffito. And I think that a cool sgraffito base would look really nice with this lampshade. I am going a little off script here. I hope that's okay with y'all. I really wanted to make a lamp but I just wanted to do it my way. So let's get started. Okay good morning guys. The plan is to attach these two together to make one lamp base. They're a little bit drier than I would have hoped. So what we're gonna do is probably add some slip. They're also not very even. Oopsies. We can make it work. I believe in us. I saved yesterday's throwing water for something later but I'm going to use that as the slip. Something that I like to do when something's too dry is I'll slip and score it twice because then it kind of like rehydrates that one part of your pot that you're attaching it together so the rim will be nice and hydrated. That will help. So now I'm using a rib to kind of blend it in. This is going to make the bond stronger but I will be adding a coil. Don't worry. It's not going to look like this. It's theoretically going to look like one piece. Theoretically. Oh I cut that very uneven. That's okay. I'm going to be cutting it anyway. What do you think? I think yes. I'm feeling like this. It feels nice and balanced because like the wider part is lower but we gotta try it the other way around. Gotta see how it looks. I kind of feel like this should be the bottom because it's like more round and this is more straight here. Let's look at the other one again. No I think the other way. I think this is the bottom. Cool. So I'm adding the coil on the inside as well so that it can have that added connection that's going to make it even stronger. But the good thing is I don't need to worry about how this one looks. No one's going to see it. So I have my line where I'm going to attach them so that's going to be the bottom of this. So I'm just going to cut slightly above to remove all that extra bottom. Okay it's not going to be perfect y'all but when you can only tell that it's off when it's turning. I don't know about y'all but I don't care too much about stuff like that. As long as it's not visual when it's not turning the pot is centered enough. Okay so we mark and maybe I'll do also because not everything's even I'll mark a Not because I don't want this to be a sharp line but do you see how like you can sort of tell that there's been two pieces connected together because of the shadow. Like you can sort of tell that it's two separate pieces and so I'm probably going to trim out most of this coil but I just want to fill that little shadow so it looks like it's one thrown piece. Like that's the goal here. So this is obviously going to go inside. What do we think? Kind of a cutie. Like I'm dying to kind of define this a bit more because right now he's a little sad. What I'm going to do now is that I want this to homogenize because the parts that were the bottoms of these bowls that I threw are very wet and the rims are very dry and then I have all these connections. I just want it all to become the same level of wetness. This is generally a good idea when you're attaching things together. So I'm going to wait till tomorrow to do the rest of it after it's homogenized a little bit and that will help with the failure rate and all that stuff. So give it a little squirt of water. One last thing that we can do today is prepare our slip. So I've saved my throwing water and some of the, you know, clay chunks that flew off in the throwing water so that I can make my slip and I have here some iron oxide. Now I've never done this before but I did watch one YouTube video from Simon Leach who mentioned that you should use 25% iron oxide. Seems like an awful lot but we're gonna trust him on this. So this iron oxide I got from Kaiega. It's called eisenoxide and this is the black version. I'm hoping that this becomes black. My goal is to make a black but I've literally never done this before so like all I've done is mix iron oxide into my clay and I don't remember which type of iron oxide I used. Also I'm gonna try and use a hand beater for this because there's still some chunks in here and then I'm gonna go ahead and sieve it. I've never done this before either. We'll see how this works. If not, I can run up and grab my immersion blender. Okay that made a big old mess but it actually worked. This is my kitchen mixer so the reason I chose this instead of the immersion blender is because I thought it would be easier to clean afterwards. I thought I'd just have to clean these. Whatever. Maybe it becomes a studio blender. So it's actually quite good. There's still some chunks in there. I think I'm gonna probably end up sieving it. Just wondering if it's paintable or if it needs more water but I think it's actually a good consistency. I don't know. I mean your guess is as good as mine. Okay let's add the oxide. So you can see it's quite dark. That's why I'm hoping it's going to be black. Let's use this. Okay whenever you're dealing with powders, you should wear a mask. So I'm just going to put like a couple of scoops in here. Okay so once all the iron oxide is fully absorbed in then you can take off your mask and it's looking pretty good. I mean it looks like black slip or black engobe so I'm happy with this. What I think I'm going to do is I'm going to let this sit. So just like my pot, I want the different materials in this slip to homogenize before I sieve it. I think that that will help. I don't know. Probably mean that I don't have to filter out as much slip. So I'm going to let these sit now with the pot and we'll get back to them tomorrow. So see you then. It's day three of working on this lamp and goals for today are smooth this whole thing out, make it look like one cohesive piece. So we're going to trim that. I'm going to add the hole for the fixture and kind of get it ready to be an actual lamp. And then I am going to do some sgraffitoing. So I'm going to slip and then carve things in which it's the part that I'm excited slash nervous about. So let's get to it. Okay I'm not going to worry about getting this surface perfect perfect perfect because I'm just going to be covering it with slip anyway. So um pretty good. Okay so I have my little light bulb thing. So you can see from this there's not like a ton of wiggle room here. The hole needs to be at least this wide so this part can fit in but not wider than this part. I was thinking that I would just make it as wide as this thing because then the shrinkage would make it less wide than that but only a little bit so that this would sit perfectly inside. This is the idea. I'm hoping that it's gonna work. My clay shrinks about 12 percent so um I haven't done any measuring though so I think it's gonna work. I think it's gonna work. Feels it feels right. So I just want to center this first. I just use my needle tool to cut it out. Next I'm going to take my black slip and paint it on my leg. Let's give this a go. So I did have to let this dry a little bit because the slip had added so much water to it and I want to make sure that I can get a clean line when I'm carving in. So you want the slip to also be leather hard not just applying it to leather hard and the slip is still wet. Like it's take some time for the clay to absorb that water and then the slip harden. So I'm hoping it's dry enough. We'll only find out when I start carving into it though. I do have a vision for what I'm going to carve on this but I have zero sketches so I don't know. I felt like it would be fun to just go for it. We'll see. Probably you guys know by now that I really just kind of like to fly by the seat of my pants while I'm working with ceramics. I don't even know. I got these new tools. I don't even know what sort of mark they're going to make but we're going to test them out. Okay the first thing I did I kind of fucked up already but okay actually it's nice. It's a nice level of wetness to carve into though. That was supposed to be a straight line and it's not. That's the thing about Scraffito. A better potter than me would plan this out way more. So if you're wondering what I'm using I don't really have anything to say about it because the carving. I'm so happy with how this turned out. It's like exactly what I had in my head put on to real life so it's really special when that happens. Yeah the idea was to kind of use the prompt a little bit so I have the landscape going a bit the sky the earth the water and underground but kind of you know put my own little spin on it and get away from those underglazes. So I'm really happy with it. So one thing that I did that you guys should definitely not forget to do if you're making a lamp is don't forget to cut out a little notch for the cord. You see a little notch cut in here for the cord so that can come out. Next I'm just going to let this dry out. I'm gonna fire it. I'll probably put a transparent glaze on it or maybe I just tell you while I was waiting for this to dry I was firing something else and I popped in some samples and these samples look awful and so I was so worried about this piece because like this is just it's washy. You wouldn't see the drawings at all. It's very thin and obviously I just applied the slip to the sample way thinner than to the actual pot because this actually looks black. Thank god. I would have been so heartbroken. So let's make this lamp. Let's see first of all if our fixtures fit. Yes it's perfect actually. Oh but the real test is the lampshade. I like it. But okay let's let's get this wired up. Okay now I need to find a light bulb. So nice. This shade makes such a cozy glow. Oh I love it. Ah well that's it I guess. I hope that this video was fun for you. I hope that you love this lamp as much as I do. If you have any questions about this project or want to make any suggestions for future projects feel free to leave those down below. Otherwise I hope you guys have a lovely and creative day. Bye friends!