This will be a high speed posting, I am running out of time. It’s three weeks and a couple of days to the show and I haven’t even begun assembling dolls yet. And, helpfully, there has been a disaster.
Here are three men. Well, their heads to be accurate. They all look as if they are having a bad head day because, as you can see, they have split across the nose.
Splits in porcelain coming out of the kiln can happen for various reasons. One is thermal shock. I recall a doll-making friend who had a dreadful disaster with the first doll heads he ever took out of the kiln. He removed them when they were still hot, using tongs, placed them on a wooden board and watched as all the heads cracked across the fragile parts, making sad little ‘chink’ noises as they cracked.
I let my kiln cool down completely, before I retrieved, washed and grit scrubbed the heads. As I was washing hundreds of pieces of porcelain I didn’t notice all of the cracked heads until I came to china painting. I think the reason these have cracked is a design fault, or possibly a pouring fault. The round glass eyes sit in a specially excavated hole inside the head. To make the hole, using tools of my own design, is quite a challenge. The tool is a mapping pin stuck in a bit of stick, enrobed in a thin layer of coarse material, I use my old tights from the nineteen sixties. I gently twirl the pin, excavating a hole. If I safely don’t go far enough the doll will have sunken eyes. If I go too far the tool will burst through the face, shattering it. In this case I think I had left too fine a bridge of material behind the nose, probably under half a millimetre.
Porcelain is so exacting, so exciting and so interesting. I’ve been doing it for thirty one years and still have a lot to learn. Which is why I pour as many pieces of porcelain as this:
with a bit of luck and a lot of work, some of them will make it all the way through the processes.
Which ones get to the end I will show you if and when they do!
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