Category: Text Posts

Glazed and Fired! (+ February Plans)

I’m pleased to report that I finally got around to glazing my first set of beads this week, and I’m waiting with my fingers crossed to see if all of the glazes I chose behave in the kiln. I used Amaco’s Hot Red and Opaque White as well as Teacher’s Palette’s Leaf Green and Midnight Blue for my beads as shown below:

(You might notice that there’s a gray glaze here instead of Leaf Green which was a total accident, I promise I actually used Leaf Green on the beads)

Glazing beads–especially the spherical ones I made this month–is soooo much harder than I anticipated, and I think painting just these 7 took me nearly 2 hours all together. The trickiest part about the glazing process was making sure every bead had an even coat for all 3 passes (3 coats is the general rule of thumb if you want your glazes to be opaque in the end!). I’ve already got some ideas for how to improve my techniques for next time, starting with actually carving out my designs in the clay and now just painting them on. 

Even though this month felt a little rushed, I’m very happy with what I’ve been able to do with the time I had, and I’ve already learned a lot about beadmaking. I do wish I had been able to add basalt sand to my clay as a tempering (stabilizing) agent to emulate the Purépecha peoples’ ceramics process, but nobody on Earth is willing to sell small quantities of basalt sand and I’m not sure my mother would have appreciated the leftover 20-pound bag of sand if I had bought some at Home Depot. 

I’ll be sure to add pictures of my North America beads as soon as they’re out of the kiln, but until then get excited about South America month!! For February, we’ll be taking a peek at Peruvian ceramics while I try not to blow up the kiln with more beads. See you then!

January Updates

New year, new blog post. Welcome to January! This month I’ve been studying the Purépecha people of Mexico, focusing on the time period between 810 CE and 1500 CE. 

RESEARCH

For my research, I needed to bring in the experts: I consulted Golden et al.’s Polities, Boundaries, and Trade in the Classic Period Usumacinta River Basin as well as Pollard and Cahue’s “Mortuary Patterns of Regional Elites in the Lake Patzcuaro Basin of Western Mexico” to give me a better idea of how the Purépecha (members of the Tarascan Empire) used ceramics. Both papers offered an archeological perspective and shed light on some interesting practices from this culture. For example, Charles Golden’s team encountered a number of ceramic beads that had been painted to mimic jade, evidence that ceramic beads were involved in displays of wealth. Pollard and Cahue also had interesting findings concerning the Purépecha’s elites: wealthy graves of women and children tended to contain more ceramic beads than other demographics. These ceramics were often adorned with black, white, blue, and/or red painted designs. 

After reading these papers, I set off to find more reference photos so that I could start drafting my bead designs. The Museum of Natural and Cultural History in Oregon provided my personal favorite reference: this ceramic necklace with figure charms. If you’re interested in the rest of the references I used, you can find them listed under “January” on my “Gallery” page!

MAKING THE BEADS

After all of my background research, I was ready to start making my beads. I drafted my idea for the string of beads with the goal of representing the Purépecha people as a whole as well as trying to recreate the same kinds of beads that they used. 

The jade effigy beads, figure charm, simple round beads, and spiral beads originate from the Purépecha themselves, but I also wanted to include an homage to the colorful Tarascan glaze-work. The largest beads on the string are meant to represent some of the colors and designs typical for the time and place. 

At the time of posting, I’ve finished molding all of the beads (shown below) and I’m just waiting for them to be fired before I start glazing. I’ve definitely learned a lot about this process already, and I can’t wait to see how my first beads will turn out! 

Carpe Lutum!