Saturday, July 13, 2013

What the heck is a yarn bowl, anyway?

So, some people show off pictures of their kids, but lately I have been showing off pictures of my pottery. While I was proudly cooing with some dance friends over of photos of my shiny beer steins, one of them asked if I made yarn bowls that could be sold at the yarn store where she works.  At the time, I didn't, but yarn bowls were on my list of new projects to try.  And with the added impetus of a new place to sell them, I got to work.

I fell down the rabbit hole of pinterest for a while, doing some research on yarn bowls.  You see, I've knitted for a long time, but I've never used a yarn bowl.  Luckily for me, the interwebs has every possible and fun kind of yarn bowl to use as a study guide. Yarn bowls are a way to keep a ball of yarn from rolling away from you as you knit, to keep them off the floor, and to keep kitties from losing their minds and making a knotted mess of your yarn.  There are different styles of yarn bowls, but ideally they have a some sort of guide for the yarn to pull out of the bowl while the ball rolls around inside. I threw several test bowls and they mostly worked.  Some a little too small, but still functional.

The next batch included an awesome sheep yarn bowl! When I was up to a half dozen decent examples, I schlepped them down to the Starstruck Cat Studio to see if my friend Heather would like them at the shop. And woohoo! Some of them sold that weekend. Yay!


Then the clay gods were angry with me for a while. To my despair, I had a run of flopped bowls, bowls that cracked during trimming (invariably with the very last bit of carving), breaking them as I brought them to be fired, cracks during the bisque, legs popping off sheep bowls, and bad glaze incidents. It was demoralizing. Sigh.

But, the clay gods have finally smiled down on me again and I can show off some new beauties!


















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