MOOdy Cow!

Although my surname is Veal, I would like to point out that this title does not reflect my personality - it just seemed an appropriate play on words to describe something I created for our home recently.

I love making things that are decorative as well as useful - I also have a rather perverse sense of humour - so when our old butterdish got broken I thought it might be fun to make something a bit quirky for housing the lowly butter.

It’s amazing how fastidious and finicky you can get about something as simple as a butterdish when you want to make your own. Our old dish took a standard-size pack of butter and was more of a flat plate with a slight recess covered with a rectangular lid. Nothing unusual there. Annoyingly, the butter we prefer comes in a giant-size pack so had to be cut in two to fit the old dish. Okay, point one: need to make a larger butterdish. We also found that as the butter diminished you found yourself chasing it across the dish, invariably pushing it off altogether unless you restrained it with your fingers. Hmm, point two: make a deep-sided dish with a flat lid. A flat lid needs a handle. Aahh, point three: make a funky handle!

The start of the project was fairly straightforward. It’s called slab work and quite simply, clay is rolled out as you would pastry, with ‘slabs’ cut out to make the required sides, top and bottom. Alright, it’s slightly more complex than that: the clay must be properly ‘wedged’ - air bubbles caught in the clay can bloat and explode during the firing process, sending ceramic shrapnel everywhere and potentially ruining everything in the kiln, so these need to be removed by slapping, thumping and generally pummelling the clay into submission. The clay is rolled out onto material to prevent it from sticking to the work surface (akin to flour for pastry) and an even thickness is achieved by using the roller on top of equal sized batons placed either side of the clay. So far, so good? It is important to accurately measure the slabs and to know how the piece is to be constructed - are the sides of the dish to sit on the base or do they go around the outside? It is also imperative that the shrinkage percentage is taken into consideration - god forbid the butterdish should be too small after all that hard work!

Slabs are ‘glued’ together using a slip, which is clay mixed with water to obtain a thick gloopy (technical term?!) consistency. I constructed my dish with the slabs around the base, with the edges just touching. This gave the piece a slightly retro feel but was a bit risky as it was only the generous amount of slip that held the sides together. Once I was sure the dish would not fall apart as it dried I started thinking of the lid and handle.

To demonstrate one of the simplest techniques of ceramic construction I make coil animals. It’s amazing how much character you can create with very little detail and I often find that “less is more”. I know it’s a bit of a cliché but I just had to make a cow handle for the lid. However, I didn’t want a ‘Buttercup’ cow, no, I wanted a ‘Mae West’ cow - a cow with attitude. Strangely, I got the inspiration for her posture from watching a well-known bank advert on the television.

Personally speaking, the conception and construction are the technical parts; often a study in concentration to ensure the thing doesn’t fall apart. The decoration is the fun part - the time when you can put life into your creation. I decided on Cooper Black for the words as it seemed appropriately ’splodgy’, and I traced these onto each side of the dish. I was careful not to press too hard as the clay had not been fired at this stage (called greenware) and could collapse and break quite easily. The words and splodges were painted using a black underglaze and I mixed red and white underglaze to get the compulsory splash of pink for her undercarriage! I could have added further splodges to the dish but felt this was unnecessary, as I wanted the cow to be the centre of attention.

And there she sits - all MOOdy, but all MINE!