Where I’m From

Poem

I am from nerf guns

From my Xbox and my computer

I am from the blue house

And my mom's beautiful garden

I am from the raspberry bushes behind my garage

Whose berries stained my skin

I am from Christmas pajamas and perfection

From Jack and William

I am from going to Wisconsin in the summer and going to church every Sunday

From heavy caffeine consumption and eating pizza on friday

I'm from my first Communion I'm from Illinois and Ireland From Coffee, and pickles

From my brother and I staining our faces with raspberries

I am from waking up early and working out every day

My plan is to make 3 different mugs. I want to have the designs on them to be different places I have been. For one of them I am going to have a Florida sunset. The second will have mountains from Colorado. And the third one will be the Chicago skyline.

My approach to this project was to make mugs with designs of memorable trips that I have taken. Honestly, it doesn’t really relate to my poem.

To make the mugs, I rolled a small slab that was three rulers thick and I cut a circle out of it for the base. To make the sides of them I rolled out a long slab that was two rulers thick and I cut them into rectangles about 5 inches by 11 inches. I scored and slipped them onto the base. To put the two sides together, I cut the two sides diagonally and then scored and slipped. I cut about an inch off the top to make them the right height and then blended everything together. I smoothed out the outside and the inside and then carved out a little bit on the bottom. To make the handle, I made a long and thin slab and then cut it to the right length and width. I scored and slipped the mug and the handle together and wrapped it with a wet paper towel. I didn’t really face any issues with construction and the only problem that I had was the handle cracking where it was connected to the mug. To fix this, I used magic slip and then wrapped it with a wet paper towel and sprayed it every day.

After constructing the mugs, I printed out the photos that I would use for the design on the mug. I used a carving tool to trace over the lines on the photos. After that was done, I let it dry out and then fired them. Moving forward, I just need to glaze it.

For the first mug, I started off by glazing it with brown and taupe for the sand and the rocks. I then did the sunset with orange yellow and white. For the sky I used medium and dark blue.

For the second mug, I used white for the mountains and then I added gray. For the sky I used white gray.

For the final mug, I glazed it black and then wiped it off so that it would be in the lines. I glazed all of the buildings gray and then used dark blue for the sky and medium blue for the water.

This definitely did not relate to my original poem, but it did illustrate what I wanted them to be because the mugs do still relate to me.