Monday, August 1, 2011

Crooknecks Explained

Barbara Rogers said...

I usually can visualize things that are described, but am missing how a donut, thrown and quartered, becomes part of - what? The stack of pumkin/gourd shaped pots perhaps, somehow? I'm making pitchers with the gourd fold in them these days, so am very interested.




Hi Barbara,

In an attempt to make the blog post look more interesting, I added other photos (the gourd patch, last year's pottery gourds, the dogs, etc). But the new crookneck gourds I'm making are pictured in the two sorta sepia-toned photos in the middle.



And the way I make those is to make the crookneck by throwing a hollow donut and then quartering that donut. When I started out with the idea, I didn't know how much of the donut I'd need to make the neck -- I wasn't sure of my targeted final size. As it turns out, one quarter of the donut was just about perfect. Additionally, that gave me 4 gourds out of each thrown donut. Pretty efficient, it turns out.

Two years ago I made crooknecks by simply throwing a long cylinders and attaching them and then worrying them into a bend. Of course, when I did that the cylinders wanted to fold and flatten each time I tried to bend them. That's why I decided to try the donut idea. That way I'd be starting with a bent cylinder.

And when I say that I attached them to one of my pumpkins thrown upside down, I mean that my pumpkins are usually like this...



...with the top (relative to the potter's wheel) being where I attach the vine/handle. But with the new crookneck gourds, as you can see, the top (relative to the potter's wheel while throwing) is now the bottom -- making for a very convincing gourd bottom. That was an important change because I intend the crooknecks to lay on their sides.

1 comment:

  1. Ah, I see. Thanks for the details, which I can finally understand. They are gorgeous!

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