LARGE Tea Pots

I have been in contact with a lady who is looking for a LARGE tea pot. I guess she used to be a student at Fairview, but has since moved out of the province. She had a very large 12 cup tea pot that Dave made, but he doesn't really make work to sell any more. So, he passed her info on to me and vice versa.

Here are 3 that I have made so far in the LARGE format. The first 2 are based off of a picture of a teapot that she liked. I try not to copy other people's work, but have taken cues from it to hopefully come up with something she will enjoy. The only issue i can see with scaling the style of pot she is looking for up to 12 cups is that the amount of clay used gets to be a bit heavy. The 2 teapots below were thrown from between 6 & 7 lbs of clay (including lid and spout). I think, after shrinkage, that they will only hold 8 cups, maybe 10. I then threw a more traditional tea pot (ie: round) from 6 lb's of clay, and it will deffinatley hold a much larger volume of tea. The rounder shapes are streached and shaped, volume is added by thinning the walls via shaping. The pots shown here can only attain more volume by adding more clay and therefore weight... I like their shape, but I don't think they will be easy to pick up.

Teapots

I spent the entire Victoria Day long weekend at the studio and came up with a way to build a tea strainer into the lid. I have tried this before and have never been successfull. I was inspired by an article in Ceramics Monthly about a year and a half ago. The potter (her name escapes me ) threw a tea strainer shaped somewhat like a cocoon and keyed it into the lid, so it was thrown as a seperate entity. I found it almost impossible to make this work, so I abandoned this and have let the idea steep so to speak, in the back of my mind. I kept thinking that the best way would be to throw the lid upside down as I normally would, but exagerate the flange of the lid in order to form the tea strainer from it by closing it in. The difficulty with this was how to open it up to be able to get the tea inside, but also have it act like a lid to keep the heat in. Well, I managed to come up with a solution yesterday. After the lid is trimmed and the knob established ( I trim my knobs from the excess clay left from throwing), I cut into the lid with a pin tool on a 45 around the knob to open it up. I save the knob and set aside. I then trim out the opening so the knob will sit into the central hole. Now the tricky bit. Invert the knob in the hole and push a ball of clay into it that will be large enough to throw into an upside down tear drop. When done, it looks kind of like a long skinny pacifier. The reason for this is to weight the knob so that it doesn't fall out when the pot is in use. Finally, I use a small drill bit to drill out the strainer holes. The holes can't be too large or the tea will go through them. I will take a picture tomorrow, I completely forgot to today.