Fruit Basket Challenge

So for my initial challenge for Ceramics II, Daiken has suggested a fruit basket. He did say that the interpretation is loose. OH MY. I am sure that you can see where my mind has gone!

Well. I am interpreting the basket literally. A basket.Okay. So I attempted a basket. Yeah. Maybe this is not one of my successes. LOL. Eight hours on Labour Day ended up in the Recycle Bucket. Ah well.

So here's where I suspect I went wrong. I think to create something woven like this, in order to not stress the clay, maybe the compression has to be better. And I was using a small inverted basket as the shape... Daiken reminded me that as the clay dries it shrinks. So perhaps I need to try forming it inside the shape rather than draped over the shape. I tried to put a coil around what would be the top. I think that was too heavy... as the clay was drying, and shrinking the weight of that (even though I placed plastic beneath it to support it) was too much for clay stressed by 'weaving' it.

I will work on improving my skills and rebuilding my shattered confidence (LOL), and will try this again someday. But for now... my interpretation of this challenge might look a little more like a bowl.

#BasketCase