OMG we made our own clay flutes Saturday

Friday Lary was still feeling pretty poorly with his cold.

We went to the charity shop to buy mens shirts to handle our clay (messy) for our flute making workshop on Saturday at Annie's.

Lary ended up finding some very nice looking splashy print shirts, they aren't made for tucking in, but are made to wear outside trousers and still look dressy.
They look a bit weird at home but are so attractive and suitable for down here, and often I think they come from either estates, or overstock in department stores.

The shirts he got didn't seem as if they had been worn, and I found a pair of brand new slacks. Still had the store label on them.

The charity store we patronize, called Angelview, helps challenged adults to find employment, so we enjoy supporting them. And often we pick up small housewears like vases, cups, small bowls and the like there, and books too.

Saturday we went over to Annie's and had coffee before our class, we were 6 people in all, plus Annie our teacher, and Nash the instructor who is a young Mexican man, now living in the States, and a flute maker of some reknown.

He comes from a pottery making village in Oaxaca, quite a remote location we understand, but he has been in the US for many years now. Over lunch he was telling us about his life in his early years, he was a goat herder as a boy, and learned to make pots by watching his parents and the other villagers.

First we rolled out our clay to make a rectangle form, using a dowel as a roller, and some steel rods as measures for the depth of the clay. Then we put vaseline on the dowel, and rolled our piece of clay around the dowel, and used 'slip', a clay bonding cement, to join the clay into a tube formed around the dowel. Then we removed the dowel carefully, and made end caps for both ends of the clay tube.

When you use slip to join parts of a flute you rough up the parts to be joined first with a scorer, then apply the slip liquid, then join the parts and smooth it all out carefully. Rough edges stay pretty rough when the clay is fired, so you want to remove them or make them smooth.

We had already kind of chatted about what key flute we wanted, and 5 people made flutes, another person made a big barrel flute shaped like a drain pipe with an end cover on each end, and another lady made a jaguar ocarina. It was fascinating to see them all take shape. I had decided I wanted a D flute, so mine was a bit longer than the others were. Lary was making an E flute.

After putting the end caps on both ends of the tube using slip, we made mouthpieces, we used kind of a bamboo sliver, tapered at one end, to form the airway for the mouthpiece. We made a rectangular shape first of all, inserted the bamboo sliver, cut clay away for the airway, and joined that piece to the flute tube using more slip.

We shaped the clay by kind of pulling it up to seal the joins, and then Nash cut the airway through, which nobody else dared to do by themself. We were using a hairdryer to speed up the drying process a bit, normally Nash would do some steps then leave the flutes and come back to them later to do the next part.

Then we burnished them to get a nicer smoother finish, using shiny rocks to rub all over the flutes, although they were pretty smooth already, the clay we used was red potters clay, fine grit with no rough bits in it, it came in big blocks inside big plastic bags, and Nash cut us all the piece he felt we needed. The ocarina was made with 2 little hollowed out cups joined together, and the sculpting was incredible to watch as the jaguar head took shape.

The barrel flute was wrapped around a large cardboard shipping tube that had been wrapped in plastic to ease the on and off process.

Nash provided all the tools, Annie had 2 big tables all covered with plastic, and we each had a big board to work on, they weren't made of plywood, they were some kind of dense board as you didn't want the grain of wood showing in your clay flute.

Before Chip put the final touches on his lovely barrel flute, he formed a gecko which wound across the front of the flute, it was wonderful to see how he made that gecko, but then while he was burnishing the flute, in the final stages, the mouthpiece fell off, he was really heartbroken, but Nash very quietly and patiently repaired it for Chip.

It was a very long day, at the end some of the people played all different kinds of wooden flutes together, getting into the Anasazi and Shakahachi flutes, but I was just exhausted, so didn't try that. Neither did Lary though he tried one with no luck. They are very different to play, and take a lot of patience and a steep learning curve.

Once we got home, it was nearly 7 PM, and we had a quick dinner and went over to visit Wendy and Dave, who were very excited as they had just bought a new house, over at Ivy Ranch and Golf Course. We were both pretty tired, but super exhilarated too, after the day of flute making.

We can't wait to try them out, they will dry at Nash's house for about 2 weeks, and then he will fire them, and get them back to us.