About twenty years ago my parents died. First my father,
after being treated for prostate cancer. Then, my mother, from a stroke. Through
a strange set of circumstances, their cremated remains were on top of our piano
until this year.
The story of why they remained there is a long one but has
no place in this post. My parents were both veterans. During World War II, Dad
was a retired Naval aviator and Mom was a WAC code clerk in the Pentagon. Mom
had said she always wanted to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery but
then, as I grew up, she quit saying that. I don’t know why but I suspect it was
because Arlington filled up and no longer accepted the bodies of veterans
except for special occasions. That’s how it rested until about four years ago.
At that time, I checked and found out that though bodies
were no longer being accepted, cremated remains were and I had two on top of my
piano. I passed the idea past my sister and after about a year of discussion,
we decided to go ahead with it. Three years later—it took that long to get the
documents together, apply, and be scheduled for an interment—we got a date.
March 21, 2024.
Mom’s urn was within the size limits but Dad’s was not. They
were not very nice urns, anyway. I talked to the family and asked if I could
build the urns for them. They said yes and I started.
The specifications were fairly simple: it had to fit inside
of a 9-inch cube and hold the ashes of my parents. I had been through a similar
situation with wood turning an urn with a friend and we’d already run into the
situation where the result had been too small and we had to start over. I was
not going to make that mistake.
Just to make sure, I purchased two urns as a plan B.
The following is how I built them. They came out well but
this is sort of like showing the ins and outs of a magic trick. So, if you like
their picture up there and want to preserve the mystery, read no further.
I decided on a simple ceramic 9-inch cube for each of them,
figuring it would shrink below the size limits. I settled on blue-green over
black as the base. It seemed somber without being morose. I would use ½ inch
slabs of clay “glued” together with slip. Finally, I would have small ¼ inch
feet.
To this end, I first built a protourn, using the ½ inch
slabs sans feet at a four-inch scale size. I liked the result but it seemed too
dark. Also, the glaze ran a little bit. I resolved on the final product to use
more blue-green on the outside. The protourn could be dipped in the glaze but
the larger urns could not be. I would have to pour the glaze over the urns and
then scrape off any excess glaze.
First, I had to layout and cut the slabs: six per urn. Five
for the sides and one for the top. The bottom and top slabs were cut straight
but the side slabs were cut with a bevel. This would prove a bit problematic
later.
To keep the slabs straight as they dried to the point that I
could assemble them, I dried them between sheets of dry wall loaned to me by my
teacher, Cheska. Thank you, Cheska. Thank you for so many things. Drying took a
bit less than a week.
Once they were dry
enough, I assembled them. I did this by
cross-hatching where the edges were to connect and then applied slip and
pressed them together. There were some issues here. Fingerprints and
indentations were left in the clay. I cleared much of them up but Cheska
suggested I leave the remainder: they were my fingerprints in the urn of my
parents. At this point, I trimmed as much as I could to make the surfaces flat
and added the feet.
The process for
making things in our studio goes something like this:
- Make the raw clay
product (greenware)
-
Let it dry to the
right point.
-
Assemble and trim
-
Let it get bone dry
-
Bisque fire the
clay (bisqueware)
-
Do any repair or
sanding of the bisqueware
-
Apply glaze
-
Glaze fire
-
Any post glaze work
There was some
warpage in the bisqueware. Unfortunately, I did not capture any images of the
bisque product. I poured glaze, black first, then blue-green, on the sides and
then the bottom. After that had dried, I tried to do the same for the interior.
That just didn’t work. I ended up with far too much pour material on the
outside which I had to scrape off. I did it differently on the second urn: I
just painted the interior with black glaze.
At this point, the
class went on break. I had scraped a great deal but it was too wet to do much.
Cheska was in the studio during break and was kind enough to scrape off some
more.
Then, the urns had
to dry completely. If there had been any moisture from the glaze into the clay
(bisque absorbs water) it might have exploded in the kiln. I did have a plan B
for a reason.
The result was...
problematic. One of the panels had sprung away from the other and made a large
crack.
In addition, there
was significant warpage between the lid and the chamber.
Finally, the glaze
on one of the urns was too thick and dropped, making ugly pedestals. These, I
would have to grind off. Cheska suggested
several possible repairs for the crack. One was apoxie, a sandable epoxy
product that was more like clay than putty. At least, so it said on the box.
For the lid/chamber mismatch, I decided to seal the two with black beeswax. It
would hide the warpage and blend in with the rest of the urn.
I had solutions for 2 of the three problems and a
possible solution for the third, the crack.
I tried the crack
repair first, thinking if that failed, there was no point in going further.
Fortunately, it worked. I could see the repair but when I showed it
to people who knew about the crack but hadn’t seen it, they couldn’t find it.
There was a problem with sanding in that while apoxie could be sanded, it left
streaks in the material giving a visible gray look. I covered that over with Sharpie.
After I ground down
the bottom, there remained these pox pits (my word for them) that I found truly
ugly. The apoxie had worked so well on the crack, I figured it would work on
the bottom.
It didn’t. This was
a schlimmbesserung: an improvement that makes things worse. Wendy
suggested that I cover the bottom in black felt. I thought this was a good
idea. I had planned on copying the label from the original urns to these new
urns. Framing them with black felt might work.
It did. It was so
successful that I wished I had left the ground surface without the apoxie.
Meanwhile, Wendy
had been tackling the problem of the labels. She started with water decals and
tried several brands. They didn’t print well. The one that did, curled up when
it dried. She ended up using transparent vinyl decals. This worked well enough
that one of the funeral people admired the “engraving” of the tops. We
gracefully accepted the compliment.
The round image on
Opal’s is the WAC service medal. Earl has Naval aviator wings.
At this point, we
had a family Zoom meeting. I felt I needed family approval for this. To make a
long story short, they approved.
Now, I had to seal
them. Back to the protourn for a test. This was successful. But the warpage in
the actual urns was greater than the protourn. Also, the wax I used for the
test was not the wax I used for the final urns. (Both were from candle kits. I
had trouble finding black beeswax any other way.)
I layered strips of
the wax on the urn, using a heat gun to make it soft enough to adhere. When I
had enough, I heated it nearly to melting and put the lid on top. Beeswax isn’t
putty. There are only about fifteen seconds of malleability. After putting down
the heat gun so it didn’t start a fire, that’s about seven seconds. When I was
done, the wax was bulgy. Wendy has steady hands and she was kind enough to trim
back the wax to a more attractive state. Then, I took the heat gun and softened
out the cut marks.
They were done. Now,
I just had to get them to DC.
We packed them up
and drove down.
I have to say, I
sweated every inch of this. They were done but they weren’t done until they were out of my hands and interred. We got to ANC and I
carried the box in, thinking I would carry Earl and Opal the last mile. Inside,
I took them out of the box and put them on a couch in one of ANC’s family
rooms. There, pictures were taken and they were approved by the funeral liaison—a
lovely man named Bill.
Who then informed
me they needed to go back to our car and wait for him.
My sister and I each
carried one of the urns back to my car. There, we waited for Bill to meet us.
Once he drove up, we had to put Earl and Opal in his car. (This last mile
was getting pretty long.)
We followed Bill to
the site of the ceremony. There, a representative of the Army and a
representative of the Navy took the urns to the site and the ceremony was held.
I’ll talk about that sometime but not today.
Then, we had to
carry the urns to the actual gravesite. This one my sister and I delegated. My
son carried Opal and my sister’s daughter carried Earl. They were just as
nervous as we had been. In the back of my mind, I remembered that there in the
back of the car was still my Plan B. Just in case.
The urns were put
on the ground for the benediction. And we were done.
We did not stay to
see the urns actually put into the ground. There was no ceremony for that and,
frankly, if there was an accident, I didn’t want to see it. Instead, we went
out for dinner.
Thanks to Wendy, Ben, Cheska, Hana, the whole Hopkinton Center for the Arts ceramics gang. I couldn't have done it without your help and support.
That was last week
and even now, I can’t really believe they’re not in the front room holding down
the piano.
Still, I think they approve.
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