New Forms: a Cake Plate Again and French Butter Dishes

New forms are so mysterious I feel again like a little kid, learning huge swaths of the world.

I've been through several iterations of cake stands, learning from each. The latest is actually a best so far.

I'm not a painter and the invitation a flat surface gives, to treat it as a canvas, is a bit beyond me. I like this somewhat loose and abstract thing, but there are a lot of possibilities to explore.

Oops. This was flat; I think the base warped this time. Not sure. Perhaps fixable.


And I've been trying to make French butter dishes. They are a two-part combo, a bowl with water in the bottom, and a reversed container with butter stuffed into it, set into the bowl for a water seal. The idea is to keep butter, safely closed, out of the refrigerator so it is soft.

That took several iterations too, to get to the point I'm at now, one successful dish. What are the proportions that work? Yes, the butter holder needs a flat top so it can be placed open end up for using the butter. How big should that be to sit over the bowl steadily? What looks good? How far is the vertical distance from water bowl base to the ends of the butter holder sides? How do you measure this? How do you visualize it before you've made one? And how to glaze all the parts, so what needs glazing is covered and no touching parts are glazed? For me it's a visual puzzle. Oof.

This one works. It's such a strictly horizontal and vertical construction that the glaze would probably look better with horizontal edges. Hmm.

The next one, on the other hand, never opened; I must have put glaze somewhere where it glued the two parts together.

Ever onward.