Beaver with Ice Cream

Although the beaver is Canada’s national icon, I’ve never seen a beaver in their natural habitat. I also thought it was fitting to make a cone of vanilla ice cream since it’s never too cold to have ice cream in Canada!

The true challenge of this jar was trying to get the lid separated from the body. I didn’t apply a wide enough band of wax around the bottom edge of the lid so glaze dripped down and fused the two pieces together. We tried gently tapping with a wooden rolling pin, harder taps with a rubber mallet and freezing followed by dipping in boiling water. The tail even broke off during this process.

Eventually what worked was using the handle of an espresso portafilter to hit the jar hard. The portafilter’s handle is made of metal and covered in a layer of rubber so it was the hardest material. But the glaze was fused so strongly that shards of glass and clay broke off the jar. I used a two part epoxy to fix as much as I could but many of the shards were just too tiny.

I learned my lesson: always leave a ~2mm gap from the bottom of the lid and from the top of the jar. I haven’t had a problem with fused jars ever since.