The weekend

I was able to get into the studio for my Me Time on Friday. It was just me, Lorraine (another self directed student on Friday nights), and another student named Dave who does quite well on his own, and doesn’t ask too many questions unless he is stumped.

I was able to get my dinner plates, side plates, and salad bowls thrown, but not much else. I always go to the studio full of ideas, but I seem to always lose steam at about 7:30. Not surprising as I get up at 7am and work a full 8 hours in the office.

I did my usual 5 hours on Saturday at Ceramics Canada. I was actually kinda productive there, in that I was able to resurrect a painting of mine from near death. Amazing what you can do when you slap another coat of thick modeling paste on and obliterate the nastiness from previous attempts at artfulness...I left it to dry there, so still not sure what it looks like, but It looked 1000 times better than before. I should say that I have absolutely no painting skills, so I create according to my abilities. My paintings are purely abstract, and I work primarily in goo. That is, I use a lot (I do mean a lot) of modeling pastes, acrylic gels etc to build up texture. Then, I use the squirt method. I use acrylic inks and they come in little glass bottles with eye droppers and I just squirt away. I do use a brush, but that is used mostly to move the ink around and add water to help it flow. We (the potters that work at CC) formed a little painting group that meets the 1^st Sunday of every month, so my work this Saturday was in preparation for next weekend.

After my 5 hours at CC I went to the studio and put in some more time there, approx. 4 hours. I trimmed, and finished off some of my boat forms. I will try to take some pics tomorrow night. I do like the form, so I picked up some ^10 Bmix to make some for the salt kiln.

I went back to the studio first thing on Sunday morning and worked from about 9am-2:30. I managed to get a few things done in that time. I made some dinner plates for the salt kiln out of Plainsman P700 porcelain (I may do some carving on them, not sure), as well as 9 or so tall drinking vessels (haven’t decided if I will handle them or not). I am slowly trying to get enough high temp stuff made for this salt firing, and I am, my problem is that it is taking up all my shelf space for my other works that I have on the go, like the turning the table show, the Fairview sale, and now this CCAA Christmas sale.

Tomorrow, I will be teaching, and I have 4 newbies to think about, but now that I have done 1 basic bowl demo for them, I will jump back to more complex forms. I may introduce the boat shape. It is pretty simple to make, but requires patience. You have to let it get to the right state of leather hard before you start using the clay shredder to pare away the extra clay and smooth over the seam on the bottom, or I might do a covered jar for them. It requires patience as well, as I use the clay shredder to true up the corners and straighten out any unwanted curves. I’m trying to keep the demos interesting for everyone every week, so they don’t get bored. I did see 2 of the newbies on Sunday, it is always good to see them coming in to the open studio time right off the bat.

Oh, and my tea service was delivered in one piece and they apparently really liked it, so I can stop sweating over it.

I will be sweating enough tonight anyway, as it is my Jazzercise night. I only get one a week now, as the other class available to me is on Friday nights, and as we all know, mistress clay is a task master and I am chained to a potters wheel every Friday night. When I say chained, I really mean a daisy chain of puppy dogs and rainbows :)

This is a picture of one of my paintings taken last winter. It is a bit dim, but you can see the painting on the wall behind my television and all my plants.